 Welcome to Start Up The Storefront, presented by Aurobora. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Ben from Little Spoon. Ben, thanks for joining for people who don't know what does your company do? Thank you, Diego. So Little Spoon is the leading and the largest and the fastest growing all the above baby and kids food company online. So we are a direct to consumer brand that offers a range of food and nutrition products from a baby's first bites all the way through their big kid years, really kind of the first of its kind. Platinum products, we've got more than a hundred that we offer across six different product categories, again, spanning the baby stage, the toddler stage, as well as now as recently up to older kids. We have some things here. So this is our producer's favorite thing. So our producer is a full grown adult and he's been loving this, this, this TV dinner thing that we all used to enjoy back in the day. So what made you want to do this? Do you have children? Are you are you a family man? Why this category? What did you see? Give me the story. Yeah, so people find it to be somewhat amusing that I started a baby and kids food company without having kids. I did not have kids at the time. I do not have kids now. I was actually in the food space before and basically just saw really a couple of things. One, just a major shift in package food, package, beverage, like away from the center store, highly processed, shelf stable stuff that, you know, a lot of us grew up on to, you know, fresher, cleaner, better for you options. Of course, it's like very commonplace now. You can go to any bodega in New York and buy Kabucha and cold pressed juice and, you know, all the cutting edge stuff. But baby food at the time when we were starting literally had not changed in a hundred years. Gerber essentially created the concept of putting baby food in the jar and selling it in grocery stores. And that happened in the twenties and still to this day remains, by the way, the biggest brand in that space. How big is Gerber from like a either evaluation perspective or just like a revenue perspective? So they're owned by Nestle. It's not it's not public exactly what their what their revenue is. But I mean, I've seen estimates that it's in the, I mean, it's it's certainly in the billions, I would say in the probably, you know, one to one to three billion dollar revenue range. Okay. And what did you say? It's like a better for you product or is that sort of the opportunity you saw where there's a better way of doing this? Yeah. So I saw this baby food category and, um, and of course, little spoon today and I'll tell you about our journey and everything, but we're a lot more than just baby food today. But when we started looking at this, this category is just it really had not kept up with the times of today's consumers, right? The needs and wants and priorities of someone, you know, say a millennial or someone who is of this generation that's this now, you know, of the generation that's having kids and starting families, it's just very different than the needs and priorities of generations before. And so we saw this clear opportunity in the market. I remember, you know, one of our first taglines in the beginning was your baby's food shouldn't be older than your baby. And literally that was what was happening. I mean, all of the package baby food had had a shelf life of multiple years. It's highly processed, you know, heat pasteurization. Basically what I mean, the FDA would call it commercially sterile. It has none of the properties of fresh food. When you think about fresh food, there's vitamins, there's nutrients that should be a bright color. You know, you can obviously taste the difference in the baby food. It was just it was just stunning to me that the same people that were going into places like Whole Foods and buying eight to ten dollar bottles of green juice for themselves were left with an option of either either I have to settle for this grocery store baby food, this highly processed food that is older than my baby, or I have to make it myself and that's a trade off that didn't seem right. And so that was really for me. I mean, again, not being a parent, you know, I really just saw this very glaring gap in the market. Another thing that I'll say that was, I remember it was kind of a defining moment in the early days was looking at even the pet food category at the time when we were when, you know, I was just kicking this idea of little spoon around. There were upwards of a dozen fresh pet food companies companies making literally fresh food for dogs and not a single option out there for babies and for children. So it was very clear to me that there was an opportunity in that category. And then, you know, there's many sort of obviously subsequent steps from there, but it was really just like a glaring gap in the market. That's so fascinating. And so the way I sort of dissected is, okay, so what you're solving is a really counterintuitive issue where I guess in your head, you might think person has child, they're going to do everything they can to give the child the best. What's happening in reality is couple has child and they're so busy surviving. They're just like, whatever, whatever we can put in this baby. And usually what that means is like out of convenience. And so either you have the means and necessity or time, let's say, so either you have money or time, time being the more precious one to create this like healthy, better for you product yourself, or you're just going to what's available in the grocery stores, which is probably convenient and the shelf life is exactly in years and there's gums and binders and that's crazy. Wow. That's really yeah. And of course, the dog wouldn't make sense because if you're a dog owner, you obviously have time to walk the dog. It's a little bit less time constraining. And there's a couple of things I'll say to that by the way. So first