How to put together a gift basket
Your in-laws own too much stuff as it is, and you can’t think of something else they’d actually enjoy owning. Or maybe you want to send a seasonal thank-you to a client. Possibly, you have decent ideas for eight or nine little gifts but can’t come up with one great present for somebody special. A holiday gift basket is an elegant solution to a lot of stressful holiday gift-giving impasses.
Steven Freeman has a lot of experience with designing food-based gift baskets. He is the owner of Angela’s Pasta and Cheese Shop in Manchester and has been filling baskets for customers for a long time. “Angela’s has been making gift baskets for, we’re in our 45th year now,” he said. How many has he made this season? “Three hundred thirty,” he said, without hesitation.
According to Freeman, one of the nice things about a gift basket is that it allows somebody to pamper someone else with little touches of luxury.
“I’m not going to buy cashmere socks for myself,” he said. “I’m not spending that kind of money on a pair of socks. But I want them.” Putting them in a gift basket is a way of indulging someone without making a big deal about it. He used the high-end candy that goes in some of his baskets as another example. “A customer may not spend $5 on an adult Reese’s, but once they try it and say, ‘Wow, that was delicious!’, they go to buy it. ‘Oh, it’s $5? Well, it was really good, so I’m going to buy another one.’”
While almost anything smaller than a bowling ball can go in a gift basket, Freeman offered a few general guidelines to putting together one that makes an impact.
Include small bites of food that the recipient can eat immediately. “You want something you can instantly get in your mouth to feed on or snack on,” he said. “Even if it’s a pasta meal that you have to cook and spend time preparing, you can get something to snack on right away. In every one of our baskets, we put something that you can break right into.”
The presents in the basket should follow a theme. “Our pasta baskets are a pasta meal,” he said. “There’s a bag of pasta in it, an equivalent size sauce to complement it, and then a snack, a beverage, and a sweet snack and a savory snack. So while you’re preparing the meal you can be snacking and drinking other things. We try to tie it together.”
Put a surprise in each basket. “One thing baskets allow us to do is to introduce customers to products that they wouldn’t necessarily buy themselves,” Freeman said. “Maybe it’s something that they don’t think is their flavor profile, or it’s not a budget-friendly thing they would normally spend money on. It should be something that the recipient isn’t likely to have tried on their own.”
Make it easy to see everything in the basket. Freedman said Angela’s usually uses shallow baskets that showcase gift items well. “The baskets [we use] are all tapered,” he said, “so it gives you a larger surface to build on it, as opposed to trying to stuff it all in. They need some good padding. And it’s very intentional that they’re filled up that high so you see the product. It gives you visual volume. And then underneath them, we use recycled packing peanuts to raise everything up, because they’re lightweight and they compress nicely. That’s our base; then we put crinkle-cut paper on top of it, then fill it with the candies, chocolates and then the bigger things.”
If you have a crisis of imagination, there’s no shame in having someone put together a basket for you. “We have about 10 gift baskets we make year-round,” Freeman said. “We revamp them every summer.” Angela’s sells 10 premade baskets that range in price from $62.99 to $166.99, from small and simple to extremely luxurious. “At Christmastime we make 12 Tiffany baskets,” Freeman said. This year, one of the 12 baskets has a $1,000 gift card to theTiffany jewelry store. “Last year we sold out; we had a lucky winner. This year, the winner last year bought the first Tiffany basket for us to donate to someone else. Win or lose didn’t matter, but she bought it. She’s like, ‘I don’t want to win again,’ so we’re donating one Tiffany basket to a customer.’
Angela’s Pasta and Cheese
815 Chestnut St., Manchester, 625-9544
For a list of gift baskets available from Angela’s Pasta and Cheese, visit angelaspastaandcheese.com/gift-baskets. Until Christmas, Angela’s will sell holiday gifts at a pop-up store at the Live Free Refillery (460 Route 101, Bedford, 488-2231, livefreerefillery.com)