Peanuts & Persistence- The story of ManiLife

0:15Hello and welcome to series three of the Tomorrow Brands podcast, where we explore what it takes to build a brand of tomorrow. I'm your host, Ruth Vitock, and today's guest is Stu Macdonald, the founder of Manny Life, the cult peanut butter brand that started with a ton of peanuts in his bedroom in a very burnt batch that turned out to be a brand. out to be genius. This is a conversation about doing things the hard way, often accidentally, but also about building a brand that really means something to people. Hope you enjoy. Hi Stu, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Before we get into it, it'd be great to hear your background and how you came to start ManiLife.

0:50Hi Ruth, ManiLife started when I was offered a job at a company called PwC, which is a big accountancy firm. I knew I didn't really want to do it so i decided that i put it off and moved to argentina where the idea was i was going to go there and basically build up enough guilt to become an accountant for three years uh i arrived fell quite randomly into working for a peanut butter social enterprise which i got pretty into pretty quickly because product's magic if you give a child the choice between an apple and say mars bar they'll choose the mars bar 99 times 100 but if you dip the apple in peanut butter not only does have become more delicious and therefore more attractive to the child but it also becomes more nutritious as well so it was like it was this magic food that i hadn't really liked before and it was an amazing tool for getting kids to eat better so anyway interest grew and one thing that happened also was the idea of like entrepreneurship which don't really like the word but like starting a business became a bit demystified because i very arrogantly thought that i could do as good if not better a job than the guy i was working with so started experimenting with recipes in my friend's kitchen like selling to local community got more and more into it and then a bit of a light bulb moment happened when I basically met the family that we still sort all our peanuts from today met them loved them it was around this time that I was beginning to realize I should probably go home and I started looking at the peanut butter market back home and saw that whilst it was growing no one was thinking about peanut butter the same where we spoke about chocolate coffee while in particular there was no provenance but it was purely commoditized so in 2015 i came home put off the job again imported the first ton of peanuts from this family with the idea of starting manny life which was going to be the world's first like provenance led peanut butter brand and it was going to be like magic only obviously it wasn't It was a complete fucking disaster because the day the peanuts arrived, our production partner pulled out.

