[00:00:01] Welcome to The Innovation Day Podcast. We are on episode 8 of season 3 and today's show is going to be a little bit different. We've had a lot of unique guests on over the years from authors, to advocates, to founders and business leaders and most have been focused
[00:00:16] on products, services or well books that are targeted at you to consume. Today we're talking to Robert Kirstik, founder of Freshline. As you'll hear, Freshline is a business solution and while you may not know Freshline, the story of Robert's journey will definitely
[00:00:33] resonate. It's one of resilience, change, testing and learning and growth. And the business of Freshline is all about food, something we can all relate to. I hope you enjoy listening to Robert as much as I enjoy talking to him. Thank you for joining us this morning, Robert.
[00:00:51] Yeah, no problem. I want to ask sort of, you know, what is Freshline? That is my often where I start but Freshline didn't really start as Freshline. So maybe we start pre-Freshline and give
[00:01:04] me a sense of what the first iteration was, why and we'll talk about why it changed and where we are now. I'm originally from New Brunswick. So from a very early age, I got exposed to the
[00:01:17] seafood industry. And basically when I was in third year of university, me and my co-founder at the time, we were talking a lot about how inefficient the seafood industry really is. You can buy lobster at the dock if you're near the fishing ground. But you
[00:01:32] know, if you're not close to where the lobster's from, you can get five, six, seven middle men before you end up getting your lobster. So my co-founder and I, we basically took a look at that problem and we said, we think we can make that better. So we
[00:01:45] started a company called Coastline. And what we did is we used technology to connect fisheries and fish farms to basically restaurants and retail, particularly high end restaurants. That was the bulk of our business. So we started that at a third year
[00:02:04] of university. And that's really where we started and that that was the beginning of our story. Let's just dig into that for a second because I, you know, third year of university was a long time ago for me. But I really don't recall myself starting
[00:02:19] up businesses. I was pretty thrilled if I made it to a week of classes. Like, do you have people in your family who were in the industry? You know, are you just uniquely entrepreneurial? How was it that you started up a business in
[00:02:33] third year of university that sounds like it requires a fair amount of intimacy with both the sort of purchasers and suppliers in a really specific industry? I'd say that, you know, both my co-founder and I, we were pretty
[00:02:49] entrepreneurial from a young age. But yeah, I did have a little bit of a leg up being from New Brunswick. You know, although today, I don't have any family members that are working in seafood. I do have family that has
[00:03:02] background and very close exposure to seafood. A lot of friends that are fishermen of family members, you know, up there in Northern New Brunswick. So yeah, I think I had enough proximity to the industry that I felt like I could
[00:03:17] give it a swing and it didn't feel as foreign, I think as, you know, it might for some people. And once you got into it, I think a common theme amongst entrepreneurs is I'm sort of glad I didn't know then what I know now or I may never
[00:03:34] have done this. As you started to get into it, were there moments in that kind of initial iteration where you went, oh, wow, this is like maybe way bigger and more complex? Or did you feel you kind of got it right from the
[00:03:52] get go and it kind of fell into place? Yeah, no, I mean, it was definitely definitely more the former. We were we're in over our heads for sure. For I think the vast majority of that beginning journey. And you know, I think where we really got hung up
[00:04:07] was not even getting access to the seafood products that we were listing on our platform. It was much more on the distribution side of the business. You know, we were basically chickens with our heads cut off. I was using
[00:04:21] my car, my personal car to pick up fish and deliver it to restaurants like on hotshot deliveries where we were already kind of an hour and a half late, you know, we had fish spill out onto highways like just crazy, crazy stuff. It was a mess.
[00:04:40] But then you'd show up at the restaurant and try to compose yourself and pretend that fish didn't fly out on the on the highway and get to the next customer. Yeah, yeah, as one does, right? So we really tried
[00:04:51] to try to make it all work. And for the most part, I think we did. Obviously, that businesses that you know, the foundation or the or the genesis of fresh line, but maybe give a bit more shape to, you know,
[00:05:04] size scale type of customers type of suppliers like because again, I imagine that there's fresh line DNA and all of that, right? Totally. So it was really, it was a really cool business. We basically had kind of a three sided marketplace. So we were connecting
[00:05:20] these fish farms and fisheries to high end restaurants. And then we were subcontracting all of the logistics in between. And we're able to build it up to a scale where we were working with just between 300 and 400 restaurants every, every week or so. And a
[00:05:34] handful of retailers as well. And that was in Vancouver, Toronto. And we were working on Seattle and the pandemic hit, but it had a good scale to it. And there was about 200 seafood products that we were actively flowing through the system at any given time.
