— Mitch Miglis

Yeah, great question. I think health is on everybody's minds these days and, and correctly. So, and I think spices are when, when they rank risk of adulteration, spices are always at the top of the list in terms of supply chains where something happens. Anytime something gets handed off many times there's always incentive for somebody to adulterate something, increase the, the, the weight of it or change mix in wood pulp mix in all this other stuff. And I think that, um, people are always trying to stay ahead of it, but there's so much, so much adulteration that ends up happening in this world and spices are particularly prone to it because they typically change hands so many different times. And so spices are definitely a place where you should be more, more attentive and more watchful. Um, we, we all know, I think in the US people have known to look up for irradiation where often spices were sterilized using irradiation, which means that they would be exposed to radiation, which would kill all the buggers in there. But also people didn't like that they're spice. I mean, they weren't glowing, but you know, people didn't like that their spices were exposed to radiation, which makes sense. And a lot of spice companies also, um, will, will, uh, sterilize using ethylene oxide gas that's called ETO sterilization. The kind of safest sterilization is steam. It has the least amount of kind of, it's not exposed to anything else. And so long story short, with all this, I think you, because you don't get to kind of check the supply chain of a lot of the places of where you're getting your ingredients from, you kind of need to trust that you're buying from a company that you do trust and that you know will do it right and kind of take care of their ingredient and be a good custodian for the quality of what they're bringing to you. The other thing that I've seen is that people are always like, why can't I get a certain retailer's jar of garlic that costs 99 cents? And a good rule of thumb is that like producing food well and paying people equitably costs money. And I think sometimes when we find things that are just a price that's too good to be true, it it, it is too good to be true. And so I would just be totally just be wary of things that are on super sale. We've seen, I've been in so many stores where there isn't a single jar of spices over $2. And so where are they cutting corners? How are they saving it? How are they able to get these spices at these really, really low price? Someone is paying the price along the supply chain and you may be part of, part of the be that are paying the price because of where this came from. So it's really important to trust your companies and your suppliers.