Seasoned from the Start: Spice Sourcing, Tariffs, and Trust-Based Farming at Burlap & Barrel

[00:00:00] Spices are one of the largest vectors for both disease and E. coli and salmonella and all that stuff. And also there's so much opportunity. You hear about lead and turmeric, it's because when things change hands 20 times on the way to you, it's very easy for one of the people along the way to try to boost their take by mixing some nonsense into it. Hello and welcome to the Next Level Supply Chain with GS1 US, a podcast in which we explore the mind-bending world of global supply chains,

[00:00:26] covering topics such as automation, innovation, unique identity, and more. I'm your co-host Reed. And I'm Liz. And welcome to the show. Hello and thank you for joining us. We have a great episode for you today. Our guest is Ori Zohar. He's the co-founder of Burlap & Barrel. They're a spice importer and we get into everything supply chain related, including the benefits of using GS1 standards.

[00:00:56] That's more towards the end. But Ori just shares so much information with us. It was great to hear his passion. And there was one part of the conversation that I just had to call time out. And I'm not going to let you know what that is. You're going to have to listen and hear it. But it was shocking to me what they don't do in their business. Enjoy the episode. Ori, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Glad to be chatting with you.

[00:01:23] Yeah, this is going to be a fun one. When can we talk about spices and things at work, right? So first, before we really dive into the heavy duty questions, introduce yourself, your company, Burlap & Barrel, and what kind of your company does and what makes your supply chain model distinct? My name is Ori Zohar. I'm the co-founder and co-CEO of Burlap & Barrel. We're a single origin spice company, a social enterprise. We work directly with smallholder farmers in

[00:01:53] 22 countries now to bring in incredible high quality fresh spices directly from the farm. So what's happened in chocolate, coffee, tea for single origin, we know that when we cut out the intermediaries, we work directly with excellent farmers, in our case, growing excellent varietals of spices and bring them directly to us. The farmers make more money. We get transparency, we get freshness, and we get quality. So we're building this model here. And for our business, we are a spice importer, but we also sell directly to consumers. So about 80% of our sales are straight

[00:02:23] from our website or Amazon going straight to consumers. But we also sell to food service, retail, bulk, all that stuff. We're just happy for anyone that wants to use our spices. That's the kind of lay of the land of the business. And we're turning 10 years old in October. So we're about to add another digit to our age very soon. Happy anniversary. Happy birthday. That's awesome. Double digits. No joke. That's a big hurdle to get to. Especially since we have no idea what we're doing. My business partner and I, we started this. My background is in business and entrepreneurship

[00:02:51] and marketing. It was where I started my career. My business partner was a chef turned aid worker that kind of started bringing back incredible cumin from Afghanistan, where he was an aid worker and his chef buddies were like, holy cow, this is the best game we've ever had. Can we buy this? And that's where kind of Ethan, I brought the band together after having an ice cream business back in 2010, where I got a bunch of cavities and all that stuff. We came out as from outside the spice industry. And so the fact that we've been able to build a spice company, that's really

[00:03:17] setting a new standard for sourcing and quality. And that's been around for 10 years, but it's a big milestone and we're still figuring it out as we go. That's awesome. I think that everyone, all of us, we're all figuring it out as we go. And those that say they have it figured out, stick around for a minute. It's going to change and you're going to have to keep up and something's going to happen. But I was really jazzed to have this conversation today with you and I'd love to start with where you all started. How did you think about setting up your supply chain

[00:03:46] and your approach? What did those early decisions look like? We are a spice company, but we also like we talk, we joke that we are a supply chain company at the end of the day. That's our specialty. And by the way, we went on Shark Tank in 2023. We said that we are one of the oldest businesses in the world and it's been around forever. It's absolutely true. But Ethan and I have been friends for a long time. He was always cooking first in his home, then at restaurants. And I was like, I got to get a seat at the table whenever this guy's cooking. We kind

[00:04:13] of developed our friendship over that. And that was right when Ethan kind of came back to the US. He said, Hey, my chef buddies are really interested in this cumin. Is this our next company? And we kind of looked at it together and we said, we can't just be a cumin company. Like a lot of CPG food companies, CPG as in consumer packaged goods have like one product or a handful of products. And we looked at spices and we said, nobody wants to buy cumin here and paprika there and onion there. We said, we have to kind of build this kind of holistic spice company. And so Ethan went,