[00:05:50] And to give you an idea of kind of the scale of the logistics we were coordinating, we went all the way to Japan, struck up partnerships with vendors inside of Toyosu Market and to the largest Hamachi producer in Japan on the southern island of
[00:06:04] Kumamoto. And to give you an example, chefs would place an order on coastline, which was the name of the business at the time. And basically they would be placing the order directly with that Hamachi farm, for example. And then we
[00:06:18] would they would the Hamachi farm would harvest the fish out of the fish farm. And then we coordinate all the logistics getting the trucks up through Osaka, all the way up to Haneda and Tokyo. And then we'd end up flying it over clear and
[00:06:30] customs, and then doing the deliveries to, you know, restaurants whether that was in Vancouver, Toronto. That is an unbelievable description that you just walked us through. There are so many moving parts in all of that. I mean, I, we could I think we could probably just
[00:06:47] have an entire episode on that sentence. Like how did you get into how did you go from New Brunswick to Japan? Yeah, well, I mean, we when we were evaluating where to start the business, we decided that Vancouver made the most sense.
[00:07:00] And the reason for that was there was a large amount of supply coming into the Vancouver market, big variety of products, but also just a lot of products in general. And there's also a much higher amount of demand. And so
[00:07:16] those two sides of our marketplace were in very close proximity in Vancouver. And so that's where we thought, you know, also being Canadians, that was going to be the best place for us to launch off. And the Vancouver Japan connection was just closer?
[00:07:33] Yeah, well, that was a that was a little bit more of a job. Yeah, just I'm trying to thread it. I got I got New Brunswick to Vancouver. But yeah, Vancouver to Japan. Yeah, so Japan was one of the last markets we
[00:07:47] connected to before the pandemic. So we at that point, we had supply coming from Vietnam, all parts of the US, Mexico, parts of Europe as well. So we were we were getting supply from all over at that point. Japan in particular,
[00:08:03] that came from a partnership we were able to strike up with one of the big Japanese trading houses, they call them the Koretsu. And so we were able to hook up with one of them through a government introduction, the Canadian government introduction and ended up signing a
[00:08:20] deeper partnership with them. And then they made a really large number of connections into Japan with folks that likely would have never talked to us without without their their weight kind of behind us. So yeah, it was a lot of fun.
[00:08:35] And you've mentioned before the pandemic a couple of times, which is going to be a key kind of pivot point in this whole story. But before we get there, what kind of volume of product were you moving through your system?
[00:08:46] If I remember correctly, it was something to the order of about half a million pounds of product every year. So we were really processing a lot of weight of product, but then also we were doing about four million a year
[00:09:00] in revenue going through the system. So yeah, we were we had done a seed round and we were planning on gearing up for a series A in 2021 at the time. A half a million pounds of seafood and four million
[00:09:12] dollars of revenue. A couple of guys start this up at 30 University. That's an unbelievable story right there, like full stop. And obviously it would have kept going. But for the pandemic, what do you think you guys had fundamentally solved? Do you feel there
[00:09:28] was sort of one or two or a handful of things that were the things that you really cracked? And that's what got you to where you were? Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think we were surprised by what those things were to because they weren't
[00:09:44] initially what we expected. I think if I were to try and highlight them, I think one of them would be the e-commerce system that we ended up developing at Coastline. It ended up being more of a differentiator than we expected from the other
[00:10:00] distributors that we were competing with. And I think by us having a very sleek system that made it easy for chefs to order and highlighted the different elements of the product around the supply chain, how the product was getting to them.
[00:10:15] I think we were able to really sell the story of the fish a lot more easily. And I think that that was a really big thing for us. And I think when it came to the supply chain, we came to
[00:10:25] realize that although there are a lot of middlemen for a number of products, a good number of products, a lot of the times those middlemen are relatively efficient, especially for the highly commoditized items where, for example, a filet of salmon, folks examine all over the
[00:10:41] world and the price of salmon acts very much like a commodity, very similar to oil. It's going up and down based on pure kind of supply demand characteristics. And I think having a very efficient supply chain is kind of an entry point for that kind
[00:10:58] of product where Coastline was really able to differentiate was on the harder defined products that might not have been available in the market before, or if they were available, they were only available through one or two vendors. That's where Coastline was able
[00:11:14] to come in and really drive efficiency and really make our brand stand out. But it's not what we expected because we expected to obviously be able to come in and kind of conquer and be cheaper basically on every product that we were offering. And ultimately on those
[00:11:31] commoditized items that really wasn't the case. We were only able to basically meet the market where it currently was. And that was with all of kind of the different things that we were doing on top of that. I ask that question because I'm going to be
[00:11:45] interested to see if there's, you know, what of that DNA ends up in fresh lines. So why don't we switch gears? It's what March of 2020. Yeah. The business sounds like it's in great shape growing, established half a million pounds, four million dollars in
[00:11:59] revenue and then things shut down. I imagine if your customer base is primarily restaurants with a bit of retail, the restaurant business evaporates essentially overnight. Take me to that time and what you guys did and where you were thinking. Yeah, so you're right, it did.
