 All right, welcome to the podcast on today's show. We're talking to Seth from Sweet Fin. Thanks for joining. People who don't know, what does your company do? We sell a lot of fresh, healthy bowls. We are based out of Santa Monica, California. That's where our first location was based out of. About eight years ago, we started, and we are a chef-driven premium poke concept based out of Santa Monica. What made you want to do this thing? Why food? Why fast casual? What did you see in the market where you were like, there's not, what's missing? You saw an opportunity. What was the sort of the first step? Oh man, so growing up, I was just obsessed with food. I was someone that was always in the kitchen, loved to cook, and I was one of the first kids, I feel like my age, that loved the Food Network, and I felt like it was the first person where it was socially acceptable to watch the Food Network. So I just always wanted to do something hospitality. Just love to host people and be in the kitchen and be around my family while we were cooking. And so I graduated college at USC, studied entrepreneurship, and I knew from a business standpoint, I wanted to build a brand in the food world. And from a business kind of perspective, I knew that the fast casual industry was really starting to blow up. What year was this at that time? It was like 2012, 2013, when I started to first think about ideas. Yeah, that's early. Yeah. For the fast casual, okay. Well, we had just come out of the 2008, 2009 recession. Right. And it was really the birth of fast casual. Chipotle was really taking off sweet green, shake shack. I remember Bo Lago in Boston was another, yeah. Anyway, yeah, that's when I was living there. It's all these fast casual places were like popping up everywhere. Yeah, so I saw void in the market. No one, everyone was really doing the same thing. It was like sandwiches, pizza, salads, and burgers. And I wanted to do something that was fresh and innovative. And I'd had poke a bunch of times and growing up in LA, I love sushi. It was just like part of how I would eat. And I also wanted to create a brand that was a little bit healthier than the other options and had 10 different ideas in my head from this different fast casual ideas. And I just kept coming back with my partner to like, how can we scale sushi? How can we do this? It's possible. Someone's gonna do it. It's never been done. And if we do it the right way, it's gonna take off. Was the goal, or at least the mindset was it always to have like a bunch of locations or did you wanna start on one? And then sort of piecemeal it? Like how did you see it from a business perspective in that way? I mean, I originally was like, we're gonna have hundreds of these things. That's what I wanted to do originally. I still wanna do that. I was gonna say, you still can. Yeah, we still will. So to start, we knew we needed to just prove the concept out. No one knew what we were talking about. So like imagine being in your mid-20s, you've never owned a restaurant. You've never really worked in a restaurant. You've never really owned a business. You've like had a bunch of side hustles and then you're pitching investors for this new fast casual restaurant concept. Crazy. Investors don't really know what fast casual is. They like kinda get it. And they don't know what the category is. They don't understand what you're selling. So like we would go to investors and we're like, we're doing poke. Like poke, is that like a Facebook? The Facebook poke? Is that you're doing a social media company? Literally that was like the response to it yet. That's a good question. That's funny. And yeah, that was the one like Facebook was also. I remember the poking. I'm old enough to remember that. Yep. And so we had a bunch of tastings and we brought our chef and we would sit down with people and we'd have them try the product and they were like really understood like this is fresh. This is healthy. It's customizable. It's portable. It really leans into like Asian flavors that were starting to become one. Where would you do it? Just like anywhere like picnic style? No, it was a funny. And I mean there's a bunch of- Are like at your house or something? No, there's a bunch of funny stories. So the way my partnership came about, was my friend Brett and myself from USC. And then we had this goal of having 100 poke shops within the first few years of opening. And so we're putting together a business plan and we quickly realized we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. So Brett was talking to his dad who's in South Africa and his dad's like, listen, you guys need a mentor. You need to like talk to someone who's done this before. So he's like, you should talk to this guy named Alan. He lives in LA. He's a little bit older than you. He's more established in the restaurant industry. So we meet with Alan and we're pitching him on this idea. Alan had been running the food and beverage operations at the W at the time in Westwood. And he's like, I think that's a cool idea. I've never done fast casual before either. So this is gonna be learning for me, but this could be something that we can work on together. So Alan joins and at the time, his chef at the W was a woman named Dakota Weiss who had just finished filming Top Chef. And so we all sit