What’s next in the food challenge series? We’ve had several Wendy’s challenges. I would go so far as to say we’ve pretty much exhausted the Wendy’s possibilities (that said, I’m sure someone will read this as a challenge and come up with something even worse than the fries and milkshake challenge).

Thank goodness for Taco Bell.

Gautam (aka The Unsung Hero) had come up with the idea of eating 20 Taco Bell original tacos (those are the hardshell crunchy ones - 89¢ each) in an hour during one of our many reminisces over previous food challenges. Unfortunately, he came up with this idea on his last day of work before taking a couple of weeks vacation. Everyone thought this was a great idea but understandingly, did not want to proceed without Gautam (even though he said he would come back from his vacation just to witness this challenge we didn’t really think this would be fair).

So now that Gautam is back and all caught up with work, it’s time to get the ball rolling.

20 Taco Bell tacos don’t sound like a lot. I mean, I order 3 of those suckers every time I eat at Taco Bell (because they taste great at 2 AM and we all know they aren’t that filling). So what’s the big deal? 20? No problem.

But think about it…..

20 tacos in an hour means you have to finish a taco every 3 minutes. For an hour. When was the last time you ate food steadily for an entire hour? We’re not talking a normal dinner with conversation and wine.

Steady eating.

For a whole hour.

20 tacos.

The talk is this is going down this week. So I hear… I’ll keep you posted.

Note: as an aside, I was going through the office working up enthusiasm for the new Taco Bell challenge. Of course that dredged up stories about previous challenges, who had participated, how they went. The one that brought up the mose fries and milkshake in a blender challenge. Mark B was describing how he tested out this challenge ahead of time and how the coldness of the milkshake made all the fat from the fries congeal so that the resulting goop was the consistency of cement. It was so thick it had to be eaten from a spoon. In fact, if you scooped some out then held the spoon upside down, none of it would fall. You would think such a colorful description would deter anyone from trying this challenge again, but nope, instead this long store only stoked the passions of some of our eaters. So there may be rematch… stay tuned.

So, last time, I choose Peet’s coffee because I knew it was a safe bet from my pre-PowerReviews days of shoveling beans for hours on end. But now that we’ve finished off our fresh coffee supply, it’s time to try something new.

One of our partners, Café Britt sent out a promotional email to their customers last week and generated over 300 reviews in just 4 days. While doing some moderation (i.e. personal research), I noticed that they were getting rave reviews across the board. Now we will be the judges.

Currently in the kitchen:  Costa Rica Dark Roast (currently “Top Rated” on Buzzillions.com with a product rating of 4.9 stars and 381 reviews), Costa Rica Decaffeinated (currently “Top Rated” with 4.9 stars and 104 reviews), and Tres Rios Valdivia (was “Top Rated” last week when I placed the order - 4.9 stars and 381 reviews).

This will be a three way experiment:

1. How effective is Buzzillions for a customer taking a risk on a product she has no prior experience buying online?
2. How well is our “Top Rated” system working?
3. Will Café Britt’s blends be delicious enough to overcome the plastic k-cup’s ease?

Ours is Dutch.

Dutch is a corgi. He’s been hanging out with us at the office all week while his owner, Gautam, our VP of engineering, is out for a wedding and honeymoon in India.

We really like having Dutch hang out with us. He’s a real active participant in the goings ons at the company.

Here he is hanging out with IT and watching over our servers.

Here he is hanging out with the moderators, checking over the reviews to make sure they aren’t offensive.

He’s such a trooper!

Everybody’s time is precious. To many, coffee is precious as well.  And, to many, the planet is precious.  These groups are certainly not mutually exclusive, but with our current coffee maker they are becoming that way.  Every cup of coffee made in the office creates a plastic, non-biodegradable, non-recyclable byproduct.  We throw away at least 200 of these plastic k-cups per week (low estimate).

Now, I know better than to mess with people’s coffee.  No matter how wasteful our Keurig Brewer might be I know that it makes tasty coffee, that it’s time efficient, and that it’s not going anywhere.  No worries, Green Mountain makes an eco-friendly solution – “My-K Cup “ – a reusable filter that fits into the machine the same way that the plastic one does. It makes coffee in exactly the same amount of time*! Plus, since this mesh filter is not bound by the limited k-cup options, we can branch out to fresher coffee: actual coffee beans, locally roasted beans…even locally roasted hipster beans!

But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The first “coffee of the week” picks are from Peet’s.  Since I used to be a barrista there, I had a few favorites that we ordered to be our trial run:  Major Dickason’s Blend , Ethiopian Fancy, and Sumatra.

