Seth Waite - The #1 Most Important Question to Ask Consumers

today we're speaking with Jeff Grog founder and managing director of JPG Resources 70% strong and and food and beverage innovation and commercialization partner that's work with some pretty big brands like Colly Power just to name a few I think brought you know over 25 products to market with across a bunch of clients Jess spent a bunch of years at Kellogg and Kashi among others really just kind of honing his R&D innovation commercialization chops and I think in addition to guiding JPEG Jeff also runs a CPG focused venture fund as well as a um so excited to get into it maybe just first off for the a group of listeners that aren't that familiar with the JPG maybe just kind of give us a quick lay of the land just in terms of kind of the origin story and why behind the company and when you started it and then maybe you can kind of close that part out which is kind of a quick overview of the of the venture fund that you guys are running as well absolutely thanks for having me on Adam uh yeah as far as JPG our background really spawned out of my experience in Kellogg and Kashi and really not being completely happy with the consulting options that were available you know everybody wanted to work on the fuzzy front end and wanted to do ideas and prototypes but didn't really want to have to think about are these products viable in market can they ever make money can they be manufactured at scale so you know our promise has always been that no matter what kind of fuzzy state we start in we're gonna always have the end in mind and we're gonna know that at some point that value innovation does not have value until it's on the shelf and on the shelf in a way that you can be profitable so that's the way we think and and the way we operate and so all of our team whether they're in the ideation stage or in production or manufacturing or if they're in the development team they're all thinking about how to put all of that together make the concept work make the consumer promise work and make it work in a way that creates a real business so that that's JPG in a nutshell we do have all of those services end to end from the from the ideation end and the strategy through product design and development with culinary and food science folks and then we uh do a lot of contract manufacturer search and relationship building and then we can manage the back end uh for people too with uh helping on their supply chain so it's been fun to build this system and to have kind of the only really comprehensive partnership available to the industry and then you know coming out of that also we had people asking me over a few years why do you not have an investment fund and you know kind of eventually found the right partner so Andrew Reynolds is my GP partner in RCV Frontline and we invest in early stage brands usually you know a couple million in revenue so there's a little bit of proof of concept and the founders Learned a little and knows what works or doesn't work in their business and then you know we we invest help them double down on on what's good about what they're doing and build from there cool just a few examples some other brands and kind of projects you've worked on uh tell me just a a bit about that the journey with with Collie Power Power where I believe you guys partnered with the founders basically from inception all the way to you know pretty significant scale yeah yeah I mean Gail came to us before she started The Color Power and worked with Pete and our team to kind of frame up the idea and make sure it was gonna be commercially viable we helped design the commercial product that you know translate what she had done in her kitchen to something that could be made at scale and I helped find a manufacturer and and bring that you know we had to help source equipment and and design the process that scale to make that work and and then really just worked with her and that team you know over a decade uh since and so that's been a great partnership the whole way you know we did similar things with Health Warrior uh you know when when Caterton bought vans and it was a mess it was a big turnaround effort we got deeply involved there and worked with that team both on operations first and then on innovation so we've got a a long history of kind of being an integrated partner with brands for you know a period of growth until you know until sale or uh until some level of maturity that that if they end up running on their own yeah cool I think a while back and you were kind of talking about and then disruptive innovation has kind of become a bit of a diluted buzzword to a certain extent can you just maybe just kind of expand on that a bit to start yeah I mean I think there's not that much that's been done in the last decade that's truly disruptive you know and a lot of it um at bigger companies they have disruptive innovation departments but they you know when you're constrained to innovate within the brands that you already own or or you know you put other kind of artificial constraints on or you want something to be big right away it's hard to actually be disruptive so there's some of that that happens you know we worked on the Kraft Hines um it's called Remix Project where it's the kind of freestyle of the sauce category where you can customize sauces that was that was cool and fun and it was it's been successful but it's rolled out very very slowly Kraft Hines being a large company it's it could be disruptive but you know it's not moving at the base of disruption I would say you know in the