down, we're at the W, we pitched Dakota, Dakota, what do you think about this? And she's like, this is really weird, kind of a serendipitous moment. I've never really heard of Poké until this last week when one of my line cooks was like, hey, we should add Poké to the menu. So maybe this is meant to be. So we decided to all basically become partners, myself, Breton Allen, and then Dakota, I guess was a managing partner at the time. And we formed Sweetfinn. But to go back to your question, like where would we do the tastings? We would have the tastings at the W in Westwood. Nice. But hopefully no one from the W in Westwood is watching this. We would like hide the food costs under the P&L of like the larger restaurant. I love that you're sharing this. So you're like having like all these tastings at the restaurant and no one would know like who are these guys, what are they doing here and why are they always eating like a ton of raw fish. And actually like Dakota hired on some of her cooks and her chefs that were working under her at the hotel and now still like there's some that actually still work for us. That's amazing. So it was a funny time. That's a good story. There's like some hustle in that. There's some scrappiness to it. I have a better story actually now that I'm like going back to that time. So like we're trying to raise money. We have like our first big investor dinner. So like. And how many have you had prior to this? These are like small things like having friends, like we're eating and stuff like nothing like this. Yeah, we're sitting at a table like 30 people. We all, you know, I'm fired up. I'm like trying to get the most important people that I know to like invest in this thing. So we all sit down at the W of course. And Dakota is this is the first time that she's presented the food in front of this many people. Everything that could go wrong kind of went wrong in terms of just like the pacing of the meal is just really long because she had never prepped for that many people and it just kind of going on and on and on. And at the end of the dinner, she was supposed to come out and kind of talk about the inspiration behind the menu and just introduce herself and get people excited. So she comes out. Yeah, I'm like sitting next to like the former CEO of Starbucks like literally everyone I could pull on like this is gonna be amazing. It's not going well. So she comes to the head of the table literally never forget this. I'm sitting next to one of my best friends and she goes, she keeps like clearing her throat clearing her throat. And she goes, I'm so sorry. I want to talk about the menu but my throat is closing up. And I'm just like, what? I'm like, I'm allergic to fish and I've been tasting the food and I'm having an allergic reaction. So my friend next to me like nudges me and he's like, dude, you want me to invest in your fucking fish restaurant and your chef doesn't even eat fish. Like she's allergic to fish and this is the first time I ever heard of this. This is so good. I'm just like, oh my God, this is not good. I can just imagine all the feelings you're doing all over. I was just like, I cannot believe this is happening. This is big. I ended up putting in more money than I wanted to or felt comfortable putting in to get store number one open because we didn't raise it all but it ended up working out okay. That's really good. We're doing something right now where it's like we're doing a three day pop up for this. We're trying to bring like LA's next magic castle. Same thing. And so it's like three nights, all the magicians, all the people, top tier chef, every one of the rooms like head of, you know, head of MGM, head of immersive, head of blah blah blah from like you name the companies all these massive companies. And I'm like looking forward to that moment or I'm like someone's gonna bomb here. Someone's just gonna choke, not show up. I don't know who it's gonna be but it's gonna be a disaster or it's gonna be like 140 degrees a day before and we don't have AC. It never grows as planned. No, and I like can't wait. And it's just gonna be, and I'm just gonna feel all of it and be like yeah, this is how it's gonna go. Well it gets you, you kind of also learn if you have partners like how they deal with stress, how they can adapt to certain situations. Yeah, totally. I freeze. No. It's not easy. I just look around and I'm like, yeah, this makes sense. Here we are again. Yeah. And so then, did any people that were at these days sign up? You know, like the loyal friends invested. And what's the check size you're getting at that point? So the- And how are you calculating how much you need also? That's kind of another, because you're doing two things. It's a business, but it's also like a restaurant. Right, so. Group-ish. Well, so the way we structured the business originally was let's raise money for store number one. And if this goes well, we'll figure that out after. And that's what we did. So we created an LLC. We knew that for store number one, it's gonna cost us $250,000 to build the first store out. We got $50,000 in tenant improvements and for marketing and PR and all of the things. We needed a runway because we didn't wanna be strapped for cash. Let's just say, I think we raised like $465,000. Of that, I think the majority of it, my partner