of all, just zero again on the time piece. I mean, the other thing we recognize is that the generation of parents today, people who were, you know, and I'm saying today, but really the same goes for even when we were starting Little Spoon, you know, I mean, that we launched over five years ago. If we were working on this probably about seven years ago, it was so obvious to because everyone that I knew that had kids had people, you know, my age or maybe a little bit older that were starting families, they all had jobs and it was also the rise of the dual income household. I think something like, you know, close to 90% of households have dual working parents, right? And that is so fundamentally different than what it was 20, 30, 50 years ago, 1100 years ago when Gerber started. And so, so yeah, parents are more time strapped than ever before. And I think the standards have only gotten higher, but yet the products that are available in the market just haven't kept up with these kind of evolving needs and preferences. The other thing, sorry, on the dog food, just to take it back there, it just kind of ties into this, who this customer is. And it was a bit of a moment actually as well when we saw not only were there were all these pet food brands and it's like, why, how in the world are there, you know, 10, 12 companies selling fresh dog food, not a single one selling fresh baby food. And at some point it actually clicked that the generation sort of what I would say my generation, this millennial generation that was basically that maybe many of us had not yet entered the life stage of parenthood, you have not ready to start a family. The first natural step is often to get a dog. And I'm definitely, I'm one of those people, my dog's here in our office with me, you know, so, so it kind of made sense. It's like, Hey, obviously all disruption starts from a consumer need. And if you think about this millennial generation, like the same people that were not ready to have kids, but maybe, you know, still have the same values and principles and so forth, we're getting dogs. And now we have a whole generation that is in mass going to be starting families. We want to be that solution. And so that was sort of like that was the thing, you know, ultimately that was like, Okay, yeah, this is this is this is an opportunity worth pursuing. Yeah, there's there's a clear customer journey there where it's interesting where it doesn't actually start with your company, but the thesis of look, there are people who want to feed the thing they love, whether that's an animal or a human being. It doesn't really matter, but the that's so fascinating. And so what was your when you first came to market, you know, what did you decide to come to market with? What was the first set of products? Our first product line was our baby blends, which is fresh, cold pressed, organic, pureed baby food. We started with like, I think fewer than 10, maybe eight or nine individual. No, it was that those are our smoothies. So it was, yeah, in a little in a little cup with a spoon actually, of course, because I got it, got it. Little spoon, a la Gerber and little spoon. Yeah, exactly. So we started with like eight skews of pureed baby food. It was all, you know, really small batch. I mean, we were literally, I remember the first production run, I think in total was like 400 units or something. But yeah, it just, I mean, just crazy to think about given where we are now. Did you make the decision early on to be DTC or did you see an opportunity maybe in retailer? Did you try going into retailers? It's a great question. So we were actually, and this is something, you know, we don't commonly talk about not because there's any, for no reason other than it just doesn't often come up, but we actually intended to start little spoon and build the brand in retail. That was always the plan from the beginning when we were in the idea stage as even, I mean, there's a whole long story. I can share bits of it if you're interested, but there was a whole long story of kind of how we decided to move to DTC. Ultimately, it was, it was a very intentional decision, but there were actually some things that happened that were out of our control and honestly some of the best looking back on it. It was definitely for the best and I'm not sure that we would have actually made the decision that we made had a couple of, you know, a couple of things out of our control not happened. So we were planning to launch the retail. First of all, it's a way better valuation. It's a way better business model. It's a little bit harder to pull off, but if you can figure it out, obviously it's the way to go, right? You control everything. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, and it cuts both ways because it is hard to your point. It is hard, super hard. Both are hard, both are hard, but if you do it right, there's a, it really is a massive opportunity in DTC. So we'll talk about DTC probably later, but starting out kind of in the early days, we were planning on launching a retail. In fact, we actually got a booth at a large food trade show called Natural Products Expo West and we were literally there to pitch retailers to try to get our product in front of retailers. And we had so much interest. We had multiple regions of Whole Foods that wanted our product. In fact, had approved our product, even a couple of even going into that show. We had a number of other retailers, large ones that were circling that we were talking to. I mean, the show could not have gone better. I'll just say this much for people who haven't been to Expo West. It is the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life. I think most people, if you've ever been at a startup, if you ever worked for just a company in general, you've been to a trade show, we get it. It's maybe like a floor and for context, maybe as large as like a football field or maybe two at most. Expo West is like 