 This is Startup Store Front, canned octopus, mussels, and squid. In Europe, canned seafood is a delicacy, but here in North America, consumers don't eat as much canned fish. As a matter of fact, most people only know of canned tuna, and that's it. Scout is a craft seafood company that is bringing this tradition back to the North American table. They can lobster, trout, and mussels and take it from the Startup Store Front team. Tastes delicious. Today, we're talking with Adam Bent, the co-founder of Scout. We discuss, why tuna is the number one canned fish in the United States? How kelp became the new kale? Why every major seafood brand is being forced to change how they fish. All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Adam from Scout. Thanks for joining. For people who don't know, what does your company do? Thanks, Diego, for having me. Well, we're a craft cannery. Right now, we're focused on trying to get Americans to eat a broader variety of seafood. We started with canning it, so putting fish in a tin and growing it from there. The reason I wanted to talk to you is because we got an email from someone on your team, and I was like, canned fish. Is this the thing? It made me really curious. You guys had sent us samples, and we had the lobster one. I had the lobster one, I should say. The salmon, the mussels. The salmon one, the mussels, and the tuna. I had the lobster one because I thought it was delicious. I thought, are there people like me that have an adversion to the idea of canned seafood? Obviously, everyone knows canned tuna. I think we all grew up with that. But it was like, can there be a company that exists that has canned tuna and some of these other products? It was actually really delicious. I'm glad you think so. I say actually, which is shocking in some way. It's like you are a real person, putting real time into growing this real business, and it's obviously working. To me, it's like, wow, I really want to chat with this person about how did you get to the point of making it so good? Even just going down the road of why this problem? What did you see in aquaculture or in the fishing environment that you said, there's an opportunity here in the canning space for something to take off? What was the thing? Most emerging CPG categories as young brands, we're coming in typically mission-based and we're trying to affect change in the system by offering better products, better or better for you, usually better for the planet and actually stand for something and seafood was this white space that didn't have really any innovation happening in it. If I asked you what your favorite seafood brand was, now that it's out, what is your favorite seafood brand? It doesn't exist. It's not something that comes to mind, right? But protein bars, the RTDs, the Auroboros we have in front of us right now, a chocolate bar, ice cream, everybody has favorite brands and multi-product categories, but seafood was this outlier that didn't really have any brand affinity with customers. And then when I looked at... True, very true. Okay. I like it. And then when you look at the brands that serve the category, can I name some of them? Like Bumblebee, Chicken of the Sea, Starkis, these are billion-dollar companies, right? Legacy companies. Yeah, they've been around for a while. Big time. And I mean, all of them have moved most of the operations offshore and a lot of them are involved in supply chain practices that are not honoring people on planet and are profiting immensely from oceans and waterways, but not really doing anything to connect consumers back to ocean health or climate action or making sense of the ocean and let alone trying to get consumers to eat a broader variety of seafood. We have mass consumption of chicken, beef, and pork on land. We have shrimp, tuna, and salmon as the sea versions of that, right? So we got to get consumers to eat a broader variety of seafood. It's actually a function of helping to protect our oceans and waterways so we can expand the palette and the space. That makes a lot of sense. Also, a huge blind spot for these companies in some way, which is interesting. And then what is your first step in doing this? And so do you go, okay, let's just make a tuna to compete, or do you go, no, we got to go like a CPG company that knows what they're doing. Let's have a line. Let's have four, five products that we can push in the market and sort of release at the same time. What's the, what's that first step look like? When we launched, we didn't set out to even do tuna. We now have tuna and I'll get to that, but we really wanted to showcase the variety of product species that you could consume. So we initially launched with trout, mussels and lobster. Okay, you have a mollusk, a crustacean and a finfish, two of which are aquaculture farmed in different ways and one of which is wild caught. And it really showcases the biodiversity that exists in seafood, what we could be eating. What we found out as a year and a half kind of went in post launch, it was actually necessary for us to bring tuna to market because we're kind of shooting ourselves on the foot. If you want to get more people to trust the brand and try new products, we got to meet them where they're at with what they know. And then we all grew up eating can tuna. It's a bread basket item, right? It's like milk and bread and cheese and it's something that's ubiquitous in the American household. And you don't even really think of the brand behind it. It's just there. Yeah, I didn't know it was bumblebee until we were actually talking about it. Until you said it. And I was like, oh, yeah, I remember that now. And folks shop it on price primarily and that's the way the retailers have thought of it. It's a loss leader in store, it's, you know, profits and sense. And it's really been built on trying to offer the cheapest product, not