and I put in, maybe like half. Yeah. From like savings that we had. Which is good. That's a good thing. But like, so we opened the first store and now at the time I wasn't used to it, but like everything that could go wrong from a construction standpoint did go wrong. Like things run back order. Like it was in January of like 2015. I'm like, okay, we're opening this week, awesome. The health inspector comes in and he like rips us a new one. Like we had this like hoity-toity like awesome design group come in and they're like, yeah. So in the bathroom, we have like these wood paneled walls that are gonna be etched and carved with these really cool designs. And then the guy comes in and he's like, you can't have wood on the walls. You can't. This needs to be FRP or something. Too much bacteria. Yeah, like all this stuff. I'm like, I didn't know this. That's why we hired you guys to like get this stuff. But like, anyway, the design ended up being great. You know, but the inspector came in and just like ripped us a new one. So he's like, oh, and by the way, I'm like going out of town for six weeks. So I'll see you in early March. We're like, okay, cool. So now we're paying like even more dead rent and not generating any revenue. Before we get into, let's say opening day, why the name Sweetfin, how did you land on the name? I just honestly remember writing down a million words and like being like, this sounds good, that sounds good. I mean, there's like the obvious like kind of sounds like sugarfish. I don't remember at the time thinking that, but I was like, yeah, sounds good. Sweetgreen wasn't around. They were like in DC. I'm like not going to say that I thought about them, but like it was probably some sort of subconscious like, but like I think I thought Sweetfin was a good name because like it was catchy and it was like pretty clear like what we did, the fin was related to seafood and fish and sweet was just kind of like a type of vernacular that we would use in Southern California. Like that's sweet. That's good. Like it was just like something positive. So it just like was positive vibes. And everyone else like Poké didn't exist, but like every Poké concept that like most of them that opened after us was like Poki Doki, Pokiko like the dumbest shitty names you've ever heard. Like Hoki Poki, literally Hoki Poki, that was one. That's pretty bad. It was pretty bad. So I thought like, okay, we did go with the name. Yeah, that worked out. That's smart. A lot of inspiration from different sources. And then what was opening day like? So with the delay, it was like actually a positive thing. It ended up being a positive thing because before we opened, we created these vinyls that went on our windows and it was sweet fin opening soon. And it was two giant photos of these like really delicious looking Poké bowls. And mind you, like we were the, I don't know if I said the story, but like we were the first Poké concept to open outside of Hawaii as like a standalone concept. Like no one knew what this was. People love sushi. And so we were in Santa Monica and crazy enough in 2015, like it was a little bit of a health food desert. There were not a lot of like fresh, healthy places. It was crazy to think about today. Tokaya wasn't there, like sweet green, like all of the fast casuals, Erwan, like no one was there. So we had these like two giant images of these Poké bowls that people would walk by and there's a lot of tech companies around there at the time, they're like, that looks good. That looks good. And so like day one, I'm from LA. I got all my friends, you know, my family and just like we just built a lot of like hype over like basically the year leading up to opening. And I was worried like no one's gonna show up and ends up we crush it out of the gates, like literally hundred person lines down the block. And to the point where we're like, we cannot keep up with this. So we would close between the hours of two to five PM and we'd put a gone fishing sign on the door. So like we could prep and get ready for the night. That's really smart. And so then we had all these, like we didn't, again, we didn't think any of this through. We're like, okay, so we're gonna have these like homemade taro chips and these crispy onion toppings. And it's gonna be like very similar to like what you would get at a sushi restaurant. We didn't have a fryer. So everything we were doing, we were frying on like a tabletop like induction burner. Sure, yeah. So I had someone in the store working the night shift 24 hours a day frying stuff. And then we would fry like food at the W hotel and then like drive it over. And it was just like, but like the first year people couldn't believe how well, like we did almost 4,000 bucks a foot. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. It was like people were like, what? Yeah. And you know, we had a really good product. I thought we built a good brand quickly. We were like really into the community but it was a little bit lucky in that like we were the first concept and then a lot of people came and copied us and a lot of the category really exploded. And so there was a lot of press about it. So like a lot of the food writers were writing about it. And so whenever, anytime there was like an article where there was LA Times or Bon Appetit or GQ and they were talking about this category as a whole we were always getting like the headline photo and the hero image because like they're like, oh yeah, sweet fit. Yeah. So it was helpful from a PR and marketing standpoint. And are you still going back to all the investors that sort of passed them at the beginning and like trying to show them, hey look, we need to move quickly. We're trying to get the blah, blah, blah locations or is that? Well, so we paid back the investors really quickly. They got their preferred return really quickly like everyone's really happy. And so, then we're just kind of trying to figure out like, okay, what's next? So we went and raised another round. How soon after the first one opened? It was like within a year. Okay. We probably could have gone faster. And I actually remember my partner Alan, the guy who's like a little bit, not a little bit, a lot of it at the time, more experienced than us. He's like, guys, don't get used to this. I've opened a lot of restaurants, this is not how it goes. Like we could not screw up. Like everything we did was like, great, great, great, great. And the sales are great. That like it didn't matter what our labor was. It didn't matter what our cogs were because like just top line cures everything. And are you working inside the shop? What are you doing for like the first, maybe a month or two? I was there every day, three months, like four months, open to close almost. I knew like every regular like, and that was really important both to me and I think like part of the success of what we were doing because like it really humanized the store, the concept. I like, hey Mike, I like, I literally knew everyone and I'd get to know them and like people like really become regulars quickly. Yeah. What's the hard part of it? So in my head, it's always like when you're playing with fish, things can, you know, the shelf life isn't that high. And so is that the hard part to figure out? I mean, I think there's a few things. Obviously the frying is one of them that you figure that out. Yeah, I mean like, yes, we have like a very strict 48 hour, you know, product in, product out. And so it's very easy to over order if you're not careful and you're not budgeting correctly and you don't basically like, you're not good at projecting. And now that we have eight years of historical data, we're pretty good at understanding like, what we're gonna sell, what we're not gonna sell and labor, you know, like, this is not like taking a burger patty and just like putting it on a flat top. Like we were getting like fillets of fish. And so like, first of all, we can't afford like a sushi chef that's gonna maybe like, I don't know, make $100,000 or $90,000 to come in all day and just cut fish. Like we're dealing with like normal back of house team members that we have. So how can we create like replicate this process or create, you know, processes that we can take to other locations, you know, remain efficient, but also have a product that is great. And so like what are competitors at the time we're doing, which was like the easy way out is like, they're just buying pre-cut fish, like frozen fish, like we didn't do that because everything, especially at the time, like we would always talk about everything's homemade, handmade, chef driven, you know, like we take Dakota's chef driven principles and like all of, you know, the way you run a proper kitchen, whether it's fine dining or fast casuals the same way. And a lot of people were taking shortcuts like Cisco, a food distributor was selling like poke sauce, whereas we were making our own hot sauce and poke sauce and pickling vegetables and, you know, doing things the right way, which set us apart, but from a labor and just off standpoint is more expensive and challenging. How did you guys arrive at the pricing of it? And so was it just like, what's the market gonna pay? Did you just take your costs and 4X, 5X them? Yeah, I mean like, I think, you know what, in the restaurant business, at least for fast casual, like the two big costs that investors look like, look at that are important. There's three main costs on the piano, labor, cogs and your occupancy costs, but your cogs and your labor is, you know, what they call your prime costs. And so you wanna keep the prime costs under 60%, which means typically you want your food costs in the low 30 to high 20 range. And so Dakota would create recipes, we would cost it out and we'd have a theoretical food costs and then we'd, you know, do the inverse math of like, well, what do we need to do to have a 30% food cost and that's basically what our food costs would be. And if the numbers seem like, hey, this bowl is gonna be $18, then we would either have to substitute ingredients or change the recipe to make it more palatable. Different serving size, yeah. But like we had other restaurants to compare against, like, okay, we know that we plan the same sandbox as a Mendocino Farms, right? So what are they charging for a sandwich or a sweet green, what are they charging for a salad? Or if you go to Air One, what are they charging? So like we just wanted to be within the same price range. Yeah, and obviously the more locations you have, sort of the better that can get. And so at what point do you start going to location 234? So we raised that