[00:12:20] Sorry, I'm taking you back to probably like the most unpleasant time. Thanks for joining the podcast. And I'm going to drag you through that experience again. That's OK. It can be a therapy session too, right? So no, I mean, I think
[00:12:35] that did happen. I mean, we we had our revenues. We were growing at a pretty good clip. But yeah, when the pandemic happened, we basically were wiped out. So we went from about four million a year annualized down to about 100 K a year, pretty much overnight in revenue.
[00:12:54] And we had a pretty decent size team at the time, too. We we had to lay almost everyone off. And that was not fun, not for us and especially not for the employees that we had there that had to find work afterwards.
[00:13:11] And yeah, my co-founder and I just kind of went back down into bootstrap mode. So we we took a hard look at, you know, everything that we had and we we just started trying to come up with solutions,
[00:13:25] which ended up taking a little bit longer than we expected. But, you know, I got to give credit to my co-founder. You know, he he was right there shoulder to shoulder with me through it. And I think because we were working together on that,
[00:13:39] I think we're able to to navigate our way through. Take me to that to that process. You're you're you're sitting there. There's likely some type of a list that says, you know, these are the things that we, you know, we want or we're going to build on
[00:13:53] or we're going to keep and these are the things that were not, you know, did that was that list sort of fish and e-commerce or was it e-commerce? And we don't know what else. Was it not e-commerce? Like what were the foundational elements as you started
[00:14:08] to shift and rebuild into the fresh line of today? Yeah, I mean, we we were looking at everything. We had built up a pretty strong network of refrigerated trucks as well that that we could outsource and coordinate with our software.
[00:14:26] And we were even looking at creating kind of a refrigerated 3PL marketplace. And we were thinking that that might be helpful for vaccine deliveries and that kind of thing. So we were looking at that. We're looking at e-commerce, which ultimately is what we ended up going with.
[00:14:42] We're also looking at building out our own pure direct to consumer brand. We were really scratching at everything we even was from direct to consumer to vaccine shipping. Yeah, it sounds like everything was on the table. We did try some of those things.
[00:14:58] We tried to be experimental about it. We created these milestones where different folks would, you know, pick up different experiments and then we'd run them. And if we hit the milestone and we'd keep going, if we didn't hit the
[00:15:11] milestone, we'd shut it off and try a new experiment. So we tried to be kind of methodical about it, but in a very panicked and very panicked and insecure way. But yeah, we ended up finding that the there were end up being two actually
[00:15:28] two experiments that we thought, hey, these two are are really kind of looking like they're working. One was the direct to consumer play. And then one was the e-commerce platform that we have today. And after about another three, four months, we ended up turning off
[00:15:42] direct to consumer and just full committing on e-commerce. Which also must be really tough because I do I just to take a small step back. I do love that, you know, panic with a sense of discipline as you are experimenting.
[00:16:00] But but, you know, you're experimenting in such an extraordinary moment in time that it must have been hard during that period to hypothesize as to is this kidding because of the moment that we're in in the pandemic or where we are in the pandemic?
[00:16:18] Is this failing because where we are in the pandemic? And, you know, would it either be successful or unsuccessful in a different circumstance? Like kind of every part of the equation seemed to be in flux. So that must have been a pretty challenging challenge
[00:16:31] into read the signals, no? Yeah, totally. And we were definitely thinking about those things, but we didn't really have the luxury to fully consider them because we knew that we needed to get money in the door. Yeah, it was definitely a different time and we were filled
[00:16:46] without absolutely through the whole thing. So even being filled without experimenting with a bit of panic and some discipline signals are that e-commerce is the way to go. What does that e-commerce look like? How does it take shape? Is it partly taking shape because of relationships?
