The Road to Sambazon: A Journey with Acai Pioneer Ryan Black

In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, host Jeremy Julian is joined by Ryan Black, the co-founder of Sambazon. Ryan shares his fascinating journey of discovering acai in Brazil 25 years ago and turning it into a popular superfood in the United States. He discusses the sustainable and environmental impact of Sambazon, the challenges in establishing a supply chain, and the evolution of acai from a niche product to a mainstream health food. Ryan also outlines the future plans for Sambazon, including their retail and franchise expansions. This episode offers insights into entrepreneurship, sustainability, and innovation in the food industry.

00:00 Welcome to the Restaurant Technology Guys Podcast
00:29 Discovering Acai: A Journey Begins
01:39 The Nutritional and Environmental Impact of Acai
03:10 Bringing Acai to the American Market
09:06 Challenges and Innovations in Acai Distribution
15:02 The Acai Bowl Experience Explained
17:33 Expanding Acai's Reach: Retail and Beyond
22:08 Sambazon's Sustainable Business Model
28:36 Launching Acai Bowl Franchises
35:30 Closing Thoughts and How to Get Involved

Transcript

Jeremy: 0:00

Welcome back to the restaurant technology guys podcast. I think everyone out there for joining us, as I say, each and every time I love getting on the air and talking to you guys. I know you guys got lots of choices. So thanks for spending time with us today is going to be a really fun story. Ryan black is joining us. Ryan wanted a, having read and then you. When I talking about a pre show, I'm excited to have our listeners here with where you're at and where you're going.

Ryan Black: 0:21

Right on, Jeremy. Thank you. Thank you for having me here and give me some time to talk a little bit about Sambazon and acai in my story. really, it started, 20, almost 25 years ago, which is crazy. I was 25 years old and had the opportunity to go down to Brazil and have a bowl of acai. and I knew immediately, I was a, I was an athlete at the time, and, had gone to college in Boulder, Colorado, which kind of, is an environmental school and, liberal school. And. learned about, organics and fair trade and things like that. And Sort of this combination of this healthy product that was delicious and it was exciting in Brazil and had this environmental background to it. I was pretty blown away, by both the opportunity as well as the product itself. and I thought to myself, wow, like this is going to be, it had just become popular in Brazil, like in the decade prior, this actually isn't, wasn't something that, Has been popular for a long time in Brazil. It was just something that became new and cool in kind of the nineties. and since it was brand new, a little light bulb went off in my head and went, you know what? This is this is the future of the smoothie juice bar world, or at least would be a nice evolution to it. and I thought that because, acai as this, over 200, Fruits in the Amazon rainforest. Acai is considered to be the most powerful. And the reasons are because it has this pretty amazing concentration of Omega fatty acids, and also has fiber and on its own actually has zero sugar. So it's like this, strong building block of a product. And it was being, used by the Brazilian jujitsu fighters, the Gracie brothers, and like top athletes in Brazil. so I knew it was like, it appealed to me as an athlete. and when I went a little bit further into it, besides the real nutrition, let's just call it, it also had, it was being wild harvested in the Amazon rainforest, which, after a little bit of research, I learned that Greenpeace had come out and said that. Acai is, could be the most important, non wood product in the entire Amazon rainforest for the people and for the planet and for everybody in the Amazon rainforest. And I was like, Whoa. So between sort of my background of sports and this, green sort of education that I got, I found acai if you will, of course it was already popular in Brazil. I didn't exactly discover it or anything, but, I what? What? Maybe the light bulb that went off in my head was this combination of taking something that was delicious and beautiful, combining the nutrition message to it and the environmental sustainability message of it, and then bringing that to America. And that was really like the impetus. Amazon and how I tried it the first time and why I thought that when you combine those three things together You'd have a great market for it in the United States.