market and so even some of those things it all has to come together and I think disruptive innovation you know sometimes it's just a kind of an idea um you know you look at a brand like Liquid Death did zero product work right there's nothing interesting about their products but you know just changing the way people think about water and what they hold in their how do they feel about what they hold in their hand you know sometimes the disruption comes from just that nuance or that understanding of consumer behavior or psychology yeah you know so I think you know we can get carried away with trying to be too disruptive a lot of times scale is in the incremental um you know you look at you know back to honesty or you look at um even even the liquid death example it doesn't require much from the consumer to make that little shift and you can get scale there so a lot of the more disruptive stuff also sometimes takes a long time to to actually disrupt or to actually emerge into disruption yeah that makes a lot of sense like some of the most impactful disruption can often come more from you know in the form of you know like process innovation or supply chain innovation or figuring out a new way to to make something rather than actually that new like product form factor the way you position it I guess if that makes sense yeah I mean it can come from anywhere and that's part of why I think also you have to be really thoughtful about what your innovation machine looks like for company by company and what you can leverage I think of a product like Uncrustables it's you know it's a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at its core right by sealing it by freezing it by making it convenient and easy it's a massive massive success right it's a huge business and now the the Protection for Uncrustables is largely that who else is going to invest at scale to make a competitive product that that can that can go head to head so you know their their disruption was largely in the product format and the long term value proposition is largely protected by the by the asset the like literal physical asset of how you make this thing so there's a lot of ways to create disruption or to create that that one step extra that that is the value versus you know if somebody was just doing frozen PB and J it's nothing but making it into a sealed pocket sandwich is enormous totally yeah and I think along that front that's a good example and obviously encrustables they figured out a way from like operational standpoint to be able to produce and I I think I heard you I've heard you say something along the lines of like but like focusing on ones that if I'm assuming I got that right validating that you know can actually scale before you invest a lot in it and you know realize this is actually not something that can actually work yeah you know I think a lot of that comes down to you need to work with people who know and who understand what this can look like going forward and you either means you as a founder need to go talk to a lot of manufacturers even if you're making it yourself or you need to work with somebody who's knowledgeable in the industry who can help you envision how to manufacture at scale we just see so many products that are designed in house or even at a tiny command where there might be a lot of handwork or other kind of specialty behaviors that are just not scalable or or that limit your you know as you scale you would hope that when you go from 1,000 units to 100,000 units to 1 million units that you can drive cost out of the system but if you have a poorly designed process yeah you'll never get that efficiency and you can never really leverage the scale of of being bigger so you know those are the kind of things we we want to work with brands to think about is well if you're gonna be if you're gonna build a hundred million dollar brand and you know you can start by selling that thing for eight bucks a unit but chances are at some point you know for that to reach mass mass appeal it needs to be four or five bucks a unit to to you know reach the potential of that idea and if you can't gain some economies of scale as you grow you know most companies don't grow to that point you know they they become a premium niche specialty item which is fine that can be great I think there's a lot of those kind of businesses that are wonderful businesses but that may also not be something that you can get investors to back or that investors are gonna be happy with you know you need to know if you're building a 10 million dollar profitable lifestyle brand so to speak and there's nothing wrong with that those are great businesses that's different than building a hundred million dollar brand you're gonna exit to a strategic right and you know I think that in the last decade of the you know lots of money flowing in and everything else too many people didn't understand which they were actually building yeah that's a great point is important especially as a company grows and things can get more bureaucratic and what not in your experience working with so many brands how can a founder instill this kind of culture into their company from the start and then really kind of probably what's the harder part is maintain it as the company scales yeah and it it requires different skill sets as you grow and it requires evolution you know in the early days I think and the one durable piece is you need to value input from anywhere you need to value ideas from anywhere and the best companies do that you know the best companies don't care where the idea generated if