Jacob Kremple

For sure.

And in a restaurant, they want to keep their food costs as low as possible.

Their goal is to keep it as absolutely low as possible.

So most chefs want to continue to shop around and not make some of those commitments.

And in case the market drops out, the tomatoes were super high in April, May, and they're coming down in June.

But you go back to November, December, they were 20, 30% below the five-year average, right?

And so like, do I want to lock to get some guarantee of price?

You know, my old days when I was at HelloFresh before coming to Baldor, a meal kit delivery company, we had a cost per meal that we had to hit.

I wanted consistency in pricing.

I was trying to lock as long as possible.

For a lot of chefs, I think some of them want to be able to play that variability in up and down so that they can take advantage of some of the cheaper opportunities to keep their food costs lower so they can eke out a couple more dollars here and there.

And they probably think they net out at the end in a net win.

But in general, yeah, like food cost is a good component of a restaurant, but there's a lot more that goes into that versus like a retailer, a food service distributor.

Most of our cost is the cost of the food.

So when that cost changes, it's near term much more impactful on us for sure.

But that's our job as Baldor is to help direct our customer, right?

Like we wanna make sure they know where markets are heading and what we're able to do to help support them the best that we possibly can with, you know, we carry 80 different tomato skews at a given time, right?

So we wanna help push you towards the things that are, if you're looking for price, that's the best optimal price, but it's also my job to source

multiple regions and find the right partners and ones that when tomato markets get costly, that they're not just going to pull act of God on us and raise the price significantly, that I can still get my contract at a good value.

But then I'm also there for them when the markets are super cheap, that I'm pumping the volume through them and supporting them.