Jeremy: 3:10

Yeah, no, and I'm excited to talk about the market and where it's going, but I guess just from your own education, you've been doing this for 25 years. Why do you think it took the, Brazilian, economy so long, or I guess just people, because it sounds like it was something that the people deep in the forest may have been eating for a long time, but it took, You know, till the nineties, as you said, before it became commercialized and became a product, any idea why? Cause again, having been a consumer of the product, it's fantastic. and to your point, all of the different benefits that it has, and you look at it and say, you know what, if it was an apple tree in Washington state, people were eating it for years. And it was something that they took all the time. So any idea why?

Ryan Black: 3:48

It's a really interesting Question. I maybe we have a couple reasons. So So one is that it's very rare. I think in this world now that with globalization, everybody knows everything about it. everything coming up with new ideas is hard. It's very rare to find something in this case, a food that is so number one delicious. it's not some. super nutritious thing that tastes really poor. And People are finding, you can eat the algae or something, it's not like that. It's actually, even if it wasn't good for you, people would still eat it because it tastes really good. The second part is that, the Amazon, the Amazonian diet of this product is actually, they consume like a liter of it a day, like a lot of it. And they consume it at room temperature. It's actually even a, what would it be? not a myth, but like a history of the acai tree, a legend of the acai is that I'm actually going to tell you what the legend is. There was the, a situation in the Amazon rainforest centuries ago. Where overpopulation was happening and, the chief of the tribe basically said that all newborn babies would need to be put to death because there wasn't enough food. There was a ban on new babies. There was a bit because there wasn't enough food to support the, the people. And what happened was the chief's daughter became pregnant. And her name was Iyasa. And Iyasa is spelled I A C A, right? And, Iyasa had her baby, and the chief wasn't partial, and they sacrificed the baby. And, the mom was found the next day. Holding on to a, a tree, looking up at the tree at, and basically the legend goes that they looked up at what she was looking up at, which was the fruit of this tree. They named the tree because of her, her death. And also because of the way that the Asai hangs off of the tree, they called it the tree that cries because it looks like tears almost. And they named the tree. the opposite of ESA, which is acai. and because they discovered the ability for this tree to feed the population, they lifted the ban and the Amazon rainforest grew and became what it is today. So the whole Amazon rainforest is born out of the legend of this acai tree. So anyways, with that being said, your question as to why it hasn't been banned. come why it didn't become bigger in Brazil. I think the reason is because it's highly perishable because you have a, as I was mentioning those healthy omega fats and no sugar, and it doesn't have any acid in it as well. And, fruits in general, they typically have a lot of acid and a lot of sugar in them and that's what protects them. So if you have a glass of orange juice on the table and you leave the room and you come back the next day, you could literally drink the orange juice, right? Like it's not going anywhere, but if you think about something that's, lower pH that doesn't have acid or sugar. and that's fatty like milk as an example, right? If you did the same thing with milk, you'd come back to the next day and the milk would be all curdled and, nasty and sour, and it would be spoiled. So that's how acai. And behaves is more like milk than say orange juice. So you think about this, you got this tiny little berry that grows at the top of a, 10, 15 meter palm tree that you got to climb up there and get. And then the berry itself is, it's almost like a marble. It's like hard as a rock because you have the solid seed inside of it. So you get a really small yield off of it. And then once you take that yield off of it, you mix it with water to make like a pulp, it's highly perishable. So what happened in the 90s was that, and they consume it like right away in, in Brazil within hours of processing it. Maybe they, Put it in the ice box and, as a refrigerated for the next meal or maybe the next day at the very most. So what the, Brazilian jujitsu fighters did is they had fam, the Gracie family, like literally the guys that brought Brazilian jujitsu to the world, they had family in the Amazonian, region. And so I say it was a staple of the diet up there for the people. And they brought that product down to Rio de Janeiro where they lived. And in order to bring it down, they had to freeze it to protect it. And they started mixing it with different things and came up with basically a sugar syrup to mix together with the acai. And that's what became the acai bowl in the 90s. That's the history of it. And, and maybe the reason why, it's perishability is really the reason why it probably didn't, arrive on the scene, until the nineties.