2:54So I had a ton of peanuts in 25 kilo bags on the bedroom. I was going to make it. So that summer, I got together like 45 friends, rented out my old rubber club kitchen, bought two little kitchen blenders. And we made 4 ,000 jars of peanut butter one jar at a time. And it was hell for me, but my friends enjoyed it. But it was also formative for a few reasons. one was it was the beginning of this like we'll always find a way culture which has played that again and again which we can maybe touch on but more importantly we transitioned from what was ultimately going to be like a provenance-led co-manufactured brand which is very copyable right like provenance is now a thing in peanut butter i think because of us into a brand and business that made a product made the product in a way that no one else had done to that point and still no one else does you still can't make mani life in a normal peanut butter factory like pretty much all the major peanut butter brands in the uk are made in the same factory and that factory can never make our stuff and it's because of how the process we developed in that kitchen which is quite cool and the last one is we developed a product called deep roast which is like the one we're famous for complete by accident because we basically burnt it and then realized it was delicious and deep roast was the best thing we can come up for burn and then what's followed has just been like the kind of proverbial roller coaster which we can go into but that's like the ground zero that's an amazing origin story 10 years ago as well yeah i know it's like is pretty i so i became an accountant for a year and then quit to go take it full-time at the 2016 so in my mind we're still only nine it's still only nine years because there's like this element which i appreciate may seem crazy from the outside but there's this element of obviously pride to where we've got to but also shame that we're not further along because i feel like the product that we have is so great and like the reaction we get when people try it is so extreme that in my mind and we can maybe go into the trials and tribulations that have stalled and put and career the business but like in my mind we should be like way further ahead than we are now but it has been a journey and like probably wouldn't change it because all the learnings we've picked up along the way it might change a few bits it's been a very crazy 10 years as well there's been a lot of headwinds yeah yeah it's it's not been an easy time to launch and scale a brand yeah it's interesting isn't it because i feel like that's definitely true but so two things one i feel like now is harder because like we were like starting a food and drink brand was like starting to become quite cool but it was still it was maybe like i think at the time 50 000 food businesses would start a year now i've heard it's something like 150 000 like it's like mental and obviously most of them don't last a year but there's that and then there's also the kind of personal aspect of had I not started but as long as 25 when I started like life would have gone the way like the risks and hours and like just sheer energy I was able to put into it then admittedly being like an ignorant like mid 20 year old who didn't know his ass from his face versus what I could do now I'd maybe build it in like a smart way now but got two kids got a mortgage like it's I always tell people who are interested in getting into I guess like starting their own things like start either start as early as you possibly can or like learn all your crafts and all the stuff and start a bit later to start to start something like 33 even though I look about 45 to start now would be madness yeah I think you called it ignorance but I do think that naivety yeah that's probably more kind way of saying it naivety it can be quite a helpful trait when you're starting because if you knew of all the things that were coming your way and all the things you're going to have to deal with and how i think that it sounds we talk about entrepreneurship and it sounds glamorous and exciting and you're working for yourself and reality is you're not working for yourself you're working for like the demon in the back right of your brain that's just like screaming which is a very like young naive driver i think when i meet people i'm quite friends with a guy called toby hopkinson or toby hoppy who's one of the co-founders of all things butter the way he's building that is very different because he's got 15 years of like in the trade learning he's a lot calmer appears to be a lot kinder to himself and it's like a complete different way and it feels a bit smoother but both have their pros and cons yeah so what did you think building a brand would be like and what did it actually feel like in those early days so I remember very distinctly having a conversation with someone saying that I didn't want to build a brand because my view of a brand at the time was this like glossy false like constructed like artificial thing and i remember being very intent from the outset on being not necessarily like selling myself but like i always used to speak of my life as a person and one of the things that i would often parrot in the early days was like the most interesting person in the room isn't the person shouting about themselves it's the person asking all the questions and who are interested in others and so if you go back to early mani life it was all about the mani lifers and the people and and there is still an extent to that now flip that question that said i didn't want to build a brand i want to build something else ironically as i've started to understand brands and like the power of them and i guess that the modern trajectory of them that is what the modern brand is it's like your best friend in the room whatever as the business has scaled there's been like tensions on how to on on tensions on keeping it personal and there's always that thing of pulling the long lever which is very hard to do personally and getting into the weeds with people and i'm still a massive proponent of the value of one-to-one interactions and how really good one-to-one interaction it can actually lead to hundreds of if that person is a certain type hundreds of kind of indirect ones i think it's interesting you had such a negative perception of what brand is when you started out yeah it's yeah it is i think

9:59i i actually think that so when you're in the brand world you think of me as these magical things and i definitely wasn't in the brand world then i was like joe boggs in the street and I actually think most people have that perception but it's like the core nucleus that think of them as these amazing things and you're either discovering brands like subconsciously through it's changing a bit now like non-personalized glossy adverts that was my view of brands I was like they're just it's just like all rubbish and I and even now I try and instill in the guys like don't say anything that you would be embarrassed to hear yourself say in the pub and I think that is like a behaviour that we were maybe a bit ahead of our time back then but you're seeing that more and more come through and those are like

10:52they're getting a lot of airtime about all being edited in media like they've hit that super well and it's just that authentic human interaction It's interesting we had two from Lucky Saint on the podcast a while ago and she talked about the pub test. All of your marketing strategies should be simple enough that you can say it to a friend over a pint and that they get it. I think there's also something in, it's interesting as a marketeer when you hear people talking disparagingly about brands. And I do think part of the reason is because of a lot of the language that's been used by consultants and the brand house charts that have been built.