[00:04:43] met a vertically integrated cardamom farmer that was also growing all spice and chilies and limes. And he met a organic spice cooperative in Zanzibar that was the spice islands growing really world famous cloves is really intense fiery peppercorns and nutmeg all that stuff. And then he kind of came back to where I was living in San Francisco. And we kind of had two insights there. One is I was just kind of moving our company onto the new owner and had pretty strong

[00:05:08] kind of PTSD from all that stuff. Ethan came from the nonprofit world where he was really frustrated by the ability to really like impact change. He felt they were writing grants all day, but they weren't actually building kind of business. They weren't really creating sustainable systems. And so we kind of came together and said, we don't want the like agro capitalism. We don't want pure nonprofits. So we decided to form a social enterprise. And then two is we watched

[00:05:33] the chefs that were loving, not just the cumin from Afghanistan, but also the cardamom from Guatemala, also the black pepper from Zanzibar and the cloves. And it kind of like a light bulb went off. It said, the chefs have access to the best ingredients. They know their cattle rancher, they know their produce farmer, they know their cheese monger and all that stuff. Spices were still really a black box and nobody knew where spices came from. And so we said, okay, we wanted to do a social enterprise. And we also need to be broad because these chefs, especially that were the kind of first wind in our

[00:06:01] sales as a business, they were saying, what else you got? Like, I don't just want to buy a handful of spices from you. Help me redo all of our spices with the same philosophy and the same quality. So we started building this kind of broad business that not only had a lot of origins, a lot of countries, a lot of farmers, a lot of spices, we're expanding as much as we could. We also had this business that if you're a home cook, we'll sell you jars. If you're a chef, we'll sell you one pound kind of containers. If you are a food manufacturer, we'll send you our 55 pound bulk sacks. And so there were two of us with basically

[00:06:31] four lines of business that we were representing. And so these were a bunch of these kind of counterintuitive ways. And all of this was by the way, being packed and shipped in Ethan's living room in Jackson Heights and Queens in New York, we were a pretty funny, goofy business, but we started pretty broad and it's served us well throughout the life of the business. That's an amazing story. I think I saw your first part of your career on an episode of Silicon Valley. And then the second part of an episode of Shark Tank.

[00:06:57] That is so cool. I want to know too, first of all, I'm not a cook. I'm not a chef. My kids will tell you that. I didn't realize, I guess, that there's different levels of spices. So even just that and the ability to go to these small farms and talk to these people who are growing the spices, and that is just really cool in a personal way. And then expanding it to business so others can have

[00:07:23] those flavors. It's just, it's really cool what you guys have grown in 10 years. We have a lot of spices. Even if you don't love to cook, we have stuff that will make you look a superstar. Your kids will be like, Oh my God, when did you figure this out? But just to give two really simple analogies, like one is we all know the farmer's market and it's like the difference between going to like having an apple that's been in cold storage for six to 12 months in your grocery store and having an apple from the farmer's market that was picked that morning. But also for people that love coffee, think about this. We're like third wave spices. If first wave

[00:07:51] is like big commodity, everything is the same. Don't worry about it. I once went to a big store that I won't name and they had country of origin on their peppercorns and country of origin listed five countries. You're not getting a good product when your origin is five countries. Second wave is small specialty spice companies that are buying from specialty importers. And so they're being more careful. They're being more thoughtful and all that stuff. And third wave is companies that are importing themselves. And that's the kind of style of business that we are pioneering where we are

[00:08:19] working directly with those small holder farmers. We're setting them up, not just to sell to intermediaries, but just a clean, dry grind export. The farmers make a lot more money off of their crop and we get really fresh, really high quality spices. We're representing this kind of new wave in spices that we've been working on for the last decade, but it's not unfamiliar for people that love single origin coffee and tea and chocolate. We're applying a lot of those same values and what was figured out in those industries. But just like spices are very different. Like you have different

[00:08:45] kinds of coffee from countries, sure. But like saffron and bay leaves are way more different than, you know, Robusta Arabica coffee or Guatemalan or Indian. We're just going a little bit wider with it. We have to have a wider net and a wider business for how we do this. And that's also one of the reasons why we're here talking about also GS1 and all that stuff. But that's a big reason why we've been working with a lot of the barcodes and the tracking and the data to be able to have this really broad lineup of products be tracked and just kind of be able to be picked up in any grocery

[00:09:12] store or from our site in our warehouses and just be scanned and handled in the right way, given just how many different spices we carry in our kind of lineup. It's really cool. In the past 10 years, I'm sure that you've had to change and evolve the way your supply chain is working. And I would love to hear that. You said one of those key words in your introduction, which is transparency. So can you tell me a story of kind of how you started the

[00:09:37] import process and all of your transparency and traceability work and then anything that's changed? So in India, we work with a guy named Dr. Salunke and he's a turmeric farmer and he has his doctor in pharmacology. He got his doctorate in that. And then he said, you know what, I'm going to be back and be a farmer. He uses a lot of Ayurvedic principles and farming. He said, this is how I'm going to have a real impact in this, not in the doctor's office, but actually as a farmer.