If the ‘green’ option makes a higher quality cup o’ joe, will that benefit outweigh the cost of an additional 2 minutes spent brewing and breaking the habit of using the disposable cups? Stay tuned…

*Disclaimer: yes, admittedly, it does take a few seconds pre-coffee-brewing to fill the filter with grounds and then a minute or so post-coffee-smelling-yummy-in-cup to rinse it out.

You know what they say about all work and no play. Here at Buzzillions we work hard but we also like to have fun. For Cinco de Mayo we had a piñata party where participants put a bag over their heads and were then spun around several times before being let loose to wreck havoc on a poor helpless donkey.

As if that wasn’t hard enough, we also rigged up a pulley system where someone could control the height of the donkey.

Take a guess at who’s who.

Ahhh the food challenge. If you’re not familiar with the phenomenon, it’s an epic right of passage usually restricted to teenage boys in which participants race to finish large quantities of low-quality food. At Buzzillions, this vestige of adolescence is alive and well. Coney Island has the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contest and Buzzillions has… the Wendy’s Dollar Menu challenge, the Milkshake challenge and the deceptively difficult Cinnamon Teaspoon challenge.

When it comes to food challenges, certain employees among us like to push the envelope. While our staff has yet to produce a hot dog eater as celebrated as Takeru Kobyashi, we have our fair share of cult heroes and unlikely champions. Enter Matt Wendling and Gautam Prabhu. Anything they may lack in stomach capacity, they make up for in sheer ingenuity. Since we’re all about reviews here, here’s my assessment of two food challenge all-stars:

Gautam aka The Unsung Hero ****

Pros: Boundless enthusiasm for challenges, Puts his money where his mouth is

Cons: Rarely actually participates*

Best Uses: Instigating, Betting on food challenges

Review:

Behind every good food challenge is a good instigator. If a sentence starts off with “Wouldn’t it be gross if…" Gautam happily lays down a $5 bill for whoever will take said dare. Gautam rarely participates in food challenges, but without him, the Wendy’s Dollar Menu challenge never would have come about. Who could take the idea of racing to eat each item of 10 items of the Wendy’s Dollar Menu from dream to reality? Who could rope at least 10 of his colleagues into participating without participating himself? Who would be elated rather than disgusted watching the spectacle from beginning to bitter, super-sized end? Gautam, that’s who.

*There is only one known instance of Gautam participating in a food challenge. Rumor has it that he attempted the Cinnamon Teaspoon challenge in the Fall of ‘07, but lost on a technicality.

Matt Wendling aka The Machine *****

Pros: Impossibly large stomach capacity, Loves food

Cons: Never lets anyone else win, Susceptible to food comas

Best Uses: The Wendy’s Dollar Menu challenge, Chugging frozen concoctions

Review:

Since I joined the company in November, I’ve witnessed Matt’s food challenge prowess on two occasions. One involved a blender, a Wendy’s frosty and a large order of fries. Imagine a sludge made of cold potatoes and chocolate milk. Now imagine drinking it in 3 minutes flat. But Matt did not rest on his laurels. Some months later, Matt took on some stiff competition from across the company, and came out ahead. Remember the Wendy’s Challenge? Using the weaving and bobbing technique he went from fries to chicken sandwich to chili and finished all ten 10 items in 10 minutes. Tasty.

Stayed tuned for more adventures, but never, ever try this at home.

Angela

It doesn’t have to be about deprivation, preaching, or nagging. Too often “going green” becomes loaded with negatives – saying no to all things sugary and fun while embracing drudgery.

The goal: Create an environmentally friendly office environment while retaining all of the sugary funness.

Ten of us (the “Green Team” unless anyone has a less cheesy name?) met last month to share ideas about how to start moving in that direction. It was an incredibly productive conversation that has led to a number of simple yet significant changes in the office already.

1. You’ll notice more plastic bins for snacks and cereal in the kitchen to allow us to order food in bulk whenever possible to reduce extraneous packaging.

2. There is now a recycle bin in the upstairs half of the office to make it just as easy to recycle that soda can as it is to trash it.

3. We can now recycle plastic bags in the kitchen (it’s even a recycled bag itself!)

4. And all that delicious, organic, not-wrapped-in-plastic fruit that we’ve been devouring?

And this is just the beginning! With the green pages on buzzillions.com as our guide for environmentally friendly products, and all the creative ideas bouncing around the office, our carbon footprint better watch out!