necessarily the most responsible product. But if you flip on over to Europe, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France, canned seafood or tin fish is like charcuterie wine and cheese. It's all about the craft of preservation, way more products being offered from, you know, artisanal manufacturers that have high degrees of quality and oils and herbs and spice blends and packaging. And it's not treated as something cheap and cheerful that you drown in mayo and then put the two pieces of bread. Now I sound really, or I feel really dumb. And so it sounds like because Europe is already doing this or at some point maybe has mastered this, is it difficult to get the taste right? It is, yeah, especially for. Because it's sitting there, right? It's like in a can for a while and so things can happen in the can. Yeah, it's at room temp, generally. And so it can't be that straightforward. One of the beautiful things about fish is like the natural oils that exist in the product make it really great for preservation. And it can actually kind of highlight and bring out new flavors and textures. And with some maturity and some aging, a product can transform. We all like to eat some sushi or like cook fish filet at a restaurant. And canned fish is just a similar, sorry, it's a different, it's a different way, even though it's the same species to enjoy seafood. There's some texture and flavor profiles that you can get from the method of preservation that don't exist in consuming, you know, cooked product that's just plated. And every seafood species is different. I mean, what you have to play around with to make a muscle taste good and it's very different from a salmon or tuna level on a lobster. So there's a lot of product development that goes behind time and temperature. And then we have the added complexity of, you know, the FDA or CFIA, putting a lot of controls on these things because you can make people really sick from, from canning fish without proper oversight. So there's a lot of limitations that we have in Europe, way more relaxed. Like you can cook at a lower temperature, a lot less time. You can get a higher quality product in other countries that are allowed to import here, but with domestic production in Canada and the US, we have a lot more rules. So creatively, we want to do a ton, but we do have really kind of critical control factors that we have to work within. With tuna, we, we've all heard about overfishing of tuna populations in the world and also with lobster. I know that the price of lobster has pretty much skyrocketed over the past like couple of years or whatever. And like you said, like the tuna is like the meeting people where they are in the lobster is like the way to like get them to recognize the brand as a whole. With those two items being kind of on the surface, difficult to get to, or at least like provided a value. What other fish on your repertoire is kind of like the, the one that you're trying to push people towards the one that maybe they're not familiar with and what makes it that way. So maybe I'll circle back to the example of those bigger brands. Right. Think about the, the species that those companies offer. It's like 50 skews plus of just tuna. None of them have bothered to use their vast marketing resources to try to popularize other species, because they'd rather pump out the fiftieth skew of tuna and a new flavor than trying to actually get adoption from, from consumers and trying new species. And it's, it's based on profit. It's what's going to drive the most amount of sales. We've taken a different approach and, you know, we're constantly looking at data and trying to figure out what species make sense to bring to market that have enough familiarity to it's called the average consumer, but are not so unknown that they're never going to buy it. And then we won't exist as a company. So it's a sweet spot for us of trying to make sure that we have the right amounts of products that are familiar, like a tuna, something that you typically might have going to the east coast, like a lobster boil and you're remembering a trip with your family to Maine or something. And you're going to recognize a lobster as a celebratory type of premium product. And then trout has, you know, some, some familiarity. It's something you see on menus and you probably had it a few times in your life. So it's, it's as simple as that, even with just kind of anecdotally, what are people going to be comfortable with using a bit of data. And then once we see something working with those early adopter, like very foodie forward consumers that live in New York and LA and Chicago that are exposed to all this culinary juice all the time, you can see what might have some legs to actually bring to the mass market. And right now that, that product is trout is kind of a first great example of that. We are one of the only 10 trout products that you could find in the market when we started. And that has been well received and now works in mass retail. So the trout is farmed in Idaho, should I get into the full production of the trout? Sure, yeah, yeah, let's do it. It's farmed in Idaho from natural spring, like aquifers that are flowing through these farms. It's actually the natural, just like flows of currents that are going through these farms and then there's outflow, the water being filtered. The, the trout are not crowded. There's no antibiotic use at all. And they're a great shining example of a sustainable seafood product that's farmed. And it's very scalable for us because the inputs are controlled and we can get a static price on that. Unlike lobster, which is wild caught, fishers are going out there with traps, they're laying traps with bait. They got to leave them there for a little while, go back out, manually pull them into their boats. It's extremely labor intensive and mother nature