next round. And how big was that raise? That was two million. Okay. Should have raised more. Okay. We could have raised a lot more. Always the case. Yeah, always the case. The actual number one, like always take more money when you can. Yeah. And we definitely could have, cause we were really hot. And what year was this at this time? I was like 2016. Okay. And so we basically quickly signed four more leases. Okay. And in that two million dollar raise, not only did we have like the friends and family participate, but we started to get notice from like people in the industry. So I, through a connection, met a guy who became a mentor, my name, David Swinghammer. And David. Swinghammer? Yeah. Okay. Sick name. That's a great name. Wow. And he was co-founder and CEO of Shake Shack. And. Heard of it. Yeah. Small burger chain. And you know, partners with Danny Meyer, one of the first employees partners at Union Square Hospitality. And I remember he was flying out to LA. I got put in touch with him. And we met in Santa Monica. And I was like, this is what we're doing. This is the food. And he's like, I really like this. This is awesome. Like I want to be involved in this. So he put, you know, a good chunk of money in and he was working for private equity company at the time. And the managing partner, founder of that private equity company put some money in. I remember we had like a classroom session with him. David and we like, you know, had the whiteboard and we were like, okay, where are we going to be in five years? And we're supposed to be at like 70 locations. Now we're a little behind, but we'll do that. But yeah, I mean, it was like really cool to, you know, like have legitimate interest in what we were doing in it. And when we went to, you know, real estate partners because we weren't a credit tenant, we were in a new category. That was another thing. Like not only were we trying to convince investors to invest in sweetfin, but to find location number one and to get the door open, we had to convince real estate owners. So like the first we had an LOI out on a place in downtown LA. And again, like things happened for a reason. Thank God that didn't work. And we ended up opening in Santa Monica, but I remember the broker called us and like, it's like, you know, we've been talking to ownership and they don't know what this poke thing is. And they don't think it's going to work. So we're going to like put this grilled cheese concept in the space and said, and I was like fucking bummed. Again, I'm like another setback. This is just taking so long. So then I learned from that mistake. And I was like, okay, if we're going to have to pitch landlords and real estate owners, we need to put together really professional deck. So I'm like, okay, let's put together real estate deck of who we are. And like no one else is going to send this to landlords. So that's what we did. Going back to like the investors when we were talking to like Westfield or talking to other ownership groups, it's always just like, you know, kind of like push and pull of like what we need and what they want and what they need. And I was like, okay, well, we're not doing any personal, we're not signing any personal guarantees on these leases anymore. And they're like, well, what do you mean? You guys are nobody. Well, we have this person invested and like, here's the deck. And we kind of like- And they accepted that? Finally, yeah. That's insane. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty unbelievable. Yeah. And it worked. I don't think I've ever had a lease that didn't have a personal guarantee, but we'll see. Well, I mean, so like we would have like corporate guarantees in the company. Yeah. Like, but I was- You weren't personally available. Yeah, like the first couple, like I think like two or three, like we had limited personal PG's and- And were these like 10 year leases or five year leases that you signed? 10 years, we usually signed a 10 year or two fives. Okay. How quickly do you get to 20 locations? No. Recently. About two and about two weeks. And what do you see in the marketplace that like what has shifted is Poke more of a common thing. Now people understand it. It's interesting. So when we opened, we were the first. Very quickly, we were not the first. There was just an explosion all over Southern California. People would come in like no shame. They'd order the entire menu. That was probably one of the reasons why we were doing so well. Like they'd take their notepad and like they'd literally like copy our entire menu and then they'd like rip us off. And it was kind of annoying, but- Wow. The thing with our concept and the category is if you don't do it right, the barriers to entry are very low because- Right, that makes sense. Yeah, so like my business thesis when I wanted to do something in fast casuals, I was like, okay, how can we have a concept where you don't need to invest a couple million dollars into a space? Like how can we do this for a few hundred thousand dollars? How do we not have to compete with sweet green for real estate? How can we take a non-traditional piece of real estate and convert it into our use? Which you can't just do like with a normal restaurant because you need a hood and there's all these requirements. Yeah, it's hard. So with that, what I didn't