11:32loads of really i've seen some that i've worked in marketing now for nearly 20 years and i still i don't understand them yeah yeah someone's charged thousands and thousands of pounds for this and actually it's completely unusable and the strategy dies if it's not executed well and so it feels a little bit like there's a desire for simplicity especially if you're in moving scaling brand exactly and what will happen and it was almost like what tends to happen with this kind of stuff is like one person makes a like a step change move and others follow and that becomes normal it becomes tired uh and probably at some point like glossy aspirational like untouchable comms was mega everyone copied it and then we very community friends of ours alice was involved in oatly and they and part of their like insane success was they just started calling like a spade and it's like we're advertising on this billboard because we want you to buy stuff and that was like really fresh and i think what might happen is and probably something said already like people will follow that and that will become tired and cliched and then it will be the next thing which is really interesting this is the tiring thing about working in challenger brands and it turns into an aesthetic and then you have to like yeah challenge it's the hipster east london trying to look different and everyone looks the same um so we talked a bit about then about the manny life brand when how did you start shaping that identity in truth it wasn't until much much later that it became like a conscious we're going to build the brand identity and it's gonna like using those kind of pillars you alluded to earlier i was always very keen at being two things this is pretty much in the outset and we and we caressed them slightly as time went on but like manny was all about the product and obsession over product and making the best product possible and i think we have always done a pretty good job and increasingly better job now of that and then life was about this we exist for the people that we bring joy to and we're this like community like for lack of a better word fun loving feel good thing and what we often struggled with and to some extent still do but less so was like premium quality food brand was at the time like monmouth very like muted aesthetic and life was like colorful fun like punchy spade a spade and so probably the reason we've had so many like different designs is the battle of those two things but essentially it's always been people first behavior wise back by a product and to this day we what drives us isn't this like innate interest in creating great products it's the joy that we elicit and the kind of connections we make along the way i frequently speak about how if the family that grew our peanuts had made honey or anything else i'd have started a honey or anything else band it was more to do with them and how much i like them than it was about this there's an opportunity in peanut butter just got very lucky that it was peanut butter any channels or tactics that gave you some nice early traction so there's all the standard ones but one which is quite unique that i think has played a major role in that like community kind of evangelists feel of the brand is that we didn't start in shops or online we basically started with like peanut butter dealers so we would create this group and this was to do with the desire of bringing people together that i always had and it was maybe like 30 40 50 people and they were like manny lifers we'd sell them wholesale product they're basically peanut butter drug dealers we'd sell them four or five cases a time at wholesale and they would sell it to their friends their local community and still to this day i'm not as close to the data as i was maybe three years ago but i'm pretty sure that the number one driver of manning up discovery is still word of mouth and that's for a business that is like in tesco in sainsbury's in waitrose and i think that those seeds were planted like yeah 2016 so that was a really interesting way to and it probably stemmed from my complete lack of faith and this like deluded view i had on advertising which is i imagine quite offensive as a marketer but it's i just wasn't aware i just didn't believe that people would buy stuff because they're advertising and obviously there's complete rubbish like people do buy stuff that they're advertising but i was very clear that if one of my friends told me to buy something i'd probably going by no i think that's definitely valid like word of mouth is the marketeers holy grail it's definitely much more effective than seeing an ad i know you have done ads so yeah we have because your friend alice i was very resistant but they were great ads you've come around i love the peanut butter dealers where did you find these people just like the street events yeah yeah yeah literally it was i think we had this thing of like whenever i would meet someone interesting they would show interest and then i'd be like do you want to be a man like that and then when they came on i would do these like very and it was all like in from the outside this might have looked really contrived but it was all very genuine i think and i think it's quite hard the top like odes to um to the mani lifer and then they'd start selling and it was and they loved it and i think it's a very hard thing it'd be it's virtually impossible to do now one because like the margin changes are number two because we're a bit bigger but i think when there's an opportunity for brands when you're very small one to do things that don't scale without the worry of opportunity costs of losing time elsewhere but to like tap into this like if you like this is a secret thing which is just people like love to share secrets and there is to most people still don't know what or who may i've asked there still is that to some extent but just not the degree that like people get excited about buying four cases of peanut butter and selling it to their friends at the pub or the gym or the whatever like the local theater back of their car yeah yeah that was genuinely how it started i absolutely love that you don't hear these sorts of things these days like small things that don't scale and like looking like weird stuff like that you touched on briefly the tensions of as you become bigger the opportunity cost of time becomes greater and there's this pressure to pull on big levers i actually think one of the secrets to like maintaining the magic is to make time for things that don't scale be it like inviting your not even your top 30 consumers just 30 quite passionate consumers to like a dinner and there are some really famous examples of brands that have done that well like mindful chef did that and i think still do that very well the challenge is that to do them there is an element of operational thinking and requirement behind those and i just didn't have that i don't because i still don't really have a balance about my body so when the man in life has got to 50 people and we started to think about how do we organize these guys or how do we like make this so i'm not spending like three hours a day chatting to each each one of them it it broke down a bit too big not quite small enough yeah but i think you can stretch it if you have if you can like layer on a bit of operational mindset so my so how it plays out often is you have i think it's got a facebook community of 50 000 6 000 people and it's not quite as magic as the 50 peanut butter drug dealers but it's pretty magic i like it i like it when you hear about brands who do these things but they don't yell about it so it's adds to it as well doesn't it hear about it but no one's really told you versus that and that's part of the magic because if imagine if mindful chef ran a brand like a meta ad about like joining their facebook it'd be like so lame but it's it is going back to that if like coming to the secret was there a sort of turning point when you thought this is actually working so we'd always known that if 100 people