Jacob Kremple

play around a golf or go to a baseball game or some type of event on the way to make it interesting.

That sounds really nice.

That sounds really nice, yeah.

But I'd sit there and listen to him and everything was about the customer to him, right?

And so like for him, he won if his customer won and if his grower won, right?

And part of what attracted me to come to Bowdoin last year was this mindset that Bowdoin had was the same thing.

Like for me, it's all about making sure we can meet the need of our customer wherever that is, whether that's a commodity, Romain Hart,

You can get anywhere to a girl in Duck Tomato like I brought here that's unique to us and incredible flavor and just an amazing story of Aaron and his family and what they've done.

So, you know, to answer your question, I always wanted to be able to, I don't know, build something to bring value to the customer.

Right.

And for me, that was sort of following in his footsteps, I guess, a little bit in doing this.

Yeah, absolutely.

As you think about contracting cycles within tomatoes, you know, retailers will be renegotiating costs throughout the year, depending on different growing regions, et cetera.

Right now, growers have been able to mostly pre-bought, right, and especially the bigger ones.

So their fertilizer cost is pretty locked in at this point.

But what you're going to see over the next six months is that's going to start to evaporate.

Our big contracting season is coming up towards the end of the summer where we try to lock with a lot of our growers to make sure we can get consistency in supply for our customers.

Our growers are already talking about the cost of fertilizer with us and saying, we've got you covered now, but come contracting for next year, this is something we definitely have to talk about.

So I do expect it to affect that price, but then it comes down to how much are we willing to take versus how much does retail have to pass on to a consumer.

Yeah, I'd say probably over the last 15 years or so, you've seen a big explosion in the snacking tomato category.