it's internal external marketing or the shop floor if it's a good idea you wanna get after alright um you know so that's one and I think that that having that requires humility from your leadership um so that is I think one common theme the other is you have to have intense belief in what you're doing and you want to have a team that not only believes in what you're doing but trust each other so that you put each other's ideas to the test you know I mean when I was a cashier we grew insanely fast we went 30 x in eight years so 25 to 7 50 in eight years and we fought all the time uh you know we we had a very intense environment and it was and when I say we fought I mean in good ways like in very productive we had if we were in a meeting that meeting we had it out and then but we trusted each other so we could talk very bluntly to each other and then we could go and execute based on the consensus and you know knowing that we were making each other better and there wasn't politics and there wasn't you know land grabs going on or anything else it's just wanting to get the best product out you know so those things I think are like the the kind of culture you want where there's radical honesty where there's really aligned vision but everybody is willing to speak their mind and you know just try and get the best outcome having said that you know I think along that period of growth and we went through this at Kashi and I have within JPG or the other business that I've built you have to add structure as you go you have to add some process as you go you know a lot of times as innovators we we feel constrained by process but you need good process helps you innovate better and helps you ensure that that innovation lands again at a profitable sustainable product you know I I think we we sometimes undervalue a process in growth companies yeah that makes total sense it should be a fairly high bar to justify the product the process of all everything it takes to actually bring a new um from your perspective the journey or process look like that leads just to the decision to get to that decision that says yes you know this is justified to to bring this new skew to market yeah that's a great question because we do find that most companies over innovate we actually turn down a lot of work by when people contact us and they say we wanna do a new launch we wanna launch a new line and our response is you have no business launching a new line you need to sell more of what you're doing now unless you're telling me you're gonna pivot your company if it's not working fine but you know when you're at 2 million you don't need innovation usually you you need to grow and so you know when you look at um between the bar category kind and quest or beverage you know these brands are 100 million 200 million and they only do one thing you know they don't have innovations all over the place so I think that's the first question is why are you innovating and does this help your business or does this just complicate your business and too many young companies are way too prone to innovation and you're at 2 million you've got 14 skews across three sections of the store is crazy those brands almost never make it they're too they're too cumbersome to work so that's one and then I think two is you need to understand what does the market want does this fit my brand does this fit my ability to deliver you know too often we see people doing really disconnected stuff you know you want if you are at a point where you should be doing innovation that's beyond just we want is flavor line extension and that's a fairly easy kind of does the is the trade asking you for a fourth skew is is there a clear place for that to go can you do something that's minimizes your cannibalization of your own and takes something you know adds incremental volume you know but when you're talking about like adding a new product line you really need to weigh your ability to execute that and ideally it's still somewhere you can leverage your same sales team leverage your buyer relationships when you're jumping aisles in the store you're essentially not exactly but you're you're starting to create another company you're certainly creating a new reality that you have to operate in that's far more complicated what have you found is is um new skill launch that's successful from an on time perspective and on budget perspective that's a really good question too because this is where founders often struggle and you know I mean big companies too but I think this comes out to process you know this is where I think we've built a machine that works really well at JPG to work through this tension because you know my point of view is the best product briefs are often a little bit impossible at the beginning but you wanna work against that high bar and you wanna test that and you wanna let's shoot high let's aim high for what we think we can do but then somewhere along the line you have to go well I can't make the taste and the nutrition and the margin and the packaging and everything else that I want I can't make it work so something's gotta give and you have to understand your hierarchy when you do that like what's most important for this consumer proposition for my company for my concept where am I gonna give to make this work and make it be viable you know manufacturable right margin all that stuff so you know I I believe it's healthy to start from a place that may be a little bit unreasonable uh that's okay but you have to have a process then to bring that together to something that is reasonable and is scalable