14,000 football stadiums on every single floor. There's countless companies. I mean, probably like 10,000 companies are there and they're all similar, but not similar. And so to me, it's like just going there as an attendee and finding your way to the, let's say I wanted to see you would take me a million. It would be like, okay, I didn't know where you are. Then I got to go in the right building. Then I got to go on the right floor and all this stuff. And so it's crazy. And so I think for companies to be successful at a conference of this size is kind of very difficult, very statistically improbable, I would say. It's a challenge for sure. It's a challenge, it's a challenge, yeah. So we were kind of like full speed ahead planning to go down that path. So yeah, so we were there, went well. We had done our first production run going into the show and had two regions of Whole Foods for sure lined up already at that point and in fact had product that was already in transit on the way to Colorado and Los Angeles. And by chance in the, I think it was like the second day of the trade show toward the end, I guess I remember. I was, I went into the bathroom of the convention center and just by pure coincidence, happened to be washing my hands next to this guy who at the time was the global grocery buyer for Whole Foods. So he was in charge of everything. Crazy. Right, so. And so I'm like, hey. And you didn't stock him. You didn't follow him in there. Yeah, it was a really. No, no. It was a genuine run-in. Some people do that. Some companies, some companies have a story. Where do they do that? I'm not above doing that just to be clear. This was fully random. I of course tried to lure him over to our booth and I was successful. I got him to walk with me. And as you mentioned, the convention center is massive. So it was not a short walk. We got to the booth, you know, showing the products, start talking. It was overall quite a positive interaction. However, he raised a concern which was, hey, fresh baby food has never been done before. This is completely uncharted territory. We can't just bring this into our stores without a more rigorous quality and food safety review and audit process. And we need to understand that what we're bringing in is actually safe because it's not like just any other product. Of course, it's for babies. It's a high-risk population. And it was something completely novel. It just, there was no precedent for it. And of course, we had all of our ducks in a row. We took that stuff very seriously. Don't get me wrong, we were pretty janky. But when it came to food safety, quality and those types of things, like we've always been very, very careful. So, you know, I'm like, okay, no problem. We have everything you need. We've done all the testing. We've got, we can, you know, just let us know what you need. At that point, we already had product in transit to two of his regions. And the way that Whole Foods works, at least at the time, was every region sort of acted autonomously and then in certain instances, the global team would, you know, sort of make overarching decisions. So, he basically, when he found out that we were launching in these regions, he basically said, hey, you got to pump the brakes. Let's do this. We just got to go through this food safety process. Should be quick. Shouldn't really cause too much of a delay. But just send me an email on Monday. We'll get it, you know, we'll get it sorted out. I'll get you connected with the right people. Fast forward. Within a week, he had left Whole Foods. I got passed to somebody else who within, I think, two weeks after that left Whole Foods. It was just two departures. And we were in this holding pattern. And we had, what at the time, felt like a meaningful amount of inventory that we had produced and transported and were storing that had, you know, a finite shelf life. It was a ticking time bomb before it was going to go bad. And it was just, you know, days bled into weeks, weeks turned into months. And during that time, frankly, I mean, we were still thinking we were going to launch in Whole Foods. We just thought it was going to be later. And we were starting to also, you know, kind of nurture some of the conversations and the interest that we had received from other retailers. Long story short, during that time, I thought to myself, let's start selling online. We have this inventory. We have the supply chain set up. Why don't we kind of just dabble in D2C? And I knew nothing about D2C. I really wasn't at the time. I mean, now it's so common to order anything online, obviously, maybe even have it delivered in 10 minutes. But you know, there was not a ton of companies outside of the early meal kit companies that were doing D2C food, especially D2C perishable food. And so it was sort of a little bit of like, we were, you know, kind of trying it. It was a little bit of uncharted territory we were trying to figure out. I really love the story. So let me ask you a real question because I think what we try to focus on on the podcast is like, at the end of the day, people will listen and you're a real person. And so at the time that Whole Foods, the first guy gets let go or leaves or whatever it might be, what are you feeling really? Like, are you thinking this is all over? Are you thinking, what are the internal conversations you have? Are you sleeping? Like, what was that internal moment like? Or are you just hell bent on, I got a pivot. That road is now a dead end. We have to do something else. What is that like? What was that moment like? I would say it definitely took some time for me to get to the point of letting it go. It was a combination of other things too. The other thing that we did along that several month journey of waiting for Whole Foods, this revolving door of contacts there, it became clear I think after like maybe a month that the inventory that we had already produced was mostly going to go to waste. Like