[00:17:03] You had before like take me to as you start to zone in. What's it looking like? Well, we ended up landing on was an e-commerce platform that is made for food distributors. Now I it's important to remember like at that moment in time, all
[00:17:19] the food distributors that we had been competing with at Coastline, their businesses had also imploded. So they they also had all of their revenue drop off. Some of them had their revenue explode because they, you know, were
[00:17:32] maybe more heavily concentrated in in big box retailers who, you know, ended up having a growth in business during that time. But a lot of the specialty food distributors had to deal with significant business loss and they too were experimenting and trying
[00:17:49] to find a new angle in order to keep the business running. And they had an even scarier problem to deal with where they held a large amount of inventory that has an expiration date on it.
[00:18:00] And they had bought all that inventory with the expectation of business as usual. And now all of a sudden they have to offload, as you can imagine, you know, hundreds of thousands of pounds of this perishable food.
[00:18:13] So what a lot of them ended up doing is they ended up saying, OK, we're going to go direct to consumer. And that's where we figured out that we could help them. So we ended up building out a very specialized e-commerce platform
[00:18:26] that initially only did direct to consumer for these food distributors. And can you give an example for those of us listening, who aren't maybe as intimate with the industry? Like what kind of a food distributor would it be? And I don't know if you can name clients,
[00:18:39] but someone that we would have heard of, like how did how would that show up for me as a consumer? Yeah, so kind of a quick overview of food distributors. So like a food distributor, their companies like Cisco. You might know Cisco as the telecommunications like software company.
[00:18:55] It's not that Cisco. And yeah, that's that's the largest broad line. We call them a broad line food distributor in North America. And the reason they're called broad line is they carry every type of food and they deliver to restaurants. They deliver to grocery stores.
[00:19:11] They deliver to prisons. Anything that needs food on a business level. And so smaller than Cisco, there are about 25,000 food distributors that are either broad line or specialty in the US and Canada. And what they do is they deliver to the exact same kind of clientele,
[00:19:31] but they might be either hyper focused on what we call a food vertical. So, you know, only seafood or only meat, only produce, you know, or their their broad line. So they carry kind of everything under the sun
[00:19:45] and they try to be a one stop shop for everything that a restaurant or a grocery store may need. So those folks are sitting on a monstrous amount of product and you're finding a niche in helping them move that product
[00:20:02] through to consumers in a way that when you listed off at Cisco, for example, and you have restaurants and institutions and stores and jails and consumers weren't on that list. So traditionally, they would be selling to retailers who would sell to consumers
[00:20:17] and you were helping them stand up a channel to move product to consumers. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Under Freshline is it brand or was there a separate brand at the time? We did it completely white label. And this is the important piece in our minds.
[00:20:31] We knew that these distributors, no matter what work they did, they're used to having their own brand and retaining that brand all the way through to whoever they're selling. And we didn't want to step into that process. So we decided to go completely white label
[00:20:45] and really function kind of like a hyper specialized shop of I of you all but made for food distribution. Is there not some complexity in that in so far as if I'm law blahs or if I'm a large retailer and my supplier is now going direct to consumer,
[00:21:07] that disrupts the supply chain in an intriguing way where your clients who are looking to create a white label solution and move some of this product that was about to expire, that being a new channel for them, was there also anxiety because it disrupts their business model?
[00:21:23] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there were conversations that were being had between the distributor and their clientele around that. But I think what ended up happening is during the pandemic, a lot of a lot of those kind of either handshake agreements
[00:21:38] or actual contracts just ended up getting a kind of verbal hey, it's OK. Like, yeah, like a little asterisk. Yeah, yeah, like this is an exceptional moment. You know, just you know, do what you need to do to keep the business alive.
[00:21:52] And I think once the pandemic subsided or at least came more under control, a lot of these direct to consumer stores ended up getting shut off also because of those kind of handshake agreements or verbal agreements that they had at the beginning of the pandemic.
[00:22:08] Fair enough, fair enough. So feels like it's a story in a lot of chapters. So really big chapter, pre pandemic chapter around experimentation, chapter around helping in this somewhat extraordinary moment. But as those handshake agreements came to an end in terms of,
[00:22:28] hey, listen, let's all just kind of get through this thing. Where did you guys land? You obviously you're coming out of the pandemic with some pretty solid relationships. You've built some revenue back up. How did things then shift once again?
