Jacob Kremple

It's that yin and yang between a customer and a supplier of, I wanna try to keep my costs as competitive as possible.

They still need to make a good return.

We've got to figure out how to do that equally with each other.

Oh, absolutely it is.

But I think if you take a step back a bit, on the restaurant side, the cost of food is about 30% of their overall cost, right?

If you go back to our retail example, a retailer, 75% of their cost, 70 to 75% of their cost is the cost of the actual food, right?

So let's take a burger in New York.

2019, it was probably 14, 15 bucks on the menu.

Today, a good burger on the menu is $22 or $23.

If you look at the actual food cost of that burger, it's probably gone from maybe $3.50 to $5.50.

That's a $2 increase.

That's huge.

That's substantial, right?

Like food costs are definitely up significantly, but that's not the full $14 to $22 to $23.

We don't talk about it enough, but the other input costs of running a restaurant are up significantly as well, whether it's labor, rent, utilities, that type of stuff as well.

Those pressures you're seeing just as much on the cost of the food in a restaurant are pushing their pricing up as much as food is.

And so, yeah, for a chef, their goal is to be as consistent in their food costs as possible.

I think that's why a lot of them tend to have that, like, I want you to price me daily or weekly and I want to shop you around and I don't want to commit to volume with you type of aspect that we have from some partners.

Others go the other way where they want to be able to partner.

But you have this sort of like dichotomy in the industry of, you know, different ways of viewing how they keep their food costs honest, right, with their distributor.