Jeremy: 8:48

and I think even your conversation about globalization, like it's hard to take something that's so perishable and move it across continents because you just can't, at the end of the day it was really tough. And so you're deep in the forest, you gotta get it out, it, the yield is pretty low. And so I think across the board, think you gave a good depiction and good understanding of why now. Walk me through the journey, Ryan. So you were at a place, you were like, dude, this is awesome. I gotta figure out how to get this back. Walk me through, I guess the next few years, because it sounds pretty daunting. You talk about the story of where this thing came from going up 30 feet in the air, getting these little berries, having to break them down to a pulp in Brazil, figure out how to store them and bring them back, talk me through that journey because I know your journey has gone from experiencing that to, I've got to figure out how to get the world, this product that's out there.

Ryan Black: 9:34

Yeah. so I guess I'd say a couple of things. as I started doing research on acai and the Amazon and this whole green peace thing about, supporting the Amazon rainforest and being a source of income for the farmers, now the whole idea of Saving the rainforest or let's just say protecting the rainforest is really about the flora and the fauna, the environment of it, and also the people of it. And what I saw was that you had, traditionally, people who live in the forest, they need to feed their families just like we do. And so the ways that they could earn income. To, feed their families were really limited to, a handful of things that were fairly destructive when you think about it was like soy plant, cut down the forest and plant soy or even worse, cattle ranching, which just, devastates the forest itself, right? or you have, timber. you have, or you have some even more destructive things like charcoal making charcoal or mining or things that are, these are all like things that you can make money doing if you live in this part of the world, but you're basically just, eliminating the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest where you're doing it. Whereas acai, and really the promise of acai was that you can harvest this fruit as a renewable resource. And protect the biodiversity of the forest. And that's what we went, that's what kind of blew us away a little bit. It was like, wow, We could build a business model that we know people are going to love the product itself again, cause it's good for you and it tastes good. And it's, all those things. but we could create a business model that as are, as we scaled, it could actually be a force for good and the Amazon rainforest, and maybe in a way that nothing else could, because there's so much raw material of it and it has this sort of global mass appeal. So while. in, socially responsible businesses in the Amazon were trying to, work with indigenous cultures or things like that. It was more like for handicrafts or things that aren't necessarily like scalable, and Acai had this promise of being a scalable because of the amount of the raw material and also the mass appeal of it. So we. believed that we had a lot of work to do, and you asked started taking you through the steps. it was a long, it was a long way around to get to a supply chain that could support, not only, juice bars and coffee bars and restaurants, but also supermarkets and places like that. So we really, as much as I wanted to go right out and open a retail store or even a, a franchise, I really knew that the supply side of it wasn't quite ready. not that the acai wasn't available. But in order to do it, sustainably, let's just call it, we needed, there's a lot of work we needed to do. And the second sort of piece that we, that was daunting besides, of course, nobody could pronounce it, which 20 years, 20 years later, I think we're almost over it, people actually acai these days. I actually saw something on the news a couple months ago that said that, the most, mispronounced words in the United States, like acai was in like the top three or something like that. So anyways, it's good. It's, it's getting pop culture a little bit. but anyways, the second part was really just the awareness. People had never seen it, didn't know what it is, changing culture, changing, people's eating habits is not an easy thing to do. and those were the two mountains that we had to climb. One, creating this supply chain that could support, supply, let's say, supply the world with acai in a way that, Consistent with the values and aspirations of us as entrepreneurs and to this awareness of what the heck is this stuff? it's very foreign. It's got a foreign name. It looks, it's foreign color. The way you got to make it is foreign. the taste is a little bit, it's foreign people have never tried it before. So these were the two big mountains that we needed to climb. and the way that we climbed them was one really head down investment into the supply side, into the, let's just call it the back end of the business. we built our own manufacturing plant. We started doing, direct sourcing with the growers, of acai, which previously didn't exist. What was happening is people were, the growers were selling it to, guys with boats who were selling it to other boats who were selling it to almost like an open air swap meet. and then people that would manufacture it. Would meet up there. sort of thing. So there was many steps in the supply chain. and we were the ones who basically said, you know what, let's cut all those steps and go direct to the source, and start working with, acai on a daily, weekly, yearly basis to really understand it from a chemical, composition and manufacturing composition. and then the other side of it, As I said, as much as I wanted to go out and open up a franchise or a retail store, the awareness wasn't there. So we really decided to, become more of an enabler in the food service world and really start offering, acai as, to existing juice bars and smoothie bars and coffee bars.