is making the decisions there if there's going to be an abundant year or not. And there's all kinds of macroeconomic factors globally with the popularity of lobster in China on New Year's as an example that can skyrocket the price. So there's variables in wild caught, there's more controlables in aquaculture and we've course focused on the responsibly farmed raised species. Do you guys own the farm as well? No, no, no, we don't own any of our farms and we do not own our own canneries. We find great partners that are experts in production and see for cultivation or fishers and they work with them and become a function of their sales and marketing. Got it. So it's very much like a very CPG approach in that. We like to at one point. Yeah, yeah, that's a lot of work. It's a different thing. Tens and tens of millions to get a cannery up and running. Who is your customer or even who's the early adopter? So you mentioned foodies, maybe chefs, but then at some point, who is the mass market that's purchasing these? You know, that's what we're trying to figure out right now. We're in this interesting transition as a company from having served that foodie forward, early adopter consumer that loves to eat out, loves to try new foods, isn't scared to try a wide variety of seafood, you know, really actually enjoys trying new things and is health and wellness focused and cares about supply chain and ethics. And that's a customer base that we serve very, very well today. It's how our company started and they have embraced the brand, but translating that now with our higher prices, our fair wages, our own production, our domestic sourcing, all of that. It makes our products two, three, four, sometimes five times more than a commodity product where there's a lot of hitting costs are not being paid there. So when we when we have a tune of product, that's five ninety nine to seven ninety nine, and you're comparing that product on shelf at one to two dollars, the average consumer, somebody who doesn't have the same foodie cultural exposure is going to have absolute sticker shock and be like, you guys are crazy. But then they taste the product like you did. They notice a substantial difference in quality. And if they were to dive into a brand a bit more, they would see all of our commitments around responsible sourcing and manufacturing and humans in our supply chain, taking care of that. And that's something we've been able to have tight controls on because up until now we've been entirely in Canada in the U.S. And this is the first year now that we're now venturing into production in Mexico and starting to go a little more international to look at our unit economics and figuring out pricing. So it's it's a journey and we want to be able to offer products affordably, but that doesn't mean making sacrifices around quality or human rights or supply chain. So it's it's it's a difficult balance. When you when you think about or even market your product in terms of like, how do you want people to consume it? Do you want them to consume it? Like I buy the salmon and then I maybe make rice or something at home and then I just place it on the plate at the end. Do you like, how do you envision and specifically in your head? How do you envision like each each one? Because I have my vision on the team. Like to say open and eat, like it's cooked. Yeah, we've already we've already done the work for you to make it taste good. It's cut. Yeah. I don't have to skin it or bone it or add anything to open the can. It's an awesome protein addition to a meal. That is literally seconds to open in place. So if you're making a quick rice bowl or you have a salad that you throw in together, even just a sandwich pasta, that's kind of quick basis, then scale products or any can see food product are such a quick and easy protein that's already cooked and adds great nutritional density to your meal. Do you even imagine like, again, we're just, we can do this all day. But Nadal ends a tennis match. LeBron ends a game. Locker room. Fuck the protein cracks. Oh, yeah. We're going right to the high time, big time omega threes. Because it makes sense, right? The snack is our launching, which launched January. Okay. It's 30 grams of protein each snack kit. What is a snack kit? So I buy a snack kit. What am I looking at? So you have a little pint shaped like an ice cream or a soup container. Inside there's a can of yellowfin tuna and organic olive oil. And then you get a little biodegradable spork. And then we've created these textural blends, crunchy toppers. We have a chili criss-crunchy topper, Zatar crunchy topper and a chili jalapeno crunchy topper. And it's different seeds, herbs, nuts, dried fruits. And it's 30 grams of protein with a ton of omegas, vitamin A, B, E, selenium. There's great, great nutritional density of a meal that you get. And it's not a processed product like a bar or a protein beverage and you're getting 30 grams of protein, which is it's more than a bag of jerky. It's more than most products. Yeah, that's amazing. And is this for kids that you're like it's for LeBron. It's for LeBron. It's a snack kit for anyone. And what does that cost? Ten bucks? Ten ninety nine. Five ninety nine. Five ninety nine. And double the price. Enter Mexico. Yeah, right. That makes sense. The commodity snack kits are usually like tuna and emulsified ingredients to mimic like a tuna salad. So it's like a mayo base. And you've probably seen them with Ritz crackers. Sure. And they retail for like a dollar to three dollars. OK. And there's there's usually less than 15 grams of protein in those. When it comes to like when I think about your investor deck, I can kind of piece it together by just chat now. But I can be doing by chatting with you now. But when you're talking to investors, tell me the dumbest questions you're getting from them, right? They're like