there wasn't going to be somewhere else that we could offload a tune. So that was, it wasn't going to crush us and we already had. I think I was extremely bullish on this opportunity. So, you know, I would say I was undeterred by it. We were plowing ahead with building this e-commerce site. Literally, I had this very naive perspective of, oh, you just like build a website and it works and like that. And you just like, that's it. Like you just, the people come and like they'll buy stuff and you just, then we ship it to them and that's it, you know? And yeah, little did I know that it's very complicated to do that. Not only putting aside the customer acquisition, the economics of the business, like the logistics, a lot of logistics involved, especially for us, but even just the actual technical side, I knew nothing about. I don't have a technical background. Again, I thought like you just got to guide and build a website, functions and like, maybe you updated here and there, but that's it. And meanwhile, like fast forward to today, we have like a 12 person tech team, you know? So it's totally different. But I was undeterred. We stuck with it. The other thing I think that was thinking back to those early days that was interesting was, gave me a tremendous amount of conviction on this D2C path. You're in LA, right? So obviously, and everyone knows Erwan. We could sell in Erwan. I mean, it's only a couple of stores, at least I may have worn out, but at the time, you know, a couple of stores and we could at least use some of this inventory that we had. We can kind of get some early learnings, get the word out, all that. We actually sold product in Erwan. And I remember going into the store in the early days and like doing demos, actually sampling the product myself and it all literally took, I remember, like the very first time I did a demo in Erwan. I realized that like, I think I was there for like four hours. And in the four hours, probably interacted with, I don't know, call it 200 people. Guess how many of the 200 people were in the market for baby food, like had a kid that was between the ages of like four months and 10 months of age. I'm going to go 10%. Like far, far fewer, far fewer. I mean, like a handful of people the entire time. So let's say there were five people that were in the market for baby food. I think only two of the five actually, all five were interested. Two of the five, I convinced to buy it and they bought like one. The message, like even for people that maybe like have older kids or there were like some, some pregnant people there, like the response was great. They were like, this is awesome. I wish I had this, you know, whenever, whenever my kids were young or like, whenever I have kids, like, I'm going to buy this, but we could do demos all day long. Yeah, wrong audience, the wrong audience. It's just the wrong audience. It's such a narrow audience. And so the common theme from everyone that we talk to, not just at Erwan, but just in general, having conversations with, with parents, it was always very clear that what you feed your kid, especially for their first bite to food, it's a highly considered purchase. There's a lot of emotion involved. Like it's a milestone in, in your life as a parent and your kid's life. And that is not something that this isn't like just going into Erwan and saying this bag of snacks looks cool. I'm going to try it. Or like this flavor of kombucha sounds interesting. I'm going to give it a try. This is food for your kid for the first time. And it's like, I've never heard of this brand. What is this brand? What is, what is fresh baby food even? And so what was clear to me. So we've got a very specific narrow audience that we're targeting. One, two, parents do their homework. They do, they ask their pediatrician. They ask their friends. They do research around these types of decisions. And so where does that research occur? Often online and increasingly so online. So if the five people or the 10 people we interact with at Erwan that are in our target market or in certain name of retailer in our target market, if the majority of them are going to go online and actually search fresh baby food, search little spoon, look up, you know, understand what they're buying and do their research, like why do we even need the retail in the first place? Let's own the game online. Let's be the first thing that comes up when they search for fresh baby food. We will be it as a digitally native brand. If we do our jobs right, we should be the first, second and third thing that comes up and we should be delivering them the content that they need to make an informed decision. So it's interesting. So the story starts with we went CPG, Whole Foods cancels our order. Then we go to D2C and then we try to figure out a way to get people to try it. That doesn't work out, but the signals tell you something else, right? And so the signals there where a parent would never purchase this way anyway. And because you're not a parent, maybe that naivety leads you into a direction to go, let's see, and then it somehow strengthens the whole path. It's really interesting that, you know, it's great. Like you're able to, what some people might be thinking is worst case scenario or failure is actually steering you and the clearest path to success and you're able to take that, which I think is great, you know, instead of being upset or dismiss, were you raising capital at this time or what did that look like? We had raised a small amount of capital, like a group of angels. I actually, funny enough, one of them I met at Expo West. So the Expo West was open the door to this one particular investor who had a lot of experience building brands in CPG specifically and had like tons of retail relationships. He invested in Little Spoon not only because, of course, he saw the broader opportunity in the market, but he invested in Little Spoon because he saw the opportunity in retail. And