Jacob Kremple

Yeah.

So he's a very chef-focused grower, right?

And so he started with building some relationships with chefs directly in the city and literally FedExing from San Diego here.

Some of those chefs helped connect him with Baldor so that we could get him through our distribution where this might last a little bit better than through FedEx, right?

But these tomatoes that he has in the box here, these varieties, again, they're specifically bred for flavor, right?

They're a little bit more susceptible to disease, et cetera, because of that.

But to make sure he gets the flavor in them, he'll go through and call out at least a third of the flowers.

When they start to produce to make sure that the right nutrients get into each individual tomato to make sure that the flavor is there when it gets to the end consumer.

Yeah, so it's almost all crossbreeding, right?

And it's done mostly at the seed company level.

So a lot of these growers will partner with specific seed companies where they find good relationships or that they grow, you know, they're developing seeds in a way that makes sense to them and their business model and the type of flavor that they're looking for, right?

a lot of these guys will work specifically with them and test different seed varieties and give them feedback to the seed company to be able to, well, this didn't have as much yield as we hoped it would, or the flavor on this was not sweet enough, or there's too much acid in this.

And so then the seed company will go back and do some more crossbreeding and try a new variety that they'll put out there.

And then when they find the ones that they love,

They're going to go in and get a contract and get the seed in and start growing.

So it's a multi-year process.

It's actually pretty fascinating.

If you go to Sunset, Paul and that team there, if you go to their R&D facility where they're growing hundreds of different varieties at a time, it's really fascinating to go through and see some of the cool stuff that they're doing.

Tomatoes that are like completely black to, you know, all the different striping like on the firebird that Aaron has here, right?

Like they're unique.