[00:10:02] We met him through a social enterprise in India that kind of connected us. And we went and stayed on his farm and did yoga with him begrudgingly in the morning and did all that stuff. But the big difference is that he has a bunch of principles. He grows all the spices, all the turmeric himself. It's only rainwater fed. He does a hot water wash. There's a lot of debate. Is it hot water, cold water? But he really represents his turmeric from start to end. Even when he takes it to the

[00:10:27] grinding facility, he puts through 10, 20 kilos of turmeric through it just to clean out the chute and then throws that away. Like he really is so careful about organic, about regenerative. He does this really beautiful crop rotation with sugar cane and peanuts and all that stuff, really healthy soil. But there was nobody on the other side that appreciated that or wanted to pay for that. And fair trade organic turmeric at origin in India is about a dollar per kilo goes to the farmer.

[00:10:54] With Dr. Salunke, we pay him about $5 per kilo, but it's not apples to apples. It's because he's doing all these other value added activities on it that just the commodity industry doesn't work in that way. They just want fresh turmeric, buy weight in the back of the truck, no further questions asked, please. And so he was this kook in his community of this dreamer that was doing this and doing it at prices that nobody would pay. But we then came along and we're the right partner because we are happy

[00:11:21] that he's doing all this value added stuff. It means that somebody else doesn't need to do it who ends up making more of the money off of that crop than the farmer themselves. And so we started buying everything that he grew. And this was in 2018. And then we've only bought more and more since then. And he's become like an influencer in his community because he's proving out this model of growing really incredible. And the turmeric is buttery and it's not bitter and it's super rich. It's this really beautiful turmeric because of how he grows it. But there was no nobody on the

[00:11:48] other end of it. So initially we worked with him to grow the spices and to grind it and to package it and to become his own exporter over years. We taught him how to be the one actually exporting the spices. And India is a country with a ton of bureaucracy. There's a lot of rules where the farmer can't be the exporter. So we also worked with somebody who could kind of rubber stamp it without kind of mixing it. You know, with other stuff. And so we created this win-win where if somebody was getting mediocre

[00:12:14] turmeric in the US, it would be roughly the same cost as us getting it from Dr. Salunke. But in our model, Dr. Salunke makes all the upside and we then don't lose traceability and all that stuff. And so that's worked really beautifully. We get to bring in it. We call it new harvest turmeric because we just always bring in the fresh harvest and it's lovely. But it's this really special product that the big spice companies can't get because they're not working in this model. Normally farmers sell to somebody, they're called hawkers or whatever that show up with trucks to the farms and are willing to pay them.

[00:12:43] They then sell it to somebody who owns a drying facility, but then sells it to somebody who owns a grinding facility, but then sells it to somebody who owns an export facility and so on and so forth. And you can kind of see why spices are one of the largest vectors for both disease and like E. coli and salmonella and all that stuff. And also there's so much opportunity. You hear about lead and turmeric. It's because when things change hands 20 times on the way to you, it's very easy for one of the people along the way to try to like boost their take by mixing some nonsense into it. And so that's kind of our supply chain. And that's where

[00:13:12] we started. We work with our farmers and now we also bring in jaggery from Dr. Salunke, which is a kind of unrefined sugar. We work with these farmers to kind of expand these relationships. And I think something that maybe you'll also appreciate here too, is that we don't have any contracts with our farmers because you try suing an Indian turmeric farmer for like not giving you like the right quality or what you expected. These are trust-based relationships where if we're Dr. Salunke's best customer, then he doesn't have a lot of incentive to cut corners or cheat us or kind of give us less.