yeah and so that that requires you doing these cycles of OK we're gonna lean in on the consumer understanding we're gonna design something that we feel like is the ultimate delivery against the the problem we wanna solve and then you have to go OK but I have to surround that with the right price point in market and all the other pieces and so you iterate between creativity and these cycles of of you know what's the next round of product look like and how does it get better and better and at the same time you know you're bringing in the how do I land the cost right how do I make sure this is manufacturable at scale um you know and you just have to keep you know rubbing those sticks against each other to create the fire that that ultimately can can you know lift the company so I think that's the kind of challenge is that you have to be good at both sides most individuals left to their own device are either too too willing to just wing it and hope it'll work out or they're too constrained so you know having partnership and process I think unlocks that ability to end up in the best spot yeah that's a great point which I thought was interesting even more than brands may think being a good example is like such a simple thing but clearly they've had a lot of success can you kind of expand on what you've kind of I guess gleaned over the years around this kind of importance of convenience and reduce friction and what not yeah yeah I mean I will say my personality if I get it wrong I remember it a lot more than what I get right and when I was at Kellogg and we were starting to work on a packaged Rice Krispies treats I remember saying why would anybody need this it takes like four minutes that anybody with a stove and an arm can make you know you stir stuff together but it was so wrong like as soon as we launched that Kelly could not keep up we actually took like a full page ad in the USA Today like we're doing the best we can we're trying to make more um and we went we built one line at a command and within a year a year and a half we had five lines running at full tilt and I was like that was way you know like fully settled into me like never underestimate the laziness of the American consumer we want easy we want it to be we want it to be just I want it now I want it simple and we've got most many households most households have two working people everybody's on the go everybody wants to would rather invest in leisure time than food prep time and you know so all of those things I think just come into play that our society is built for speed and you know and and we're there's no slowing it down so you know we we have to recognize that reality and you know not to say there's nothing that people take a moment to sit down and slow down and enjoy there is ritual around tea or coffee or other things beer you know whatever but there are but by and large like for the most part people want easy and people want just plug ins that work for them yeah so you know I I think it's again really understanding your product and if you think your product is something that's going to buck that convenience trend you better really know why and how and and it needs to be built for that but for the most part easy is the way either people want convenience for the day to day stuff or it's like on the other side it's like people and they have the free time when it's a lot of process but it's like part of their hobby if it's not like on either side of the barbell in between it's probably not gonna work yeah I mean sourdough I think you know this trend of this baking trend that's been amazing since um since covid you know really people one it's it's soothing baking is soothing it's very like elemental and you and you have to do it right you have to pay attention it takes your mind into into the process you know by the sourdough also like now you've joined a tribe right you've joined a club you're you're part of something so I think that that baking uh activity ticks a lot of those boxes for what people are looking like looking for and you're not baking that bread because you need it necessarily you know you're still you're probably not making sandwiches out of that to feed your kids in their lunch box right so it's it's all those other things and so yeah I agree I I think um you know being on the board of King Arthur like seeing this trend and seeing how people have embraced this is like taking that food making art and craft into a different kind of space yeah that's way different from why people buy most of their groceries yeah totally yeah what are you seeing today like what are the biggest opportunities in today's environment when it comes to reducing cogs it's hard I mean right now there's so many moving pieces I think you really have to be thoughtful about what you're going to chase I think one you know on the terror front which everybody's talked about a lot the last year we're seeing it settle down it's a little more a sense of predictability so now people are understanding well should I be changing my supply chain to account for tariffs or not so that's one that that's kind of nibbling around the edges I think the big pieces are what's your manufacturing look like and between you and your manufacturer whether you own it or whether you outsource it how can you do better you know how do you work with your manufacturer to to squeeze out some more efficiency how do you reduce waste how do you reduce overweights so many products in their early part of their life cycle are very poorly designed for manufacturing and a lot of founders just sort of delegate that