tried man in life like four would buy it and 10 of those would tell all of our friends but at least i think alice will know the actual numbers i think that movie's like better than that um and so we and it originally was a hunt we speak to 100 people they and then they tell 10 tens of their friends then we started going into independence and maybe came thousands and then we launched in waitrose and waitress backed us in quite a major way and all of a sudden it was like thousands and tens of thousands telling thousands of their friends and that was like okay want something and then that was the first oh this is quite exciting and then the big one was when covid lockdown hit we were pretty like under distributed for the quality of product and brand that we were but we had a fairly solid online setting and so when lockdown hit and people stopped going out and everyone moved online it like democratized access so the like lack of distribution that had been maybe holding us back sunny wasn't a thing and the business more or less quadrupled overnight um which is quite challenging to deal with and had it like knock-on effects thereafter and that was like reviews word of mouth and people wanting good stuff and so it hasn't been straightforward since then but since then there's been you have to get your 40 friends back to the kitchen not in 2020 but the year before yeah and I've seen some pictures of that Christmas yes please do let's talk a bit about culture you mentioned it briefly before what kind of culture are you consciously trying to build at ManiLife one of the big changes that we have put in place in the last year is that i promoted some finance director to be md so i no longer run the business day today which is for the business and for me and probably for my wife and kids actually a great thing and he's doing a great job it's really johnny's job to like instill that but one of the things we are very aligned on is being like a people first business so treat people well try and it's hard because obviously as the business gets really busy like eating lunch together and like birthdays particularly I guess blokes generally aren't very good with that kind of thing falls away but I think we do a pretty good job of treating our people well and fairly and and not just our team but like our suppliers and our customers and then paired with that is this which again is in conflict there's a lot of conflict but it's like just relentless pursuit of better we we haven't done the kind of classic these are our values up in the wall thing i think we flirted with it at one point but like behaviors and we're still small enough that like the behaviors that the team and the leaders in the team can emulate i'll pass through you got a sort of living culture rather than a written one yes but that is definitely i'm not sure how you found with your business but like that is definitely there is definitely a requirement to be a lot more conscious of it now that we're no longer in the five days a week all together like it used to it was fairly straightforward to emulate that because you behave a certain way at work and then you would let a load off on a thursday evening with the team like impromptu drinks and the impromptu element of culture doesn't really happen anymore so you probably could be a bit more deliberate about it to be honest it's interesting though isn't it because there's culture and then there's sort of values how leader you want to be and how you want people to feel working for you and with you and yeah and the two things it's a hard it's a hard thing to get right and i think a lot of it i think businesses they scale really struggle with that because when you're a small i remember pop chips for a really long time and when there's only a handful of you it's fine because you don't really need to say a lot of things you don't have to have a policy on this if someone wants to do this and you're like yeah sure and then suddenly there's 25 of you and it's oh that person's just done that and it's a tricky thing to navigate that growing from it being an unsaid thing yeah for sure and it's also particularly difficult when so we've always been involved in our production but historically we put our own kit in third parties and they ran it so like the teams weren't ours but as of end of last year we managed all our productions we have office team that are in london two days a week and we have production teams that are five days a week in the manufacturing in shybrook and we had a lot of people telling us that like the idea of giving the kind of benefits that the head office team get to line staff would be like insane but to make our credit we push back on that and i think the line team at my like the operators have like basically the same benefits as the head office team that is rare that is what has been your biggest leadership learning so far very hard to not do not give the cliche and it's the same one as everyone says it's just find great people tell them where describe where you want to get to and lead them and lead them to it and get out of the way and that is something that i personally really struggle with and i think it was because i was so like passionate and i guess like passionate verging on obsessed that would describe where we're going to get to but then my mind would go into all the details whatever i was doing and that is one of the reasons why promoting i was finance director and like having this new role has worked so well because it's almost like a layer so it's like a structural means of stopping that impulse but yeah with great people everything becomes far easier i guess it's i don't think it's super cliche but it's probably common answer for a reason isn't it it's hard because a finding great people is hard yeah be knowing where you need them is difficult sometimes knowing what you don't know or what you know yeah yeah and then like you say getting out the way is hard when it's your baby and it's your passion so it sounds simple and it's like one of those things okay so if I identify that this is the most important thing to do yeah exactly yeah no I think there's one one thing that is again a bit of a cliche but it's and this isn't an answer but the mix of experience and attitude is very important and often often particularly for like you're kind of five to 15 or even like one to 10 million part of the journey like the mistake is like overvalue experience under value attitude and again like you figure that out and it's a very hard thing to get right until you see the people in the business so i guess part of that is again cliche like hire slow and then if it's not working move people on quickly it's the right kind of experience though isn't it yeah fast growth fmcg businesses i think are just quite a specific thing very intense different fast moving isn't it in a way that a lot of other love it so i think there is something yeah about having the right kind of experience in the right kind of businesses another one is advice and advisors and mentors are very valuable but they are only as valuable as your ability to like process them and i see particularly with very exciting businesses because very exciting businesses like and there's a lot of people who built and sold or built and like almost sold food business that know a lot of stuff and what can often happen with them is they can get swarmed by very passionate very opinionated advisors which like to some extent we went through and you just get pulled from pillar to post particularly as it's very it's quite not infrequent that food and drink founders are like new to food and they're very fresh and they're often like insecure high achievers and people pleasers and and that that is quite dangerous like mix yeah i do some advisory so i feel like i'm on the other side of that there is such a thing as too much even good advice there's no there's no specific way to do any of these things there's something that's worked for someone but that doesn't mean it's going to work again now or with this specific brand or product.