[00:13:41] And if there's a bad harvest, we get kind of the best of that harvest. And it creates this kind of mutually beneficial relationships because we realized that we can't have enforceable international trade relationships with all these individual farmers. So instead we built these mutually beneficial long-term relationships. And this story that I'm giving you about this one Indian turmeric farmer is also true across the rest of our lineup of farmers. And we've kind of slowly over the last decade, expanded and expanded and built and built. I'm blown away here right now. And I got to just,

[00:14:10] I'm like, time out, time out. Hold on one second. No contracts? Like you don't, you don't have any type of contract in place? Like, are you saying you have no SLA type of contract or maybe you haven't? We do a lot of planning. Farmers, all that they want is they want to know that we're going to be there at harvest to put a big down payment down and to buy more and more and more. We do a ton of planning. But what I mean is that like, I think in America, a lot of agreements are based with these like 80

[00:14:37] page contracts that have all these nuances in your signing. And if you don't do this, here's the fee and here's the penalty. We have none of that kind of formal contracting. We do a ton of planning, a ton of projections. We put big down payments at harvest because that's when farmers cost to the highest. We just want to be their best customer. But just this like kind of legal relationship. I think so many people are surprised at how kind of relationship based our businesses versus contract based and like trade based. But the same thing is like, we're not shopping our turmeric every year

[00:15:06] for the lowest bidder. Dr. Saluki is our guy. And as long as he can supply us and as long as he wants to keep working with us, we want to keep working with him. And so that's where a lot of our relationships have been these really long term relationships. And it's not like I think a lot of American businesses like you're shopping out your glass and all that stuff. You're moving from country to country. We do the best when it's built on this high trust long term relationship. And I would argue with a lot of the listeners that I think even in your own individual businesses, building based off of

[00:15:35] high trust long term relationships is the best for everybody involved. Because look at how much unpredictability we've had in the last few years, you're going to need to call in those favors, you're going to want your partner to be like, yep, we're on it. And we're going to make it right. Couldn't agree more or really couldn't. We're going to talk about tariffs in one second. But we've had a few episodes around supply chains. And even if you have these really, really long contracts, but when tariffs came up and supply chain problems came up, it all came to the relationship.

[00:16:04] It was the phone call. And we've been doing business like this. I'm stuck in a pinch. Can you send me this? And so you're really, man, I needed this call today. Thank you for this call today. The energy that's just coming from it of the humanization, right? You're going to be put in a pinch if one of your farmers just ups and is like, yeah, I won the lottery. We're not doing this anymore. And they can call you. But from what I'm hearing is you're doing a ton of planning. You're talking

[00:16:33] to them all the time. You're going to know if they won the lottery. You're planning ahead. You're having this conversation. You're not automizing everything and AI-ing everything. And you do it with care. You care about them. They care about you. And I'll just say it's to the upside too. It's not just when we're in trouble, but like in the pandemic, our business grew 10x between 2019 and 2021. And I'll tell you half of our revenue came from restaurants in 2019 and 0% of our revenue came from restaurants

[00:17:03] in 2020 because restaurants were largely closed with our partner farmers too. Like we heard so many stories of other companies saying, Hey, I'm out of supplies because they're buying from their co-manufacturer who's buying from the distributor packaging, who's buying from an importer. And like they're at the bottom of the line. And if Walmart says, Hey, I need more packaging. You're never going to get your allocation. It's going to go to the biggest customers. When we were growing like crazy in the pandemic, because everyone was cooking at home and nobody wanted to go into grocery stores and

[00:17:30] everybody was ordering online, we were able to turn around and go to our partner farmers and be like, Hey, we need you to put a pallet of turmeric on an airplane. And we need it to go out tomorrow. And the farmers were like, you got it boss. And so like, we were able to also like work with them to grow our businesses together too. So it wasn't just downside and getting inside of a pinch, but it was also on the upside too, where if we need to go really quickly, the fact that we could just send usually on WhatsApp, a message to our partner farmers, and they could just get into action. That really helped us grow our business in pretty meaningful ways too.