to their co man the co man is not that incentivized to make it better and they're just happy just to get through it every day and you know send the product out to the customer um so you know a collaboration with your manufacturing I think is where there's a lot of opportunity you can you know labor costs are way up if you can reduce headcount by making your product run better if you can get 10% more per shift out you know those things add up and matter a lot um you know optimizing your truck loads uh are is your pallet configuration right if you can get 10 or 20% more on a pallet you just shrunk your your freight cost by 10 or 20% you know so some of this stuff is actually like very simple from a math standpoint most founders are not that good at it most founders are not operationally minded they're sales and marketing minded they're creativity minded so you know that that's where I think there's opportunity and the other piece is not really on too many people think well as I get bigger I'm just going to squeeze my suppliers and I'm gonna get better pricing in packaging you get a lot of leverage from scale on your ingredient side you don't get that much leverage from scale um or at least like it's way different magnitude um you know if you're a two million dollar company worrying about sourcing better is probably a waste of time but if you can formulate better and you can formulate in a more sophisticated way and you can reduce your cost of formulation or you can reduce you know 19 ingredients to 15 those kind of things end up paying off so I I think it takes a product by product manufacturing process by process kind of look but there's certainly most small companies are leaving dollars on the table on the on the operation side they look at their command transactionally and then they'll just say hey I want a lower price you know and they make it the command's problem and most commands are not that motivated especially if you're a startup to go do that work but if you go to them and say look how do I partner with you what do we need to do collectively to make your plant run better how can you know instead of implying that hey Mr Coleman I want to take money out of your pocket to put in my pocket which is where a lot of people start is this hard headed negotiation of I win you lose or whatever and you go I don't want you to make any less money how can we both make more money and if you can get more product out per our the command is gonna do better and you should get a price reduction you know so I think that there's just not enough focus on emerging brands on true actual partnership and working together with your manufacturer and your suppliers to find ways to uh to do better yeah I think that's a great great way to put it in terms of finding the right contract manufacturing partner and getting production off the ground when you're it sounds like you know you do a lot of this kind of search and building relationships with co packers and making recommendations for your clients like what's what should a kind of a copacker and a diligence checklist look like or maybe just another way to put it what are the most important variables or factors to consider yeah um it seems interesting too because at JPG like I've started in addition to running JPG and launching brands and other stuff I've started and operated two contract manufacturers my head of command used to run his manufacturing plant that's how I got to know him he was one of my commands at Kashi so we under we see both sides of the table and I think that's I'll start with that is that when you're trying to find a partner if you don't understand what they do and what's important to them and how they're motivated it's very tough to have a partnership so I think there's one is just taking the time to get to know each other a little bit hopefully you're making something that has more than one place in the world that can make it um and if so then you need to find that best relationship so that's partly all the all the basics of can they do it can they do it at a reasonable price do they have capacity is it the right fit also just that relationship piece that we we don't we see a lot of folks shortcut that or again look at as as two transactional so you know I think the the diligence needs to be both what are your Moqs and what kind of upside can I expect if I 10 x my business can I work with you or am I gonna outgrow you it's also understanding that if you do 10 x or 100 x where you start with you're probably not gonna be at the same command right like this whole idea that you're gonna command for life from when you first get married like I used to say like you should not want to be a child bride you know like you are you are a very young nascent company this is not your forever partner here you're not getting married for life you're gonna have a good relationship for hopefully two to five years and then hopefully you outgrow them you go somewhere else like that's what success looks like and you wanna make that relationship as productive as possible during that time so you know understanding those parameters on volume understanding cost and then you know how do you put together a contract that's fair and equitable and clear so everybody knows how to behave on that topic what's what's a red flag in a manufacturing you know co packer contract that maybe a good amount of founders may miss that could get them in trouble later down the line I mean one big one is who owns the formula who owns the IP you know you you as the founder of the brand you need to own that if you take the shortcut