Jeremy: 15:00

Yeah. So Ryan, real quick. Oh, sorry. I was just going to ask for those that have not experienced an acai bowl, whether it's through, just anywhere, walk me through it because I have, but I'm certain, if we've got 2000 listeners to this call, some percentage of them have never experienced it, have never had one, or have gone in and seen it on a menu and said, I don't know what that is, just give me the banana, the banana and strawberry smoothie, cause that's what I came for or whatever that might be. So would you mind just. Painting a visual for us for what is an acai bowl for those that may not have experienced it.

Ryan Black: 15:29

I will paint a visual. so first and foremost, think of a yogurt parfait. Everybody knows what a yogurt parfait, you got a bunch of white stuff, which is yogurt. And then you've got granola and berries, and you can, you could actually put anything you want on there, right? You could put pineapples, you could put, coconut. You could put cacao. You could put anything you want. Okay, now, so it visually looks like that, except for the white stuff is now purple and that purple stuff is acai and acai. It's a fruit. Okay, grows on a palm tree. it tastes like a mix of berries and chocolate. it's not actually too sweet. which is nice. So you think of it, and that's the way I also thought of it when I first have it was because it has that dense, nutrition in it, I thought it would be like the base for smoothies going forward. So think of it, have yogurt is a base in a parfait. I say he's like the base and you can make a smoothie with it, or you can make a bowl with it, that's really just a matter of the liquid that you put in it. but the beautiful thing about it is. Changing visuals a little bit. Acai is like a pizza. If you like pineapple and Canadian bacon, that's your pizza. If you like pesto and something else, that's your pizza a little bit. So acai, it's like this base. And if if you, sometimes people ask me, like, how many flavors you got? I was like, we got one, right? It's acai. And the reason is because as the base, If you like, mango and coconut, that's what you order today. You want mango and coconut on your acai, and it becomes this amazing sort of flavor mix of mangoes and coconut and acai and things like that. If you like, strawberries and blueberries and, chocolate, cacao nibs or whatever it is, or Nutella or something like That's the acai bowl that you ordered today. And so you have literally a thousand different combinations based on all the different superfood toppings and granolas and fruits and things that you would put on top of this base of acai. Does

Jeremy: 17:31

thank you for that. And again, I'm very familiar with it. Like I said to you, pre show, I have some in my freezer that I bought, which kind of leads me down the path of, so you built the supply chain. You found this, you found these barriers, you figured out, you know what, I got to go figure out how to get them from where they are today in a sustainable way, that's not going to hurt the environment. It's not going to hurt the people that are there. and then bring it here. And And ultimately the thing that I guess I'm excited to have you share is you brought a product that was not known 25 years ago to market to the point that now it's one of those misnamed, mislabeled words that, that Americans can't say. And so talk me through that path because I, you talked about doing it through some juice bars, you talked about doing it. even in retail outlets walk our listeners through that path, because I think it's pretty amazing what you've been able to do. and, I think it's really a kind of a cool story and I'd love to, I'd love for people that have listened to it, haven't don't know what it is and now they go into their local Kroger and they go, Oh, I just heard about this on this podcast. I got to try it out because Ryan told me how

Ryan Black: 18:28

Yeah.

Jeremy: 18:28

this thing is.