[00:18:00] How big is your company? And how many employees do you have? So we're about 20 people right now. We have 10 full-time employees and 10 part-time contractors. We did about a hundred thousand orders from our website last year, which is totally wild. It's a level of supply chain management at a level that we don't know. And we're also like, keep in mind, we're bringing in the bulk spices and we're storing them in 55 pound sacks. We're buying jars and lids and labels from manufacturers. And then we're kind of combining them into like small jars,

[00:18:27] large food service containers, and we're blending them. We're doing all this stuff. So we're really managing quite a broad business, but there's a reward for that, which means that we have access to a really unique product that is exclusive to us. And we're also, by the way, selling to some spice companies too in the meantime, like those second wave spice companies that I talked about that are buying from specialty importers. We are the specialty importer for some of those other spice companies. So it's a lot of risk. It's a lot of inventory that we have to hold onto. It's a very complex

[00:18:55] supply chain to manage, but the upside is that we have a big moat. It's a very defensible business to use all the VC terms. Now he's back to his Silicon Valley episode of business MBA 101, creative moat. Let's talk a little bit about tariffs. Okay. Cause we got them. It's been a challenge for a lot of small businesses. We hear it all the time. So when these pressures hit,

[00:19:20] how do you decide, are we going to absorb this? Or are we going to adjust this? Where do you push back? Where's the give and take come? Do you have any best advice for folks out there? I think the best advice is to, we saw a lot of people do knee jerk reactions. So some people were like, Oh my God, tariffs are about to hit. Let's buy 10 X of what we needed. And for some of them, that was a good idea for some of them that kind of put them in a kind of spiral, you know, where all their cash, where they needed to pay salaries or whatever

[00:19:46] was kind of tied up in inventory. So I think one thing is we kind of listened to our knee jerk reaction and then took a second and took a little bit of a distance from it. Oftentimes we do the opposite of that. It's almost like everyone does one thing. Everyone increased prices. Everybody bought a ton of product. Everyone did all these things to kind of insulate themselves ahead of it. And look, now we're getting the IEPA tariffs refunded to us, right? So we just put in a request for a

[00:20:11] six figure refund for the IEPA tariffs, which is really lovely. But what we did look at is we said, let's really understand what our costs are. And when we looked at it, we said, we do a bunch of value added work here. A lot of the cost of our spices is yes, these payments to farmers, but also our packaging, that labor of packaging, the shipping, all this stuff. And we looked at it and we said, you know what, we're going to make two commitments to our customers. And we said, one is we're not going to increase prices due to tariffs. Because we said, you know what, everyone's getting

[00:20:41] under these inflationary pressures. Let's do our best to keep prices low. And we said, we're not going to increase prices due to tariffs. And two is we said, we're not going to ask our partner farmers to cover these tariff costs because it's not for them to cover. And then we looked at the business and said, okay, let's renegotiate Corrigate. Let's slow down some of our innovation projects. Let's slow down some hiring. Let's see if we can get better deals on shipping or packages. Like, let's find other ways that don't tie to product quality, that we can kind of save it. And with

[00:21:08] that, we can keep prices low. And lo and behold, everybody else prices went up. And all of a sudden, the prices of our spices are almost the same as the price of non-single origin spices, of lower quality spices. But we made this message to our customers. And then we did our first ever sitewide sale. And our business exploded. People really stood up. And I think that it was a refreshing change in messaging and in voice in that. So we just took a second. We assessed. We looked at the plan. We made big commitments that tied to our company's values. And then we,

[00:21:38] ironically, we're not going to change our herbs to Provence from being from Provence. We're not going to change our Vietnamese cinnamon from being from Vietnam. Those are really special, unique products that don't exist in the US. But in the meantime, we saw where we could save money. And ironically, or I don't know, counterintuitively, it was all domestically where we could save costs. And so we did that. But ultimately, we were able to make these really big commitments that really resonated with our customers and put us in a leadership position in this crazy time. Instead of in a victim position, it kind of put us on the offense instead of on the defense or on

[00:22:08] tariffs. And I think that all these companies, you can do that too. It's like in the pandemic, where all these high-end restaurants were like, oh my God, all we do is high-end in restaurant dining. But a few of them were like, you know what? We do cheese steaks to go right now. Who wants one? Would have been nice to be open. But since they couldn't be open, they were able to really make kind of lemonade out of lemons. And so we've tried to kind of be creative and do creative problem-solving across this. And if you do it, it's rewarded by your customers. And we saw that

[00:22:33] in spades. I love that it's all tied to your values too. You made some decisions tied to what has been important to y'all for the last 10 years, which is cool. If you're thinking about tariffs and refunds, there's a lot of other things. And I was just wondering from other small companies, are there processes that you need to be thinking about with tariffs and refunds that may get overlooked that you can like best practice wise? What can people be thinking about?