route and you have your manufacturer develop your product for you they're probably gonna own that IP that might be okay almost every solution can be okay if you do the things around it right so but if you're gonna go that route you need to know what your buyout of that IP is and either after so many units you own it or after so many months or years you own it there needs to be a pathway to ownership because like I said at some point you're gonna outgrow that partner bluntly almost everybody who's giving you free R&D on the front end they're charging you a lot for that R&D in the cost of your product and at some point you're gonna come to us or some other competent ops team and they're gonna say I can save you 40% we need to move you somewhere else and if you don't own the formula it's much harder to do that it cost you more paying us to reformulate it so I think that's one is IP rights are are really big and investors really don't like when you don't have your IP rights beyond that I think it comes down to transparency like you should not have a two page command contract that's woefully inadequate you need something that's much more explicit in spelling out your rights your responsibilities and same with theirs um cause what we see is that a lot of contracts are just fine when everything goes perfectly and then when something goes wrong it all hits the fan and there's not clarity of who's at fault and how it works and those are when brands often feel abused because the command's not gonna just step in front of the bus when they don't have to so you need a good contract that delineates if if something's out of spec then what happens if there's a recall then what happens what do you have the right to reject or not all those sort of things need to be clear so it does take some intensity to have a good contract yeah that's really helpful you work with a lot of brands across like all aspects of CPG and in my senses you definitely got a pretty good grasp on all things trends and I think one thing I've heard you talk about is how it's kind of macro versus micro trends and how founders and operators should really focus on on the macro can you kind of expand on this and maybe kind of an examples of what this what macro examples and maybe micro examples and maybe would not be something that's worth pursuing well I'll yes we'll talk about that and I'll start by also saying I think this is where it's important to understand are you building a ten million dollar profitable company or are you building a company you wanna build and and to scale and exit and that's when you need to know the difference on if you're in a microtrend or macro right so if you wanna build a hundred million dollar company you need to be operating in a market that's billions of dollars because only 10% of a market is usually something you're not going to achieve right so you need to be looking at a market that's very very that that can be very very large so one I think that means again you look at am I going too far am I trying to solve too many problems at once or can I just say look we're about high quality protein or we're about protein and fiber which makes it GLP1 friendly or we're about the benefits of mushrooms or whatever it may be but something that you believe has scale and that the market says has scale it's not just your belief there's some reason to believe in the scale and then you know building building toward that with simplicity and with focus otherwise you know look there's a lot of good brands and good companies out there that are 10 or 20 million bucks that are really built on much more niche kind of positionings sure so that to me is the big question is the microtrend can be very sustainable maybe very highly ownable but it may not scale ever or for 20 years so it's really being honest with we see people give us ridiculous TAMs with some very aesthetic product and they're like yeah but this could be two billion dollars like you can't show me a four million dollar market today like you know come on so you know like thinking about what your true Tam is and not some outrageous thing but if you're if you're selling a product with that's very complex and nearly a medical food well chances are you're in that micro trend space and you know you need to just understand that when you start are especially maybe right for disruption right now or maybe another way to put it if you were to go start your your own brand this year what category or maybe categories would you consider going after you know I mean I think right now obviously protein and everything is a big trend but it's it's happening all over I don't know that if I was if I'm launching a new brand I'm probably not going into that mainstream you know I I think fiber and more sophisticated approaches to fiber is interesting I think there's an opportunity and this is where there's a lot of nuance we'll see how it unfolds like do you want to be a GLP1 focused brand or not it's a giant trend it's only gonna get bigger as those drugs become you know oral instead of injectable and they become affordable you know I think there's opportunity to be GLP1 friendly and that means a lot of different things there's there's a nutritional aspect there's a right size aspect there's a you know meeting meeting the needs in different ways and so far there's not been there's been a lot of people kind of dance around the edges but there's not been very many brands that go right after it so that'll be interesting to watch gut health is another aspect of that that I think continues to grow and and then the gut brain