[00:22:41] I imagine as some of that DTC white label work again starts to kind of go away. It was a great moment for us because we had now built up these relationships and these food distributors that maybe before hadn't really believed
[00:22:57] in e-commerce as being a powerful lever for their business. They a lot of them saw during the pandemic, you know what e-commerce and an e-commerce platform can do. And they decided then that it was the right time to roll out e-commerce to their B2B and wholesale purchasing.
[00:23:17] And that's really where we came in out of the pandemic was we took a lot of those relationships that we had and worked very hard on delivering a direct to business wholesale e-commerce platform, still white label that worked very well for a food distributor.
[00:23:37] And that's ultimately where we've seen all of our growth post pandemic. A very, very, very long time ago, I actually worked in the in the food terminal here in Toronto. And yes, it was a very long time ago, but I was struck at
[00:23:53] how many parts of that food and vegetable wholesale distribution felt very much stuck in a time that had long past, you know, paper orders and handshake agreements and just a whole different way of doing business without a lot of automation.
[00:24:10] Was this food wholesale and distribution was it just an industry that was that was ripe for some disruption because it hadn't evolved significantly or had it evolved but just not in the right direction? Like what one would imagine that some of these entities and organizations
[00:24:29] would have stood up e-commerce platforms or started to move that way Why do you think they hadn't? And what was it maybe about your platform or it was maybe the point of time that you got in there? Why hadn't they already kind of gone this way?
[00:24:43] Yeah, a lot of it is just because of available bandwidth and kind of attention to the side of the business. The large broad line distributors that are out there, a lot of them have stood up their own e-commerce ordering
[00:24:57] and they did it in kind of the late 2000s. But for these smaller businesses, by a smaller business and food distribution, I'm kind of referring to a business that's under $50 million a year, maybe even under $100 million a year. When you're at that size and food distribution,
[00:25:15] you're very much kind of operating in a way where you don't have too much available time to to focus on efficiency improvements unless it's related to your day to day logistics because 90% of your day is going to be ensuring that your daily logistics are
[00:25:37] operating on schedule and running efficiently. So there's been a ton of adoption, I think, to innovation in that area for these food distributors, but a lot less adoption on kind of sales automation or improving the sales side, because that area tends to be just higher sales rep,
[00:25:58] manage these pre-existing accounts, receive their orders, write them down manually, then key them into maybe your ERP. And if it's not broken there, don't fix it. And there isn't too much bandwidth to do more. Well, and sometimes those organizations might not know
[00:26:14] that it's broken until a solution comes along like yours that shows them how much more efficient it could be. It sounds like the effort was basically from the moment the sale was keyed in until the product arrived at the retailer or their customer.
[00:26:27] That was where so much focus was, but the getting to the order was the part that had been left behind a little bit in terms of in terms of evolution. Yeah. So where are you now? Where are you going now?
[00:26:39] It feels like you've obviously landed on what sounds like kind of an ownable spot in the market. There's clearly product market fit in terms of uptake. Is it now a scale question? Like the solution that we've got is applicable to
[00:26:56] 80% more of the market and we just need to go get that market. Is it a product evolution challenge where, you know, the product and the solution that we've got is great. But, you know, man, I could see seven other feature sets that we can add.
[00:27:11] Is it both? What are you guys doing now in terms of where do you take the business? Yeah, and we see a ton of opportunity for product improvement enhancement. You know, there's a ton of areas in the food distribution business that we would like to add value to.
[00:27:29] That's really kind of a question of, you know, our scale and how big we can hire our engineering team to be and, you know, how much we can afford. I think in terms of our approach, although we've had, you know,
[00:27:42] really good success, I'd say so far, you know, we have customers in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and, you know, we're adding more customers every month. But I think we've taken a very Canadian approach to our growth post-pandemic, perhaps a little bit just because of the
[00:27:58] road rash of what we experienced. You know, I think we've basically made the decision to to grow off of our existing profits and and kind of take a more gradual approach to growth. And although, you know, we probably could go out and raise a large round.
[00:28:20] I think for the business that we're in and kind of the patience that we have with it, we're in this industry for for the long term. And I think that's exactly the kind of company that our our customers need.
[00:28:33] So yeah, I think we're OK taking things a little bit slower, at least compared to going out and raising venture capital rounds in order to to make sure that the business is kind of built in
[00:28:43] in the right way, you know, and it kind of grows in a sustainable way as well. Well, I have to imagine that would come as a relief to your customers, given this once they've adopted fresh line, it feels like it's a pretty
[00:28:57] critical part of their infrastructure and to have them have a high degree of confidence that they don't need to, you know, at some point in the foreseeable future, decouple that part of their infrastructure must give your clients some some degree of comfort.