they're probably like Adam, Adam of all the things. Why? Like I'm sure that's one question. A second question toward the end is almost like I get it. Like I get it. I see the problem. But more so I see the opportunity. If you're right, this is actually pretty massive and has been a huge blind spot for these massive conglomerates. Big time. And so I like that. So I'm interested in those two things. But what what questions are you getting that you know you might argue are like really dumb. The biggest challenge that we had through developing trust and credibility for this category with CPG investors was just like education on oceans as a food system. It's like the wake of call that I always try to bring forward in my meetings and these discussions. It's like 70 percent of our planet is covered in water. It is the most regenerative food system that we have on earth. There's zero inputs. We don't require the same amount of water irrigation, fertilizer use, seeds, labor. It literally makes us free food, free plant food, free. It's an abundant food system and it's literally the most regenerative. But it's it's been pillaged by big commercial brands and big commercial fisheries that haven't really figured out how to have it a balanced food system just like we have problems on land. So I'm constantly trying to educate around the opportunity that the emerging consumer really does care about, you know, the food system and ethics. So pointing to a lot of kind of this like change in mentality that we have that people will pay more and more attention to where their food is coming from and who's making it and how and that there's this kind of huge white space has been left on the table by some of these bigger brands. How do you do that? So so I have a friend who's in private equity and all they do is buy farms. And so to me, if I'm you with the deck, I can say, look, look at the private equity interest in just farming, like fish farming, right? And we can see we can see that really simply where maybe 20 years ago, there was zero interest and over the course of the last maybe 10 years, that interest as from a dollar perspective has just skyrocketed. Right. And so we know if private equity is paying attention, the trend, we know the trend sort of right, we could be like, look, there's real interest, there's real money already happening. We're just helping them, these these existing groups that are already buying these farms, we're partnering with them in an infrastructure they're building. I'm just thinking about this like from a purely like there's other forces that work to not just not just the consumer that's getting more intelligent, but also aquaculture farming really kind of getting a lot of dollars placed on the investment side. I mean, they love aquaculture. It's real estate. That's a big one. Right. It's especially if it's land based, it's massive real estate. And then they look at it just like land based farming, they can apply the same kind of unit economics and modeling to aquaculture. And it's juicy, it looks attractive for investment. Truthfully, they're so figuring a lot out in aquaculture. There are some hard operations that are profitable. They're the ones that are typically cut in corners and there's the hidden costs that we're that we're all going to pay for later on, like feed inputs that are unsustainable, where we're harvesting more wild marine ingredients to feed fish that are farmed and we're not getting as much of a yield back. So that feed input ratio is thrown off completely. Those are those are one of the big issues there in aquaculture. But I think seafood overall has had an older generation that have really run the industry. The patriarchy really old school, often very blue collar, pretty rough. It's a hard job. And it's very male dominated. The new Bedford fishing industry. Yeah, man. Fucking new Bedford. And then it's a killer like big old system to come up against. But now a lot of these fishing businesses, processors, like vessel rights, all of that are being kind of passed down to younger generations. There's new blood in the industry. There's people who are coming with mentality that we all have, just to do better work and to protect our oceans and waterways. So there's a big generational shift and there's just this aha moment that a lot of consumers are having around ocean based foods. We're looking to reduce chicken, beef, pork, land based meats, not to get rid of them for a lot of people, but to reduce and to diversify our reading, we're increasing our plant based consumption. And we're all trying to also be more responsible to with the types of seafoods that we're eating. Seafoods are great protein. It's nutritionally more dense than a lot of those land based protein. So there's a moment like, you know, you've probably heard the comparison that that kelp is like the new kale, right? Who made kale cool? Nobody knows. It was the most genius marketing campaign where like suddenly this green vegetable that went as a garnish became the superfood that's used across menus everywhere. That same kind of thing is happening with kelp right now. And I think we'll continue to see other ocean based ingredients get that kind of attention. Yeah. What do you focus on from just a marketing perspective and getting the word out? Because there's so many avenues you could go, right? You could go foodie. You could go into like the will consumer. You could go I can think of like 20 viral moments where you open up a fake restaurant pop up and just serve people canned fish. And they're just like, oh, this is exquisite, you know, and you have like a French chef walking around giving them amazing cocktails. And you can have all these like different ways of creating or just getting people to think about the product in a different way. But how do you know, what do you guys focus on from just a marketing perspective