Ryan Black: 18:29

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. so, we, as I mentioned, we started supplying juice bars and one of our, our first customers was juice it up here in Southern California. and we met with the owners and they were like, you guys are wild and what the heck is this stuff? But you know what? We believe in this, we're going to try it. and they gave us an opportunity. and it started selling really well. they're all, they're still, great partners, 20, 20 plus years ago. but they were really the ones that were the first guys to, of somebody with a real business to really give us a chance. And so people started going to the juice bar and we would both sell acai smoothies and acai bowls. And again, the difference is only the amount of liquid that you put in. If you put, because acai comes frozen. Think of it as a frozen, it's a frozen puree. So you put a little bit of liquid in it to blend it in the blender. and it's pretty thick. So you pour that into a bowl and then you put your toppings on it and then you eat it with a spoon. That's an acai bowl, right? if you took that same frozen acai, but instead of putting a, say a couple ounces of liquid in it, you put 12 ounces of liquid in it. now you have a liquidy smoothie. And it's, if you put bananas and strawberries in there with, say, some, plant milk or juice or something like that. Now you have a smoothie and you drink it, right? It's not that different. I believe that, Juiced It Up started with smoothies and then eventually got into bowls. And that's actually been an interesting, experience over the last 24 years as well, that even though we started in 2000, we went through this journey of, smoothies and juices and things like that, I say bowls actually didn't start getting popular until 2015, like it literally

Jeremy: 20:17

only been the last 10 years or so. I, I think I was telling you pre show I've been now places, lots of different places where I'm like, Oh, that sounds really good. Whereas before I only ever thought of it as a part of a smoothie, having grown up in Southern California, I've been to juice it up and I've had, that was probably my original ironic introduction to acai was that, and back to your point, then I saw it at retail and said, Oh, let me pick that up.

Ryan Black: 20:39

Yeah. and that's what a lot of people did. And they, they would then start coming to us and saying, Hey. I love this stuff. I want to eat it, all the time, but I don't want to have to go to the juice bar to get it. Can, can you make something that I can buy at the market and make it at home? And, that was about three years into the business, two, three years into the business. and that's when we started. offering acai frozen acai packs. We call them. It's like a puree. we started offering them to local health food stores in Southern California. And Jeremy, since you're from there, you probably know Mother's Market. That was one of our first accounts. and then we were able to get it into Whole Foods in Southern, California, Whole Foods. and, and then we became a demo company and we, and I would jokingly. We just went to these stores and gave out samples and put acai in people's mouths nonstop everywhere we could get an opportunity, whether it was a rock concert or, a music festival, or it was a sporting event, or it was at the concert. Yeah. mother's market or the Whole Foods or wherever it might be. We were just sampling that because once you taste acai, like you never forget it, it's something that's new. and it makes that impression on your head and you go, Oh, it's like when, when you try something new, food wise, around the world, you you remember that. that's a new experience. It imprints into your brain. So anyways, as a company. We then were on this path to try to increase food service business and support juice bars, restaurants, coffee bars, things like that. and the guy that had three stores turned into the guy that, a chain that had five and then a chain that had 25 and then a chain that had a hundred and. now we're working on chains that have, five, 10, 000 stores, but it started, all started out with, the guy that had one location and then five locations. and then a similar path happened really on the supermarket side where we got into a natural food, store, mother's market, which had three locations at the time or whatever, and then into a division of Whole Foods and then into, Multiple divisions of Whole Foods. And then the next thing you know, we were in, Ralph's and Kroger and Publix and places like that. And, Costco and Walmart and Target and things like that. it really has been a gradual progression of us continuing to focus on product and product innovation and supply chain. and then on the market side, continuing to support, all kinds of different outlets, that wanted to bring something healthy and exciting into their menu, and, it used to be just the juice bars who had it, and then it turned into a bunch of breakfast places that wanted to have it now you're starting to see, bigger, companies looking at it in the coffee world or in the fast casual world. Or, I ultimately believe it's going to end up in the QSR world in the fast food world, because that's what, that's what Kids want today, they want something, they love acai. And so I think that, who knows, maybe one day we'll see acai in McDonald's.

