Bringing Innovation to the Food Industry

There's a couple ways to look at it. And first is like sort of like the direct. There's the demand side, right? There's like the thinking about customers and how sort of like our E commerce platform allows us to do that. So like I shared in my presentation, it's like we get the feedback, we can innovate quickly, we can take greater risks and we have greater certainty of like what is the, the sort of like dimensions of success and in a meal and sort of like how customers are behaving in order patterns and things of that nature. So that gives us sort of like the tech elements of that and the data elements of that are definitely helpful in us meeting and exceeding and anticipating the customer need faster and better. And then on the supply side like we have this entire like super complex network of external partners and there's not really like it's evolved since we've started this for sure. But there wasn't like a set tech stack when we started. Like Shopify was, didn't exist when Splendid Swoon started. So we actually like jumped into custom building very early on. And I'll come back to that because we actually are in both worlds now. But it's a very interesting thing of like stringing together and integrating all these disparate tech systems that are not ours just to fulfill orders. And so that is sort of like those that, that super disparate lean operating footprint has been one of our sort of secrets of success from a cost structure perspective. But it required us to have really smart technology building and integrations of all these different systems. So I kind of view tech as like the bridge between these two worlds. Like you said, the brains is sort of like tech forward and tech enabled and the bronze is like the, the raw muscle of actually producing a food product. And old school been around forever. One of the oldest like oldest industries, right, is like how you manufacture food. Sure we brought innovation to like the format and how it, how it's actually produced and brought to scale and brought to customers at their doorstep. But obviously food is not a new, a new industry. And so for, for us like that is, that is like both a cultural problem and a business design problem that we try to solve with, with technology. So from as it like as it relates to our actual tech stack, we like I said we like we're a fully custom build and we think that's important for us to really own that customer relationship and to do this like business model design uniquely in the way that we do it. And we also leverage the power of Shopify and the speed and the agility that that provides with all of the plugins and tools and the entire ecosystem that exists around that new technology to market and iterate and communicate and understand how we can continue to invest what we learn from that experience into our core platform, which is actually something we stumbled into through Covid and a response to that market environment. So there's. It's been a pivot here and a pivot there, but tech has definitely been a big part of what's enabled us to scale so quickly and rapidly with having such a lean team.