[00:23:03] Yeah. For what it's worth, you still have to apply for the tariff refunds. You still have to put it in. It's a pretty complex process, even with the new portal and even with all that stuff. So we are actually having our freight forwarder help us out with it because they're experts in the system. And we had to have over a hundred shipments that we had to file individually for this refund. And so just remember that this isn't happening automatically. You have to request it. And as with all things around customs and importing and government portals and all that stuff,

[00:23:30] it's not a consumer grade product. You know what I mean? The UI isn't good. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Some really lovely, lovely, easy to use products. This is not one of them. You have to proactively kind of go there and file all the right paperwork and not filing the right paperwork can have meaningful implications on what you get back and what you don't get back. And then I think too, is just with all the tariffs, I think your customers are still wondering. And I think that way too many companies try to put up this kind of corporate front. If you put in a ticket, like a customer support request, so many companies are like, we shall respond to you

[00:24:00] within 48 hours. Thank you so much for, for our whole life. We kind of were like, when we had a customer support request, we'd say, hi, this is Ori. I'm one of the co-founders, me or my other co-founder is going to personally respond to you, but give us a day. And we just saw a really strong response to that. So I think customers are asking companies to translate tariff news to them. And so I just think that oftentimes companies try to hide the behind the scenes stuff. We have found that actually showing the behind the scenes stuff, telling them what's going on, telling them how we're thinking

[00:24:27] about this and what the impact is on our business and on their spices and all that stuff has kind of created a lot of loyalty and has created a lot of really strong response. It goes back to the relationship piece again, too. Like there's so many times we're out here, we're having business conversations, but it's not a chess match. It's a partnership. I need you. You need me. Tell me what's working well for you. Tell me what's not working well for you. This is my timeline. Does it fit in your timeline? If it doesn't, can we make adjustments? Like these conversations

[00:24:54] happen a lot, but we make them more formal and sterile instead of like, Hey Ori, thanks so much for being flexible. Hey Ori, I understand we can hold off three more days. You know what? Like I send you an email back. It can wait till the end of the week. Show the humans behind it. People have relationships with humans, not with corporations. And so like show, show the human side of it, show personality, have typos in your automatic responses. I don't know. I think as a small company, we can lean into

[00:25:22] the fact that we are small and that I get confirmations for every order that comes in. Same with my co-founder. That's not happening at the massive corporations. So lean into the ways that you're different, lean into that competitive advantage. And that's really served us well. We have something exciting to share with you. It's a special podcast discount for our favorite event of the year. GS1 Connect. That is right. Our annual supply chain focus conference. And this

[00:25:50] year it's in Las Vegas, 2026. I cannot wait. Reed, how many GS1 Connects have you been to? I believe it's been seven. Okay. Okay. So it's a few less than I've been to. It's all good. All good. I love going to Connect to meet our attendees every single year who bring so many great examples from grocery, food service, retail, and healthcare about how they solve supply chain visibility challenges.

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[00:28:09] and the promo code is GS1USPOD10. See you there. One of the questions that we were talking about beforehand before we got onto this show is really, I think I know where you're going to go with it, but we have it down and I would like to hear your answers. We're in a very turbulent time right now. We've got a couple of wars going on. We've had supply chain issues before. We talked about the pandemic, Suez Canal, things happen.

[00:28:37] And this is not unique. This happens all the time. Life ebbs and flows just like the waves in the ocean. Some days it's calm and some days they're big. Do you have a strategy that you work with? We always hold steady on these and we leave this for our agile aspects. Or do you just take them as they come with these tribulations? You talked about how you're dealing with the tariffs. So I'm just kind

[00:29:03] of curious because there's definitely the batten down the hatches days and then there's, okay, things are going well. Let's be more innovative. Cut back on innovation. So I'm just curious as to, do you have a strategy or plan ahead of time or do you handle it ad hoc? I think understanding our values has been a really good way to say, hey, what do we stand for? And so like even with the tariffs, we said, what do we stand for? Is we stand for a smallholder farmers. We believe that the best spices are grown all around the world. And in America, apple pie has

[00:29:32] cinnamon in it. Cinnamon doesn't grow in America. You know, what do we love? Our steak seasoning. First of all, it's called Montreal steak seasoning. And second of all, it has black peppercorns that don't grow in America. And so like that was one of our values is that like we are on the side of smallholder farmers. We are social enterprise and we try to run our kind of decisions through that. And oftentimes it makes it a lot clearer kind of what we need to do. So like what does a tariff response look like that stands out for smallholder farmers? What does a tariff response looks like that supports small