Jeremy: 23:47

Yeah. and it's funny, again, we were talking about a pre show. I've got two daughters that both, we buy it at Costco and it's always in our freezer. and, as long as somebody, the whole house is awake because nobody likes to turn on the blender at six 30 in the morning on Sunday morning when the house is trying to sleep in because I got a bunch of teenagers, but, but in general, it.

Ryan Black: 24:03

I got a solution for that,

Jeremy: 24:04

Which,

Ryan Black: 24:04

we, yeah,

Jeremy: 24:06

actually where I was going. You guys have innovated so much from the product that I know. So I'd love to have you talk through some of that, Ryan, because I think you guys do have lots of solutions. And I think it's amazing how much you guys have innovated this product. Cause it's not just take it or leave it. This is what you get.

Ryan Black: 24:22

yeah. It's interesting. fun sort of fun fact. and we'll talk a little bit about the innovation on, in both channels, but really more on the supermarket channel. and then we'll circle back to food service. But, interesting thing is that like in Brazil, we talk about these little frozen packets in Brazil. Certainly when we started, that was the only thing available, right? Like that you, you'd be surprised to know that we have. Way more innovative products in the United States with acai than you would find in the home country. They were really working more just with the raw material in a bowl and in a cup, really. And maybe a kind of a smoothie, but not so much. But that's it. We took that raw material product, brought it to the United States, and then really started focusing on creating a variety of different products. we sell, like you mentioned, Costco, we market an acai juice, that we make from acai, and that's a big seller, especially at a place like Costco. A lot of people buy that juice at Costco, and they go home, and they pour some of it in their blender to make a smoothie. and not even use the frozen. So we went into the juice side of it. We went into the sorbet, like the scoopable acai side of it. more recently, we developed, what we call a ready to eat acai bowl. That's for the supermarket and you can find it for 2. 99 at Walmart or, it's a very affordable product at, Target or Walmart or Whole Foods or Kroger, you can find this product and you really, you just rip the top off of it. It's got a little sidecar with granola or with coconut in it and you just dip it in there and you eat it. So no 6am blender problems, for this product. Also proud to say, which is consistent with sort of the DNA of the company is that product that I'm talking about, that ready to eat bowl that you could find at your supermarkets. it's in a hundred percent compostable package. So there's no plastic in it. and, Yeah, it's consistent with what we've been trying to do from the beginning, which is, create a business that's not only, good economically, but also good environmentally and good socially. touch. And there's actually a term for that. triple, it's actually called the triple bottom line, that triple bottom line lens of looking at your business from an environmental perspective, an economic perspective and a social perspective. and making sure that the bottom line or the profit of each one of those, lenses is, is where you want to be and is consistent. and with that, you have, if you can make all three of those a success, then you have what's called triple bottom line success. And that's the company of the future that we really want to be.