and getting getting this out there? You know, this is a great question because we're still figuring it out. It's hard. It's hard. You have so much to choose from. And and seafood marketing, if we think about it, there's so much even just at a species level. I can't offer the same campaign strategy or messaging to make you want to try lobster in a tin as I can for tuna, as I can for trout, or a sablefish or a razor clam later on. When we talk about hundreds of species, we can be consuming each other own kind of education and intricacies that that need to be worked on. As a brand, though, more holistically, like kind of stepping out of that and just trying to more broad swath to get consumers to eat more seafood were in a constant spirit of experimentation. Like I said, those foodie forwards or the adopters, like the pop ups, the cool boutiques that were in, you know, the events that we're doing, the brand collaborations, that's all table stakes. And we are talking to folks in New York and L.A. very, very clearly. I want like the soccer mom in Utah to want to try our product. I want families who want to have more nutrition access. Jessica Simpson, great spokesperson. Jessica Simpson. I'm here in Jessica Simpson. Go call me. You know, if I may, when I when I think of this marketing problem for you, I actually go back to another episode. We had Haven's Kitchen on the podcast, and they were making all these incredible sauces, but they realized that the problem was that no one really knew what to do with them. And so they ended up becoming like this content arm within themselves where they showed people what recipes they could do. And you already talked about it a little bit, like where your ideal use is just like crack open the can and just eat it. But I feel like you're especially with your co-founder being a chef, I feel like you're missing an opportunity there to really showcase all of the things that you can do with these different types of fish, like literally show people. If you're not used to trout per se or whatever other seafood options that they aren't typically consuming on a weekly basis, I feel like by showing them the recipes, by showing them like this is what you can get at your grocery store that will pair with this. And here's how you can make this into a quick weeknight meal that the whole family will enjoy. I feel like that could go a long way. And just becoming that content arm will kind of serve not only like to grow your company, but also to promote the sustainable fishing practices that you are advocating for. Yeah, meal time is a big part of the whole strategy. And it's like translating what we've created as a brand in our earliest stages, where we are more specialty and more premium and not trying to make that makes sense with a more accessible price points and product lines. That's the hard part. To some extent, probably, yeah. And there's a lot of brands you'll see out there, including in our category, who like our like hot drop model, super sexy on D to C, like super content driven. But, you know, we're talking about trying to get to 10,000 shelves over the next over the next two years. And, you know, we can do vanity projects and create beautiful content that has amazing table stakes, but that's not going to make the average. Let's call them sometimes middle America consumer to want to go and try the product. They require different messaging, but we don't want to sell out either. We're not a corporate brand. We don't want to just go and repeat on what corporate brands have done to try to get adoption for their products. And that mealtime planning, that open and eat, the ease of use, the high protein, the nutritious, the responsible supply chain, we're still figuring out how to bundle that all up and try to share that on shelf. Right now it's our packaging that tells that story the most. Somebody in the middle of the States that's going to pick a product up in Nebraska is only going to pick it up probably because the packaging looks cool. But then we might get 10 seconds of their attention and they're going to read, oh, well, it's actually from Alaska. And they're going to turn around the packaging and they're going to hear more about our brand story and figure out that we're a B Corp, 1% for the planet member. And then we're starting to create that connection. So it starts with the packaging and then we can try to funnel them into our kind of digital ecosystem of storytelling and really focused on taste of place. When we started, we wanted to just source from Canada and the United States because like everybody trusts that it's our supply chain is domestic, it's local, it's regional, we can work with chefs all over. But the reality is people don't want to pay that price. So we know that there are amazing fisheries, aquaculture partners and whole fishing communities globally that have really great labor standards and want business. And we can do a great job at finding those partners in those regions and then sharing their stories and their supply chains, the taste of place of a sardine from Portugal, the taste of place from Yellowfin, Mexican tuna that we're sourcing for our snack kits. Are you where are you guys in the grocery store? And so where do they, where do they put your, where would you like to be? They're sticking us in Central Store in the K&C Food Set right now. Okay. And we've had some early wins of getting merchandise in specialty meat and cheese or deli and also the seafood counter. So being on the store periphery is a lot harder to win that space. And it takes a lot of data or a lot of dollars to be able to win that space than Central Store. So just by the nature of policies, we get shoved in with canned seafood, but we are constantly doing submissions to retailers and other departments and trying to pay for secondary placements. And again, we're still figuring