think about the flip side is well, if we can do it, anyone can do it. So like you'd have these franchisees of Pinkberry and Subway. They're like, well, I heard this poke thing is hot going well, we're just gonna convert our Subway into a poke concept and buy a bunch of crappy fish and pre-made sauces and put up a sign. And so the category took a lot of punches. And it happened. Did you see it as an opportunity being like, okay, well, maybe they can franchise. Maybe you just partner with them. Well, the space, the poke space is so fragmented that believe it or not, I'm always positive. With only 20 units, which is tiny, I think we're the biggest concept in the country that's not franchising. So like that tells you all you need to know. There are like a good amount of groups. Like there's Poke Works and a few others that have like 60, 70 locations, all franchise. Okay. We didn't wanna do that because like we were nervous. Like can we hand this playbook to someone and can they replicate it and not screw up the product of the brand? Yeah. And we weren't ready for that. So now we've spent like the last two years getting to that point where like now with the right partners, like before I came here, I was talking to some like airport operators who wanna take this concept into airports and non-traditional venues like stadiums and stuff. Now I'm like, okay, I think we can do this because like we've built the systems and done certain things that we can hand this off to someone. Does that mean you've had to hire like an operations person that has scaled some of these businesses or I guess these concepts? Like what's the thing that gives you the fuzzies around the systems and procedures? Is that you've seen it break enough times so you sort of know where things go wrong? Yeah, and we've gone really good at writing SOPs. We've moved to co-packing for our sauces. So like one of the, like we have eight sauces. Despite how good your recipes are, you can make recipe videos, you can do it all. When you're in the store, someone's like, literally like, I like it with a little bit more sauce or if we replace the oranges with lemon juice, it basically tastes the same. So like you just need consistency and we're not getting consistency because like that is obviously the proteins are important. But like, and it's all important, but like the sauce is like the first thing you taste. And if it's not consistent across all of our stores, then we're in big trouble. So like we moved to a co-packer, the sauces are coming in great, they're consistent. Like they taste exactly the way they should taste. And that was a big thing. And same with our frying issues never got easier. They only got harder. So like we moved from the W hotel to like some other random restaurant. I love to share a bit of that, Debbie. I found it so funny. It's such a good story. And then like, and then we were frying all of our chips and fried toppings, like our crispy onions. Like you would get a katsuya at our store in Topanga in Woodland Hills. That was a nightmare. Because number one, like imagine trying to hire people to fry all day long, like a miserable job. It was not great. So they would call out and then people, and then our stores would be like, where are my crispy onions? Like where are my taro chips? Like all of these things we want to do. So we're like, okay, we can't do that. The other part about it was like, we had literally a courier, like a document messenger service. Like if you were getting escrow documents, they were the ones that were occurring around our fried onions. And so like they're like, our car smell like shit. Like it was just a nightmare. So finally you found someone to coat back our onions, our garlic and our taro chips. So like you could open a sweet fin and we could ship you all of the fried goods and the sauces. And all you have to do is like do some sautéing, cut fish and vegetables. And we're good. So that's what we focus on. Okay. Okay. I find that so funny. There's so many little things to these businesses that just make them tick or not tick. And it's like a fascinating to think about how big do you want to take this thing? Now that you're here, it sounds like you're ready to scale round two, I guess. Round three. I'm confident in the brand that we built. I think despite the fact that the category has taken some punches, I think we've differentiated ourselves in a lot of different ways. And you know, we dropped the name Poke from our name like six years ago. So now we just go by sweet fin. And so I think that opens up a lot of different opportunities for us to innovate from a product standpoint, which we're in the process of doing. What are you coming out with? What are you doing? We are coming out with some grain bowls and some salads and some like basically ways in which we can increase order frequency if you don't want to have raw fish multiple times a week. Yeah. Different offerings that makes sense. Yeah. We've talked to a lot of people and like we come for your amazing sauces and bases and toppings. That's why we come back. So if you offered another protein, for example, something that's more appealing. It actually started with a catering client, the NFL. They're like, hey, we want you to do 100, 400 bowls but 100 this certain way or like, okay. And we did that. So product