29:39So it's learning what to take and what not to take on. Yeah, exactly. And the best advisors are really like the ones that kind of coax it out of you and make it feel like it's your... Like a therapist. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And ironically, that probably isn't the most common advisory. If you think of the archetype advisor, like it's not that. No, I think as well, when I found as I've worked with anyway whatever's got you to this point shows you've got great instincts like it is you can bring a brand a marketing expert in but it's your brand and that's that's a special and unique thing and to be very respectful of that and nurturing of that not to come in and be like well your brand house hasn't got enough layers and yeah there's not quite enough jargon on this to send it back.

30:37What's been the hardest part of the journey so far and the most unexpectedly joyful? The hardest there have been a lot I think I think about a specific period there's maybe two so one was post lockdown I just like business went from five people turning over a million to 15 turning over four we did the classic thing we're going to grow 50 having grown 400 and 100 before and that's pretty minor to like you're you're attacking a shrinking market and we're going to grow 15 but we like leveled up for that and i just got so people talk about burnout and obviously everyone experiences differently but I tried to work my way out of burnout for a year which because I've just I'd worked my way out of everything and like the solution to all my problems previously had been at work harder and that got pretty horrible ironically after a three-week holiday everything's fine but yeah that was pretty tough and the other one was a very acute moment where a fundraiser that should have taken three months end up taking about nine at the moment the money came in the business was being propped up by a personal credit card i'd somehow managed to get it was like 30 000 pounds of my personal credit card debt was like the gap money came in like complete relief can go back to doing the jobs i like and like building the business again and then in one week head of ops left or decided she was leaving our warehouse our roastery and one of our production sites all moved and something like four tons which at the time that's not that's always a lot but at the time that was a lot of peanut butter somehow got through the like the fuddled supply chain unroasted and i remember being in there as one of our first retail partners and turning around and i was seeing a shelf of so unroasted peanut butter is white because peanuts unroasted are white and seeing a shelf of white mani life and i think i'm not sure this is like a false memory but i think i threw up oh my god yeah but like any crisis it was an opportunity to change and like subsequently our supply chain is so much more robust than checks and places so much better and it was very fortunate happened then when it was four tons which was like two months stock whereas two months now is like 200 tons and that would have been a disaster and there's a few more but i think we don't want to depress everyone and then unexpected moments of joy uh i mean i've already mentioned that i met my wife selling her a jar of peanut butter which has brought more joy than kind of anything so that that is still the one though this is this is minor no it's actually not minor so when we launched a new customer i will do lots of store visits and i remember being at tesco in i think it's altering them up near me and i just go meet the staff and i'm gonna say hello and i met this woman there she's my early 20s introduced myself and she got quite emotional and i'm gonna get quite emotional talking about it now and i was like i was gonna love it to me come give her a hug and she basically said that manny life had saved her life because she had for 10 years this is quite planning to have daughters now but for 10 years she had like savage eating disorder to the extent that like she wouldn't leave the house like was very unwell and manny life was the only thing that her mum had found that she found she could eat and so that was like yeah yeah it was nice that is i think that is the amazing thing about working in food and drink is yeah there's such small things but you become part of people's lives and yeah that's why i love it that you've worked on or that you've touched you go to someone's house it's on their shelf and it's yeah it's it's really part of the fabric of yeah it's not lives when you hear those yeah food is a key part of our life and all his husband lovely so yeah that one was pretty yeah clearly emotional we're both going up right we're gonna move on what's exciting you about the future for manny life so many things but i'm gonna try and do three one is to date we have always been somewhat handicapped by our supply chain and as of january i mentioned like we brought one house so all of that stuff is now within our control and we are coming to the end of that six-month bedding period where