this out, but early data shows us that we actually sell more among fresh food than we do in Central Store. Yeah. That's the fun thing about what you're doing because it makes total sense that that would work. But then it's the fight of getting there, right? Or just like convincing them to understand that your product is different and it doesn't, it doesn't fit the same, the same mold. But it might look like that or, you know, do you guys have like a, just an e-commerce arm? So if someone signs up as their subscription model, or they can just get all this wonderful product. We've tried all that too. I mean, we were super hot on DTC for like our first eight months and we sold a ton. Yeah. Chai of a million. And the novelty and the newness that we are bringing really drove that. But then eventually, like no one's going to buy lobster tins on a subscription for three years. I would love them too. If anybody's listening, that would be, that would be amazing. But, you know, once they've tried us, then they kind of get this exposure to the category. And our category is actually like buying wine and cheese and meats. Like you're, you'd like to try new things from new regions and new places and new brands. And it's almost impossible for us to keep that level of an innovation pipeline of new products coming at our stage. So we're trying to find that sweet spot. But when you merchandise our smoked albacore, right, which is cured overnight in salt and sugar, it's it's rinsed rinsed off the next day, then it's air dried, then it's hand cut, then it's packed with organic olive oil after being smoked with Canadian hardwood. It's a very manual artisanal process and that retails for $9.99. When you have like duck prosciutto at like $15.99 and then that smoked albacore tint is beside it, the consumer starts to associate that product with something that is more premium and more of an artisan product, but that is not scalable to mass grocery either. So what part of our business is going to be specialty and premium and that kind of brand building foodie forward component versus what we can scale into mass retail to try to expand our mission of more responsible seafood and nutritional equity in people's homes. Are there like grocery stores that align with your mission better than others that you know, obviously there probably are, but is there like a, I don't know, what are some of the top grocers that you'd like to be with? Well, we're we're we're about to launch globally with Whole Foods after working with them for the last two years in the Northeast. Very nice. So that's it's a big one. And they have the most, if Kerry is listening from the seafood policy team at Whole Foods, they have very, very, very strict policies and for good reason. Don't agree with all of them. And I really respect the work that they do. And it's been phenomenal to kind of see them get on board with us and our mission and help us grow. And they're a bit of a forcing function to other bigger grocery arms like Albertson Safeway, Kroger. A lot of them now are really wading into this ESG sustainability, diversity inclusion programs. And that is a bit of a DEI. We were just talking about this earlier. Yeah, it's a backdoor for us. Sure. You know, we're female founded, I'm a queer founder. We'll use every chip that we have to get into retailers. We have to in this marketplace, highly competitive. And so there's there's some great programs like that. But on the seafood sustainability side, we also find ourselves often doing a lot of the education for these bigger corporate retail buyers. So it's an interesting place to be developing the programs. They're bringing in some experts, but they're still figuring it out. And if we can be part of that process, do they put you in a different category yet? Are they still lumping you in with the the tuna fishes of the world or do they, you know, are they starting to learn? When I first started pitching to conventional grocery, like big, big grocery, like the stick of shot was out of this world. They were like just dropped. Like they could not believe that people will pay 799 for a can of fish. It's not a dollar a can. No, exactly. And they're just used to seeing that high velocity, cheap and cheerful. Let's keep it moving. Those brands are spending tons on slotting fees. So it's been an uphill battle, man, like to to get the adoption from and the buy-in from these retail buyers to want to support and try to validate that there's consumers looking for higher quality, responsible products in this space. Yeah, but it's working, it seems. It's working. It's working. It's on the marketing front to earlier questions, too. Like this is, I think, going to be a constant struggle. There's a reason why it will be chicken to the sea and star cast and, you know, wild planet have only really pumped out tuna and salmon because it's it's the easier thing to do. Ultimately, it's the easier thing to do. It's what works. It's formulaic and it's what the palate knows here. But we are taking that challenge on but carefully so that we don't overindex and waste resources on trying to popularize something that's not going to work in mass retail. But it's taken us even two years just to figure this out with trout that it's got. It's got fins, got legs to to actually scale into into mass retail. And I think a reason of that is that it doesn't doesn't have a fishy taste. It's actually quite transferable from somebody who's used to the texture of tuna. They try the truck like, oh, this is actually pretty good. And then they get excited that they can try a new species in the category. And, you know, instead of having a tuna salad sandwich, they can have trout with dill and cold pressed sunflower oil. They throw in a bed of greens and more nuts. And it's like a two minute lunch. That's amazing. You just raised a bunch of money. Congrats. Thank