Nick Talken

You need to go get all those ingredients and figure out what you want to use.

And there's two main problems as a chemist that you generally are trying to solve.

You're trying to make an incremental change.

So maybe you're dealing with a with a tariff issue or your supply chain problem.

and I need to swap one ingredient for another.

Or you're trying to make like a net new novel integration, some product that the world's never seen before that has some amazing attributes that customers have been asking for.

Regardless of what you're trying to do, you have to go figure out how do you work with your vendors, right?

So it's going to your stock room, figure out what you've got there, maybe figure out what somebody else has done.

A lot of

sitting by the water cooler, so to speak, and asking, you know, people, hey, I'm trying to make a, you know, a new sustainable shampoo in this use case.

And I'm looking for a polymer that comes from a green source.

So it's not an oil derived polymer, but it's coming from a sustainable, maybe bio source.

Have you ever found something like that before in the industry?

And so you figure that out.

And that's we call that discovery, right?

What has been done before?

So you can stand on the shoulders of those who come before you.

Historically, that's been very word of mouth.

Right.

Then you figure out what you kind of want to do and you'll take out your paper notebook and you'll start to sketch, you know, what what looks like a good experiment that I want to go run.