innovation, differentiating ourselves in the market, creating a strong brand. I mean, we've shown that, so we'll have 20 locations like 15 in LA. We've shown that like we can saturate a market and they can all work. So what is the next geographical area that we want to go after? Is it Phoenix, Scottsdale Metro? Is it Vegas? Yeah, what is it? Where do you go? Texas, Florida, New York, DC, Boston. At the end of the day, we always talk about our mission is to fuel life through freshness and to provide healthy, affordable, approachable bowls and food for a guest. And I think that message resonates with many parts of the country and we've seen the category take off all over the world. Who's your demo? So when you get like your demographic, how old are they? Are they on their first job? Are they newly graphed? I'm just thinking like, who's, what are they, is it everybody? It's honestly like, it's amazing. Like I'll sit in some more stores and you'll see all races, ages, sexes, types of people come in, which is, it's rewarding to see. But like you always have your like core demo. And like our core demo is probably college educated at a certain income level where they're able to and willing to spend $15 to $17 for a healthy lunch or dinner. I'd say college to 40s is, I mean, it's a big demo. But like when you look at like our social statistics and kind of like all of that demographic information, we skew like 60, 40 female, which is interesting. That is interesting. Yeah. I guess it's cause they're more health conscious than men. And our branding is like a little pink and cutesy. Yeah. Do you have a tattoo of Sweet Van? No. Would you ever get one? If we sold for a lot of money, I'd do anything. When do you think you'll sell it? Or when do you want to sell it? I keep my options open. Yeah. We keep our, it's a group. There's, you know, myself, Bret Nalon. And I think we are really proud of what we built. Yeah. We're proud of what we built. So like we see the, we see the opportunities to continue to grow, but never say never. Yeah. When you think about fish just at a high level, are more, or is it being consumed more than it was when you guys first got into the industry? Or is it like wavering? Yeah. Like obviously it would be great for us to be the first in a market, but the benefit of not being first in the market is like people understand. They're educated. Yeah, they're educated. So like you don't need to educate people. Like the sugar fish are educated enough people, I would say. Yeah. I think people are eating healthier, for sure. Okay. And pescatarian or like fish is, I mean like actually was reading this yesterday. If you look at like the sushi market, it's like compounding growth every year since the 80s. Even like I was reading this crazy article about supermarket sushi. How much of that market is growing? Like I think people really like Japanese flavors is something we really like always lean into. And I think people love raw fish. Like and it's not just like a coastal thing. Yeah. It's all over. You need to meet the customer or the consumer where they are. And I think optionality is a trend that's only continuing. Like people want more options. Sure. And so we're trying to strike that balance of providing enough options, but also staying true to who we are. And the way I think about it is also the fish is probably the highest cost protein. And so it's not, yeah. By you dropping other protein, it makes sense. You know the numbers. Yeah. Absolutely. We got smoked during COVID because of like input costs. Like our salmon prices from, we have Faro Island salmon and that like, we were buying it at like 9.95 a pound, you know, processed to our door and they went up to like 18 bucks a pound. I mean, like it was crazy. And does that come down since or is it still? Yeah, it's come down a bit, not 100%. Okay. Fish is expensive. It's really expensive. Like you could buy a chicken breast for a fraction of the price. What market do you want to go to next? Whichever market that wants us. I don't know. I think like we do well in warm, like we definitely do well in warm weather climates. Okay. So like we want sunshine. We want to be around a demographic that cares about health, that's active. The markets I just said, like Arizona, I think like certain parts of Texas would do well. But Florida I think would be killer. And then like, I think the East Coast, like we get so many DMs from people who either move from LA to New York or come to New York to visit LA that love sweeping. They're like, when are you opening sweeping in New York? Yeah. And it's something we've looked at so many times and I'm just like, it's so scary because the rents are so insane. Yeah. But I think we would do really well there. You know, like we are a great, fast, healthy lunch and dinner option. And that sort of style thrives in a New York, Boston, DC sort of market. Tell people where they can find you. Where they can support. All over LA. Orange County and San Diego. So most of LA. On Instagram, atsweetfin. Atsweetfin. Everything atsweetfin. Seth, thank you. Thank you for coming on the pod. Thank you so much for the support and making it to the end of the episode. If you haven't already, please leave a review and share the episode with your friends. 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