[00:29:12] Yeah, I mean, it's a conversation that comes up all the time. Yeah, so I think they're they're very happy kind of the approach that we're taking. But yes, it's absolutely mission critical software. Like once it's fully up and running, you are very core to the
[00:29:28] successful daily operation of the business. And we definitely take that very, very seriously too. I was going to say, is that a different level of anxiety? I feel like I'm trying to bring up all your anxieties. I'm really not trying to do that.
[00:29:39] But but I just as an entrepreneur myself, when you say that, I instantly think, I don't know how well I would sleep at night knowing that if the software went down, you know, this would be this would be hugely detrimental to our customers. Is is running?
[00:29:57] I mean, I guess I'm thinking as I'm asking this question, all my questions are way too long, by the way, I do appreciate that. But I think about you in the early days, rushing product to a restaurant and you've got fish falling out of the car and
[00:30:13] you're an hour late. I mean, that's mission critical. If the fish don't arrive, they can't serve their customers and they can't serve what's on the menu. It seems in some ways you've maintained or retained an element of running a business that is mission critical to your customers.
[00:30:29] But how do you guys manage the responsibility of having mission critical software? I obviously part of the answer is we've got amazing engineers and a really great platform. But that's a that's a different kind of challenge than a lot of folks in a lot of businesses.
[00:30:43] Yeah, I mean, that is a really big part of it, though, because we can do things from a software perspective that ensures that we have a certain amount of uptime and we have robust backups placed in the case of servers
[00:30:57] going down or like a big outage, for example, like the one that happened in in the Eastern US a couple of years back. I mean, I think we do take that that element of our business very seriously, but we've also invested a lot
[00:31:11] at this point into making sure that we have the right uptime. And I mean, I think beyond that, that helps me sleep. I think a lot more than then kind of the old days where it was much more kind of the day to day operations
[00:31:26] that, you know, there are some things you can't control when you have a driver out on the road and they have kind of a medical emergency and they need to leave the car on the side of the road and take an Uber to the hospital.
[00:31:37] And then you're you've got a car running or something with the keys in it, right? You got a car full of fish on the side of the road. Yeah. And you're worried about making sure your driver is OK. Exactly.
[00:31:47] Not to end off by going backwards, but it feels that where you are right now is, you know, it's a product of experimentation and discipline and finding the right product and really building something that's interesting. It also feels quite different than coastline.
[00:32:08] Is there ever a part of your brain that says, hey, you know what? Coastline could still be a thing or is that something you've just moved on fully from? I just I have to imagine that, you know, save for the pandemic. Coastline still had a lot of runway.
[00:32:25] Yeah. No, I do think about it from time to time. I mean, it's not something that we could really do with this business. So I think we've we've gotten to a point now where we've in some ways we have a much more stable operating model
[00:32:38] that that is much more predictable and I think just more enjoyable to run. But I think there was kind of this day to day thrill when you're in the business like coastline was that I do think about from time to time.
[00:32:51] But the one thing that I I've realized now is it would have taken I think quite a bit of venture capital in order to get that business to scale and likely more than we had initially anticipated.
[00:33:05] And I think that would be a pretty big commitment on a personal level in itself, because then you have to make sure that you're delivering on that. Listen, when you're in what is really feels like in some way
[00:33:19] sort of the third iteration of a business and you're a co-founder and entrepreneur, you obviously need to love what you do. And the fact that you one of the ways that you describe fresh line is that it's a much more enjoyable business to run.
[00:33:32] That in and of itself is really incredibly meaningful. I want to thank you for sharing your story and letting me take you back to some of those really stressful moments. This has been fascinating. I, you know, honestly, we don't have a ton of B2B founders
[00:33:47] and and innovators on the show. And I think part of that is it's sometimes hard for folks to understand some of the nuances of B2B and some of the industries just hard to relate to.
[00:34:00] I think we can all relate to food and I think we can all relate to getting food from its origin to a store, from that store to our table. And it's really been interesting to hear how you guys have been a big part of that.
[00:34:11] So thanks for joining me today. Thank you, Neil. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. We have two more episodes coming up before we take a summer break. If you've enjoyed this or any other episode of the show, I have two small asks of you.
[00:34:27] First, can you subscribe? It's one click, but it means a lot and it helps other people find the show if they're searching. Also, then this one's easy. Keep listening. Thanks so much. We'll see you in a couple of weeks.