— Char Nolan

So we're a social enterprise and as we were forming our company, we were trying to figure out what the right way was to kind of tie our values and what's important to us, to our like kind of business operations. And so there are two ways that are popular. A public benefit corporation and a B Corp. Now, a B Corp is a certification that you get every year based on checking a number of different boxes. And if you kind of total up your score, and if your score is above a certain amount, congratulations, you pass the test, you're a certified B corp and you work with them to, to kind of verify it. And they're making sure that anyone says they're B Corp. They've kind of evaluated the companies and their responses and all that stuff, which is really wonderful. We don't have our B Corp certification, not because we don't respect it, but just because we haven't, we, we haven't done it. And in the world of certifications, well we have done for ourself is we are a public benefit corporation and we have to reincorporate our company at some point because what that does is that creates, in our company formation in the way that we're structured, it says that every company has to maximize shareholder value. And you know, that can create all kinds of bad impacts of, of, you know, saying who cares about the environment and who cares about these people, the people that own this company are making the most money. And that didn't sit right with us. And so right as we were kind of coming into being, there was this organization of a public benefit corporation, a new formation that said actually you're allowed to have two priorities. And that is one, to kind of maximize shareholder value, but an equally important priority is your public benefit. And you can state whatever your public benefit is, but then it's codified into your company's DNA. And our public benefit was to connect small holder farmers to high value markets. And that's what we do here every day. We make sure that a lot more of the money stays in the pockets of the small holder farmers rather than intermediaries. And we kind of make sure then we're able to get really high quality spices and they kind of work together because we're able to pay the farmers more, they're able to grow spices better and without having to cut corners regeneratively organically in all the really different wonderful ways. And so we're a certified public benefit corporation. It's in our DNA, it's in how we do things. And we wanted to make sure that even if, let's say me and Ethan, my co-founder are no longer running the company, which we don't have plans to to change that, but if we do in some future, that will still be in the company's DNA and we won't be able to separate ourselves from it. And in fact, our employees, our customers can all literally take us to court if they feel that we are not living up to our public benefit. So we're like, let's, let's put some stakes behind this, like let's do it for real and let's code it into our DNA and that's why we chose to become a public benefit corporation.