[00:29:59] businesses? The other thing is that you have to be really, really tight on your costs. We have to say no to a lot of things. And so there might be a lot of things that people really want to do. I think like a lot of like food companies dream of like being nationally distributed at these like giant grocery stores that have 10,000 locations and all that stuff. But often those are the most expensive places to sell your spices in the most competitive environments. So how do you get kind of creative and crafty around that stuff? And just for what it's worth, when I had my venture back company,

[00:30:28] we had a ton of money from investors. We spent money stupidly. Do you know what I think constraints have been the kind of right mother of invention. So it's actually been a really good exercise to be limited. It has forced us to be profitable, which is turns out a superpower in the kind of consumer packaged goods industry. It's forced us to come up with solutions that don't involve big national grocery stores. And guess what now Rancho Gordo, the incredible heirloom bean company

[00:30:54] sells our spices. King Arthur baking company sells our spices to all these amazing bakers. Like we've had to come up with these really creative solutions. And so I don't view these kinds of constraints. It's easy to get bummed at when there's constraints or when things kind of get thrown a wrench gets thrown in your plan. We have always used that as an opportunity to take a beat, step back and figure out how to get leaner and meaner and more creative about it. And just one other macro point is that our business has grown the fastest during times of kind of

[00:31:23] uncertainty and instability because that's when behavior is changing in consumers. So right, the pandemic, nobody wanted to step in grocery stores. Everybody's cooking more at home. Guess what? They're going online. So that dislodged a lot of people's like regular kind of purchasing behavior and sent them looking for something new. And we were there as that's something new to kind of welcome them into our world. And then we were like, we have to prove to them that our spices are so much better. And our emails are so much more fun and entertaining. And we have so many cool new

[00:31:51] launches that they'll never want to go back to the grocery store. And we were able to do that. But that's what I found is that all this kind of moments of turbulence end up kind of breaking behavior patterns. And all of a sudden, those customers are up for grab. So that's your opportunity as a small company to kind of present yourself to those new customers and really meaningfully kind of grow your business. I want to know how you use GS1 standards. So one of the really big things for us is because we have so many SKUs across all of our spices,

[00:32:17] we carry over 100 spices, almost all of them are in three sizes, jars, our food service slash chef size, and our kind of bulk size. That is a wild amount of things to track. And not only at the grocery store, which is a big part of our business is selling grocery stores, they need to kind of scan them with the barcode guns and all that stuff. But our warehouses also use barcodes to make sure that the orders are packed correctly, and everything is scanned. We use not only individual barcodes,

[00:32:43] but case packs and all that stuff. But it's just really important for us to be super clean, super clear, kind of aggregated up in all this way. Because otherwise, we lose touch for our business in order to manage a kind of multi skill or kind of heavy assortment business, we need to be even better at being able to track it. And not only that, but spices are things that people keep in their pantries for years way too long. I would argue every time McCormick does a recall, people find spices from like their childhoods. It's really important to have tracking.

[00:33:11] My mom has stuff from the seven days, you guys. It's moved from state to state. Liz, if you have any ideas on how we convince your mom to change it out that the bay leaves, their best days are behind them, we'd love to get your advice. Well, you know what I'm going to do is I'm just going to get because don't think I haven't been shopping while we've been talking because I'm a female and I can multitask quite well. But I'm going to get her a gift pack and I'm gonna be like, here, now let's get these spices out of your cabinet and refresh. I think it's cool. I had to ask about the GS1 question only because you brought

[00:33:41] it up earlier and I didn't see it in the outlines that we were talking about, but I love hearing how you're using it and talking about the hierarchies because big companies use GS1 standards, small companies use GS1 standards. And I just kind of wanted to get your thought on it. Liz, I'm glad that you kind of just went right at that, but I love the example you gave, which is, yeah, we need it for the grocery stores that we're going to work in. Right. And a lot of folks are like, well, I'm not going to go down that path. I'm going to be D to C. You wouldn't need it then,

[00:34:08] but your warehouse still needs to have barcodes in it. Otherwise you're just, you're never, you're going to lose money, right? You kept talking about understanding your cost of goods, understanding the plan, knowing where everything is, having that knowledge. You're getting that three for one with point of sale, scalability, warehouse inventory. I can move in and out of markets,