alongside him, we raised from some additional folks that also bought into the idea of Little Spoon, being a retail brand. And so I'm not going to lie, there were quite a few and they would acknowledge still conversations in those, especially around that time and even after we launched you to see where it was always like, all right, well, when are you going to get into retail? We got to get into retail. That's the business. That's the business we invested in. How in the world could you build this business online? And it was just such a foreign concept to them. They just like literally could not wrap their heads around it. And what would you say in those moments? So you have, because I totally get it, but what are you saying to them as the entrepreneur? I'm saying that this is in my, I believe this is the best path for us. And by the way, I was saying there could have been an opportunity for us in retail. We absolutely could have gone that direction. I still think we could have built a really great brand, but it wouldn't be what it is today. And I have like tons of thoughts as to why D2C brands have really almost like an unfair advantage over conventional kind of retail or CPG brands as it relates to not only just like the value that you create as you alluded to earlier, but just the, this connection that you have with your customers, this understanding that you have of their needs and the ability to be nimble, to be able to launch things quickly, discontinue things quickly, try stuff out, experiment, have very clean data, you can do controlled experiments in a way that you just cannot, you just simply can't do if you're selling in retail. So it's not to say that's not a good business. There are many, many people who have built, you know, massive, very successful, iconic brands and businesses strictly that way. But I felt based on everything that I knew, I felt quite, quite confident that the best way to build this business was direct to consumer and the other thing to keep in mind is that at the time we were just baby food, but where could you sell a refrigerated, you know, fresh, perishable baby food in the grocery store? Not in the baby food aisle. There's no refrigerators in there. And so it was sort of like, do we try to convince the retailers to put refrigerators in the aisle? We could. In fact, we did. That was going to be the plan and we actually, we still own some refrigerators from back in the day that we never had them using. For people listening to, I think if you go into CPG, at some point you might get to hold into the retailers, right? And so the retailers have their own set of data also and so they're always trying new products or they might push you in a direction that you might not feel comfortable with. And so what ends up happening is you as the entrepreneur who is building this future that you believe should exist, sometimes you have to enter into this bucket what the retailer puts you in, which can create a little bit of friction but also might not be the best for your brand or your company. And so by going to DC, you sort of own the whole thing, share a little bit more challenging, but especially with a perishable product. I know, I mean, I'm a startup investor. There's a couple, obviously emergency board meetings we had during COVID and then over the last year, but I remember like during COVID, it was like America had had a whole new relationship with the freezer section, right? And it was this brand new thing. And so there was some opportunity in that. I think that's less than at the time, but if you were in frozen, it was okay during COVID because everyone was buying an extra freezer to stock food and whatever. But generally speaking, totally difficult. And I don't think anyone's going to go to find baby food in the freezer section. It's just not natural behavior for humans today. No, not in the freezer section, not in the dairy section, not in the produce section. And if you want to invest in the physical equipment to put in the baby food aisle and deal with timelines and modifying shelves and all that type of stuff, good luck because in that same time period, I think you could build and we build a pretty sizable business online. So yeah, both are hard. Just different sets of challenges, right? And so where is the company today? I know you raised the series B, it looks like. Congratulations to you. That's huge. Thank you. Probably gives you a little bit more breathing room. Where is it today? What are you guys working on? What's the next hurdle for that you see sort of or the next opportunity that you see for the company? So where we are today, we obviously going, you know, as I said, we started with the baby food, just like these eight or 10 excuse of pure a baby food. We now have six different product categories, including our baby blends. We've got like, I think close to 50 within that line. Now we have a line called biteables, which are little like cut to size finger foods, pieces of foods for kids. Is it this? Is it the lunches? That's lunches. That's after. Yeah, that's after. So, so it goes baby blends, right? First bites, purees, that's like baby infant stage toddlers, kind of graduate into our biteables, which are these like little, little finger foods. Like they're all, you know, kind of cut to size, like tiny little pieces that kids can pick up, like learn to chew, develop hand-eye coordination and kind of transition from pure to our next product line, which is our plates. Those are, that's what you had a second ago. I have one here. Beautiful plate. There it is. That is, that is a plate. Yeah. Our producer, Nick had two of these for lunch here. He loves them. Nice. Nice. Yeah. So we've got a full menu, full menu of the plates and then we have a line of smoothies, which you were having that's in the, in the little pouches. Those are cold pressed and organic. And then we've got, and then most recently, just in the last like two months, we launched our