the manufacturing is starting to like really hum so i'm really excited to see what we can do when that that untethered so that's one paired with that i think something it's something crazy like still almost 90 percent of the country don't know who don't know not that i think 80 percent of the country know who you are but like only 90 percent households have never tried manning life and it's like when you witness the moment when someone tries manning life for the first time it's like pretty magical which just is like a blank canvas opportunity so paired with them we can now make as much as we like like to i was about to attack those people to to give those people the wonderful opportunity of trying some great is really exciting and then again paired with the factory i've managed to like tether the willy wonka style innovation like streak in my soul for almost a decade but what our own facility offers us the chance to do which no other brand can because they're all made in the same factory is be that willy wonka and that's really exciting because peanut butter is a magic product only like 40 percent of uk household buy it and they buy it two and a half times a year the reason only 40 percent of houses buy it is history of rubbish products it exists in a really quiet part of the supermarket and it's a plan and it's a planned purchase and willie wonka like streak basically turns peanut butter from planned to impulsive and i think that is a really exciting very unique place to be that obviously has a load of operational complexity laid on top of it but you've got someone else you can figure that out now yeah in my mind it worked yeah this is it you just do the idea then you got the team they make it happen yeah quite an offensive statement that but i guess to some extent yeah they would do it far better than i would which is why i was there but yeah i think that's i think it's mad that like such a small percentage of households or such a large percentage don't do anything with peanut butter i think it's crazy that those that do consume it that infrequently when the average amount of consumer as i'm sure you're aware will buy it like five or six times a year yeah so that's more consistent with my butter consumption okay i'm gonna do a super quick fire round so brand you wish you'd built it's northern pasta yeah great like and just so one of the things about peanut butter is the category dynamic was there was a clear opportunity and it was commoditized but in the uk at least it's fairly small like it's 100 100 million pound that's 150 million market 40 of households pasta 98 of households 1.5 billion frequency like off the charts like and it is boring as anything everyone's doing the same thing and it's just retracted back to own able standards and i think those guys have a monumental opportunity to create something insanely impactful in a really so any supermarkets listen to this get it or they're the one yeah i very happy they're now on a cardo yeah that's good yeah most underrated skill in a founder i think actually being a good salesperson is people don't talk about that much you're like always selling whether it's like to come work from the holidays to supply for them so that's one and then the this is very quite rare but the ability to think in systems be it like so like to systematize to basically take you off the hamster wheel into calmer slowest moves fast way products you're obsessed with that's not peanut butter so two they are a pasta sauce brand but they are so much more than pasta sauce brand called the sorcerer you might not have them but i think they are going to be mega i actually use them as like a pizza base or on when i do that i think uni i've got one of those yeah so that's mega and then there is a they're a fermented foods brand but they also do hot sauces and like hands down the best sauce i've ever tried but it's a brand called Eaten Alive, which you might have heard of.

40:20They've got big business in the kitchen, started by a couple of chefs, ex-chefs from the library, and two great guys. But I go through two bottles of their hot sauce a week. I'm always in the market for new condiments. Like, unreal. They're on a card. And it is off the charts good. Final question of the show, the question we ask everyone, what makes a brand of tomorrow we've already touched on it it's like this obsession with personal connection and not necessarily finding a way to scale personal connection because if you get lost in that it's very easy it's coming not personal but i think like people i've always believed people are far more interested in people than they are in products and people are far more interested in people than they are in brands and the brands were able to like harness that in an authentic way, not like a celebrity endorsement way, of which, I think probably the best I've ever seen is Get Baked by Rich.

41:22I think you get that. That's like the brand of the decade. Perfect. Thank you, Stu. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks very much.

41:42I'll see you next time.