[00:34:34] right? It's an investment in your foundation. It's insurance. We have less than a 0.1% error rate on our shipping. We track it and our, like on our co-packing, shipping, all that stuff, adding barcodes to our products was the single best contributor to that because listen, the warehouse workers, they look at it and they're like, wait, did they want Royal cinnamon or cinnamon varum? I don't know. Just grab one. Now we have a kind of verification layer on it. Exactly. The layman out there saying you have a barcode on your

[00:35:03] packages that are in a warehouse, you can have a proprietary barcode. You're going to go to a distributor and they're going to say, Hey, yeah, we'll have a 3PL. We'll handle this for you. We'll put barcodes on it. And everyone associates barcode with UPC. And they're not always the same. You could have the barcode. It could have a number underneath it. And then when you go to checkout, it doesn't go beep. They're like, this doesn't work. And they send it back to you and they ask

[00:35:29] you to relabel it. And you're like, wait. And that's when you get this education on not all barcodes are created equal. And I needed a UPC with the GS1 standard of identification in it. It was one of our first purchases as a company. Even when we were really beginning, we bought a bank of a hundred barcodes just to kind of put it in our, it's our warehouses scanning. It's Amazon scanning. It's distributor scanning, both for grocery and for food service.

[00:35:55] And it's also ultimately the retailer scanning too. We got into a few specialty retailers that didn't need barcodes, but it was still a pain. They had to enter it in manually on their grocery cashier and they hated it. But no, we wanted to have a barcode. We wanted to have one that worked everywhere. It just, we don't have time for, to kind of figure all this stuff out and have different things work for different people. And so GS1 was a no brainer from the beginning to do it that way. This has been amazing. We're kind of running out of time and Reed and I have two questions

[00:36:22] that we ask all of our guests. We're done with the meat of the conversation. It's our favorite part. I'll take the first one. And I'm really interested to see what you're going to say, especially because you're entrepreneurial. What is the favorite technology that you're using right now? It can be for your personal life or your work. I have to say, we like many other people are really trying to understand the boundaries of AI and what it can do. We use it so much to just like chomp down data and kind of like

[00:36:49] take a look at what's going on. I also run a lot of my emails through it. And every so often it's like, Hey, you're being a little harsh here. So just, I softened it up for you. And I appreciate that kind of feedback, but we're just looking for lots of ways to make, like, I think AI is so good at taking over what a lot of our teammates consider the most boring tasks that they have the kind of most boring part of their day. And I am so happy for them to kind of do that because then they get to assign that time to kind of like more strategic work and more

[00:37:17] connected work and all of that. So for us, we're right now on team Claude, but all the AIs are doing a really great job at just kind of like speeding things up, chomping through data, reviewing emails and tone and adding em dashes to every single thing that I write. But it's like, we're just at the beginning of it, but it's already kind of freeing up a lot of time for us. That's great to hear. The last question that I have is what is something new that you want to learn in the near future?

[00:37:44] A big thing that we're kind of learning about right now is we have been managing our finances kind of almost by looking at what's in the bank account and looking at what's going out and all that stuff. So just one of the big things is we're a company that's at that level where we need a real kind of finance function. And I'm trying to upgrade my sense. How we spend our money is so, so important. When we were a smaller company, my co-founder and I could just like look at invoices and kind of intuitively understand what was going on in the system. And so now my new learning edge

[00:38:10] is 13 week cashflow analysis and looking at like kind of hands and all this stuff. Yeah, please read. We can talk after this and you can school me on some of this stuff, but it is cool to watch our kind of company getting out of that. Like, oh, we just have a gut feeling on how everything is going. And we're like 95% correct. So like, oh my God, we've now gotten to a level of complexity and investment and teammates and salary, like all that stuff. Now, like we need like an adult in the room. And so that's what

[00:38:37] I'm realizing. And so I want to learn something myself, but I also want to hire an adult in the room. Right. Well, that's fantastic. Now listen, Ori, this was a delightful conversation. Really appreciate what you and your company and Ethan are doing out there in the space. And we just thank you for your time and we wish you much success. I appreciate you talking to me and like giving a platform to talk about burlap and barrel and all the fun stuff that we do. But we also really appreciate what GS1 does because it's enabled us

[00:39:03] to be such a small, lightweight footprint company across all these SKUs and channels and everything. So I really appreciate the way that you guys have helped the burlap and barrel get to where it is today. Awesome. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Next Level Supply Chain with GS1US. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe to our feed and explore more great episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to share and follow us on social media. Thanks again. And we'll see you next time.