kind of connection and brain health so we were seeing in some ways there there's a lot of trends right now that are actually kind of coming together um you know and and then you know greens fees are you gotta be clean label you gotta be something that that makes sense I mean if you're really medical if you're really technical maybe you can get by with being a little more you know the miracle of food science kind of thing but you know for most brands that are probably you know that are engaging broadly against the industry you know you have to design from simple and then you have to just really figure out which of these consumer needs you want to nail but I would say you know I would caution on you don't wanna be an arms race brand right you don't wanna be just like I have one more gram of protein well somebody else will one up you you wanna be something that people rapidly affiliate with and understand and you know feel like they need it in their life you know you wanna hit that bullseye you wanna have a clear bullseye and you wanna hit it and you wanna hit it very very tightly and over and over again all your messaging communication where you are on shelf all of that needs to hold together um and you need to be working on that emotional hook to your consumer more so than just being structure function kind of a position for the brands out there that they've struck lighting in a bottle or it's been a you know 10 year overnight success or somewhere in between and there are or will soon to be in a place where they can seriously start looking at an exit as they're getting the business ready for sale and to market to potential acquirers no I I think this is also you really need to understand what you're selling and you know if you're selling a really high growth brand and you've got really high growth and there's a reason that's gonna continue you don't need to be as profit focused you know cause everybody talks about profit these days but it's very hard to get profit below 10 million and then even for larger brands you need to know what you're about and you know you not necessarily everything even a hundred million you're probably not 50 margin and 50% growth and you know like those brands are really rare so are you still like zooming to growth with a pathway to profitability or better profitability or are you like hey look we've proven we can turn out really solid margin and and profitability and still grow at 25% a year like that's also viable but you know so I think that I'll start with that is we see brands sophisticated brands sometimes with what you would think would be sophisticated advisors that still don't know what they're selling you know at a 60 or 100 million like you should know exactly what your proposition is and then what they're buying into and depending on what that is you also need to then have the um rationale for well what's our innovation pipeline going forward or what's our next lever toward profitability you know how does a sale add value to the company you know how do you help the strategic acquirer understand how they make it even better than it is today so you know I I think that there's this similar what I said about commands before you need to think about what that buyer is looking at what value proposition are you giving them are you giving them growth that they can't get otherwise are you giving them a business that's a maybe a little bit more mature that's profitable and really solid but still has legs that they can see how they can go expand the growth they can get you into channels you can't get in um you know so thinking about well if I had the wherewithal of Pepsi or a Mars or whoever the acquirer might be what should happen with this business and laying it out for them so they can see it and you know big companies like that they're gonna they're gonna look pretty hard at your brand and your proposition and see if they think they believe in it or not so you're way beyond the point of selling some irrational promise you need to actually have something that they look at and go yeah I buy into that and in the back in the back of their mind they usually have some other twist that they think they can apply to to make it even better so those are the deals that get done oh that makes sense that's really powerful well yeah Jack this has been awesome really appreciate the timing this has been really valuable for for a lot of people that are gonna be listening what's the best place for people to follow along with you and all the knowledge you've got and then best place to follow along with with everything going on at at JPG these days yeah I mean we'll be updating our website some more and there'll be content coming on there at times so it's JPG resources dot com and then also um you know JPG resources on uh on LinkedIn our Colleen ex team also does a really nice job on LinkedIn and and you know talking about food and more of a culinary uh perspective um and I'm on LinkedIn at at uh as well so you know we don't do too much other socials so for the most part LinkedIn and our website are where you're gonna find us and then at events you know I'm speaking this week at uh at Fancy Foods and we're we participate in all the big shows and happy to meet people in person all cool awesome we appreciate the time Jeff this has been awesome really integrated within the space operation side versus kind of the brand marketing side that don't that scale pretty poorly changes like these can when it comes to product portfolio expansion I think I heard you reference Rice Krispies Treats like making sourdough bread at home