you. When it came to closing the round, how difficult was it in sort of this environment with the looming recession, or maybe not difficult at all? I don't know. But you tell me, what was that? Yeah. What is it like? I mean, I'm I'm on a bunch of shareholder meetings for companies we invest in and it doesn't it doesn't feel good. I'll say that much. No, there's really fucking for the entrepreneur. Yeah, it's it's in, you know, I I'm in very close contact with a ton of CPG founders, especially in seafood. We all as emerging seafood founders are very closely connected and communicate a lot. And on top of it being a hard new category to build consensus around in CPG, it's just hard in general for any emerging brand right now. Honestly, if you're a Me Too brand that's making a product the world doesn't need, that's kind of on you. You know, we don't need like CBD infused chips and we don't need like 2000 types of ice cream out there made from fake milk. Like it there's there's all kinds of products that are just unnecessary and are trying to jump on trends and buzziness. We're trying to offer up real nutritional food at an affordable price. It's going to take us some time. And luckily we've had investors that are super mission aligned with us. And I would call the more patient capital and I'm a patient capital, patient, more patient, more patient still want to return. And it's so on it, you know, relatively soon. I like this patient capital where it's not growth at all costs. And as a recovering tech entrepreneur that really worked with a lot of VCs that, you know, fucked up the company and want you to grow and cut corners and just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow and don't really want to navigate the tough times with you. I would say in CPG and especially with our investors there is a little bit more understanding of the supply chain and the complexities and that food systems are slower. So it was we had enough momentum and really great attraction to validate that there's there's really something here. And we got the investment to kind of take scout to that next stage and validate our snack kits. We need to move into more grab and go more affordable products to scale. And that's what we've done after developing these snack kits for the last year and a half. So the raise was primarily around that. But yes, this with the recession, having this bit of an outlook, start to pay attention about a year ago and knew that we would need to have more affordable products if we were going to start to really win shelves with with conventional grocers, which is the bulk of the American marketplace. Yeah. So we had the the foresight. The foresight. Yeah, you were aware enough to know. And our investors supported that. How do you view like even just the future of your industry or the future of fish like in a world maybe 10 years from now? What does it look like to you? Is it is that I go to a restaurant? Is it less fishing? Is it we open up a can of like if I'm at a restaurant and I order a charcuterie board, let's say, is it coming with fish on it from Scout? Seekudery. Seekudery. I like that. Did you try to mark that term yet? We try it. Yeah, it's been in like the public domain for too long, so you can't own the word. I'm going to start adding that seekudery to everything I do. And just yeah, it's elevated. Yeah, I've got some seekudery here. That's what happens. It's a huge use case for our products. And we have our products are used on charcuterie boards all over the place. But how do you do you like the future of the way people in general with fish like the experience fish changing in a meaningful way because of what you're doing or people in your category are doing or just canning in general, aquaculture in general? Yeah, the new brands that are entering the space are all mission driven and they're focused on on trying to bring new species to market. And then that biodiversity that I keep on talking about the established brands, the commodity brands in the space will will most likely just kind of continue business as usual with trying to bring the same species to market. And the whole industry has been built on the most amount of volume at the lowest cost. But we're starting to see species collapse, right? We have the snow crab of like disappeared from parts of Alaska. Yeah, they shut down the whole season. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's that's whole industries collapsing. Those are warehouses closing, those are processors closing, those are those are fishers that can't go out, they're losing their jobs and those big companies that typically profited from these wild fisheries, then suddenly have, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars missing from their balance sheets at the end of the year. So they have to become more climate conscious and climate aware and they have to start paying more attention to what's happening with the oceans as a food system. If they want to have a business model in 10 years. So we're starting to see the more corporate brands in our category and seafood CPG start to adopt a lot of the same initiatives. For the first time ever, or rather when we launched, we were like the only B Corp company in seafood trying to be the responsible player in the space to show bigger brands that you could do better. We're the only one percent for the planet member. We are really driving our MSC certification partnership and we know working specifically with these certified sustainable fisheries, all that started to trickle up now to these bigger brands because they're all realizing. Yeah, they're paying attention. And you know what, if it's a function of marketing, because they want to sell more product, they look at us and they want to jump on the gravy, gravy train, great, then we're doing part of our job. But ultimately, like the oceans are a huge hyper