luncheers, which is of course, you could say a healthy take on munchables. Build it yourself, lunch kits. We've got alongside the luncheers, we launched as well a full set of snacks. Well, did you get our snacks? Did you get our snacks? This guy? Oh, yeah. So we got the dipsters. We've got a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So we've got like those are dipsters. That's basically our take on Dunkaroos, right? Classic, nostalgic kids food. Just better, healthier, cleaner. So we, for example, that dip, like as opposed to the first ingredient being sugar, our first ingredient is oats. It's like an oat based butter, right? And we've got veggies hidden in there. That's kind of the philosophy with everything that we do. It's going to be something that your kid loves. It's a like familiar classic kids food. Just elevated, right? Just extra nutrition. Like our chicken nuggets are a good example. They've got, looks like a chicken nugget, tastes like a chicken nugget. Kids love it. Just like a chicken nugget. Adults do, by the way, but, but we've got chia seeds in the breading, veggies. We've got like 50% vegetable content hidden inside. You wouldn't know it, but it's grounding with the chicken. It's just like, again, delivers on the taste and the nostalgia and sort of the fun aspect that the kids want. I mean, the kid has to eat it. That's like, if the kid doesn't eat it and love it, so it's both satisfying that need, doesn't matter. And then also making the parent feel good. They know they're giving their kid the best option out there. And obviously every parent wants the best for their kid. That's the new world we live in. So back in the day, like when we, well, when I grew up, maybe you, I don't know. And if your mother or father put something in front of you, you kind of had to eat it. You didn't really have a choice. Today, there's a little bit more. Let's make sure, let's make sure Ben likes it. I remember my mom, she used to put fish oil and, or like beets, she used to like hide these two items in like everything. And I didn't know until I was probably like 14 and saw her do it. Interesting. I feel like those are, those are hard ones to sneak in. I know. I know. Sometimes I'd be like, oh, it tastes a little off. She's like, I added a special thing or, you know, it was interesting that she would try to hide things. And so, could us too for doing that. I want to, let's close on this cause I'm just curious. And so I think, I think like as an entrepreneur myself, I always thought when I have children, it would bring me a visual into a whole nother world and a whole nother set of challenges that I would probably start a company solving something I would learn during that time chapter of my life. You have done that without any children. And so what is it? Do you, do you hold out that hope? Do you think maybe in the event you do have kids, if you want them that it makes you a totally reframe how you view little spoon or, or even make you want to even go further into it. Maybe, maybe we go a little spoon with some toys or what, you know, how do you think about that? Obviously predicting the future is difficult, but how do you think about that for yourself personally? I definitely want to have kids. I couldn't imagine. I feel like I have my hands full now. I just, you know, running this business and growing this business and we kind of joke that we've got, you know, tens of thousands of kids that we're indirectly responsible for here. But, you know, I think certainly it would change my perspective of having kids. I, I would definitely say I, I over index on knowledge of, you know, kids related topics, things related to parenthood because we hear it from our customers all the time. Again, as, as directing into a brand as having this like this, this one-to-one relationship with our customers. I mean, the early days when a customer contacted us, like it was me responding, co-founder responding, like we were, all of us were living and breathing it. We still are just in a, you know, obviously slightly removed from those front lines of course today, but, but we are so connected to our customer, so in tune with their needs, which is what has really enabled us, I think to build a brand as, you know, effectively as we have because we are constantly listening to our customers and developing, you know, products that address their needs. We're developing content that speaks to the questions that they have and really trying to engage with our community in a way that definitely transcends the typical boundary of like a kind of transactional relationship that, you know, people have with, with companies. So I guess going back to me, I would say I will go in eyes wide open to this parenting journey because I feel like just indirectly I am just so acutely aware of all these things that like many people probably who enter parenthood just have to figure out for themselves. And so I'm sure there will be plenty of surprises at the time, but I would say definitely feel like I have a bit of a leg up to say the least when it comes to starting a family. Well, Ben, thanks for coming and sharing your story. I really appreciate it. I like the, you have a really interesting way of dissecting what I think most people can see as challenges into almost a clear path to success, which is, which is kudos to you and your company. LittleSpoon.com, we're fans, our producers a fan. I'm going to give my nephews some of the deliciousness that we have here and I'm sure there'll be a customer for you very soon. Thank you so much. Thank you, Diego. Really appreciate it. Yeah, great conversation. Thanks. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, share with your friends, your family, or anyone you might think might benefit from the conversation we've had today. And if you haven't already, please take a moment to leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. 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