connected food system. And something that happens in Russia has implications in British Columbia and all over the world with the oceans, with currents and with acidity and storms and the whole food web. So that interconnectivity, we're just going to start to feel it more and more and more. And I'm starting to see the associations, the NGOs, the corporate entities start to pay a bit more attention. So I'm hopeful I'm optimistic. And I think low hanging fruit is getting the American consumer to eat a wide variety of seafood and to stop overfishing tuna and to stop over farming salmon. We need to start working on popularizing other species so that we can reduce the stress being put on these farms or these wild fisheries from the same species over and over again. Yeah. So with that said, are you going to like I know you had to get into tuna, but are you looking to eventually move away from it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So with these three snack kits that we're launching, they're tuna. It's what it's what the consumers know with what the grocery buyers know. We don't have to go and advocate for trout and the tin. I mean, we still do that. But the tuna snack kits are that gateway fish. And the hope is that if you try the tuna snack kit, you fall in love with the flavor, the quality of the product and the brand. And you're going to trust us to bring you a new species. So I'd love to see us not even launch really more than another three tuna kits after the next three flavors that we bring to market would be to actually do species expansion. And hopefully that's a winning product format, the convenience, the gravango, the DIY, the texture being brought back in kind of assembling your little snack kit with 3d grams of protein. I love the protein angle is the one that gets me. That's the one because for me, it's like being busy is one thing and but eating right while busy is hard. And so like you're the salmon tin for me was it. It was like, this is it. It's easy and I'm done now. Say, you know, and I can go play tennis. You're converted. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really didn't take much. And then the lobster one for me, I was actually, I made lobster bisque like two nights before and I had bought the lobster. So I was already I already had it. Did you like boil it? Take the show off? No, no, like I get the reason I ask you about the subscription because I have a butcher box subscription. And so this one came with lobster claw and so but it's frozen. And so then I just thought and then I just make the soup. But when I had it in the can in your can, I was like, oh, this is like I could I could have just used that in the you know, the broth. And I was like, that's really interesting. And so then my brain just started going nuts with like because it tasted good. Right. And so it's almost like this thing is a gateway to chefdom in some way for me where it's simple enough. But it's also like a gateway to save time and the nutrition is there. It tastes great, which which I think is everything frankly. And so I just became a believer in the product because when I first got the email, I was like, there's no way this is like, no, I wouldn't be this crazy to go down the road of this. But it tasted amazing. Here I am. No, but I mean, I think that's, you know, it's my ignorance, too, of how hard or challenging this can be or not be. But but Kudos to you for creating a really delicious product. Thank you. We're rooting for you. I mean, it's a tough road ahead. But I think I think directionally correct. Big time. I mean, when Charlotte, my co founder started this with a vision in 2014, it was a side project. And even at that time, we were friends. And and I was looking at her like making canned food cool again. I know that's a hard mission and see foods even harder. But she had that vision in 2014. And we've been working hard over the years to popularize what we're doing and to to make it make sense. This is a great opportunity. That's part of that. And I think we're getting there. There's there's it's a viral thing on TikTok right now, even date fish, tin, tin fish date night on Tuesdays and tons of media are covering it. And it's just a wild thing to see how far we've come in just two years from the pandemic that celebrated pantry cooking again and always fine items, tin fish got its it's kind of halo then. And it's just kind of continued on over the last two years. Well, look, where people find you and buy the product and support you guys and all that good stuff. Tell tell everyone. Yeah, I mean, can head to our own site and then thrive market, which we all love, great, great ecom player, all the whole foods in the country as of as of January, as of April, be able to find us across all the H E B stores. There's not a lot since January or when here in Erwin. Yeah, nice. That's right. Pax there in January. It's a huge and you're the first people I really talked to about it in media wise or a bit more publicly, we're going to be at Nosh live over the next couple of days. We'll talk about it there. But I'm excited about the product format. Well, if we're any indication, if our team is any indication, all it takes is like one bite literally go buy buy some scout at the store, give it a shot, try it. It's it's mind blowing. Honestly, converted us instantaneously, new believers, like I didn't even want to share it. It was so good. I'm glad I had to. Thanks, I don't think you appreciate your time. Thanks for having me today. If you made it this far, I bet you loved the episode. So you should join our YouTube channel membership for only two ninety and a month. This gets you access to one, the whole unabridged conversation. Two, you get the episodes on Monday, one day earlier. Three, you get two additional entries to our giveaways. 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