Jeremy: 27:05

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Ryan Black: 28:42

Yeah. Thank you. so from the very beginning, again, the first plan was to create this retail environment, cause that's what I experienced in Brazil. it was similar. I've heard, or read, I should say, in Howard Schultz's Starbucks book about that third place away from home where people go and they congregate in this community and they hang out sort of thing. And in Brazil, that's what I experienced. But instead of having a cup of coffee, it was having an acai bowl. And so I was like, okay, so this is cool. It's got the tropical vibe. You got good, good music thing. the supply chain that we've built has an opportunity to communicate about, fair trade and environmental sustainability, and all kinds of positive things and optimistic things for, for the customers, frankly speaking, and the product, yes, we sell acai as a product, but it's really the, Acai is a carrier, if you will. It's a vehicle for that message of sustainable development. And actually, Sambazon is a, an acronym for sustainable management of the Brazilian Amazon. that's the way we founded it on day one, because we wanted to have this, positive energy from really the acai palm tree. All the way to the palm of your hand. And we actually have coined a term we call palm to palm from the palm of the tree to the palm of your hand. And so it's very difficult to, it's literally impossible to tell that story behind a freezer door in a supermarket, Or, or behind the counter at somebody else's juice bar, it's very difficult to do that. And really from the beginning, we've been, fixated on this idea that once the supply chain is built to be able to supply the masses and a, and B, the awareness is there to, to be successful with us, IE, without killing ourselves, we would come back and launch our own retail business. As we've planned for 24 years. So in the last few years, we began working pretty seriously on our own retail concept, and trying to take the challenges that we've seen with us, I, or with us, I, your retail concepts. away so that the experience for the customer is seamless, and that has to do with the speed of service of how long it takes you to get a bowl. Cause I, I say, again, that whole idea of taking a frozen fruit out and, cutting the packs and put it in the blender and mix and other stuff and doing all those things. it's really time consuming. and that's not something that, you might think that you open a store and you got a line out of the door that's actually a good thing. It's actually not a good thing. What would be much better is if you had, twice as many people coming through your line in a day instead of people standing in line and waiting. we've been working for over a decade on The intricacies of the acai bowl making model, if you will. And we actually opened our first store in 2011. I think we were one of the, actually, I know we were one of the first few acai bowl shops. dedicated acai that ever opened in this country. but we did that in order to not necessarily start competing in that market, but really just start learning in that market, learning how we connect with customers, learning how we make acai the best way, learning how we refine our menu and how we refine our guest experience and, guest journey. And so I'm really excited to say that in the last couple of years now, we're starting to put our retail locations out. We've chosen to, do a couple things. One, we started putting them in high traffic locations like airports. So as an example, down in the south, you have, Charlotte airport, which is the number 10 airport in the world. You have Atlanta airport, which is the number one airport in the world. with Sam's on acai locations inside of the airport where travelers can go through, breakfast, lunch and dinner and get an acai bowl and get it fast, get it within 90 seconds, even when it's a very busy time. and that's what we do. a really fantastic thing for the brand, for the consumer. and, more recently we have, launched a franchise program, just in the last few months, actually. and now we're looking at, putting our first, acai bowl franchise retail locations out on the street. I would say In a neighborhood near you.

Jeremy: 33:15

and I guess talk me through, because I do get this question from time to time when people are in the place of trying to understand the franchise, is it. Primarily non traditional locations. Is it end caps? Is it brick and mortar? Is it inline? Do you need to have a drive through? Talk me through what the ideal franchise model, is it a brand that has 400 other restaurants and wants to get into this? Is it a guy that's a health food nut that, runs a yoga studio and runs a CrossFit gym. And now he's now he or she wanted to do this. Talk me through what you guys are looking for is as you guys are launching into the franchise world.

Ryan Black: 33:45

Yeah. so a couple of things. we as a company are, pursuing both non traditional locations, which is airports and healthcare and universities, as well as, franchising, which would be more, as you called it and cap or, strip mall or, malls or something like that. So we're doing both, testing out both. Yeah. We do have a corporate store, here in Southern California that I mentioned, we opened in 2011 and we're looking at some more, corporate stores, as really more to learn. you mentioned the drive through model, something we'd love to try, and. going back to that sort of speed of service, which we feel like through some of our own proprietary dispensing equipment, we've created a very quick speed of service, which we think gives us a leg up a competitive advantage, into acai bowl making. It is a, acai is definitely in our DNA, as you can imagine. and, in terms of, our perfect franchise partner, we are looking for partners who. Have experience in the franchise, food and beverage, market. I think we'd be, we're looking for people who, know what it's like to have to operate and develop and, have an HR department and maybe have a construction team and these sorts of things. So we do

Jeremy: 35:00

with lease

Ryan Black: 35:01

that,

Jeremy: 35:02

And yeah, all those kind of fun things. Sorry.

Ryan Black: 35:04

yeah, absolutely. I think we've waited, we have literally waited 24 years in order to, to launch our franchise and, we have some pretty, aspirational growth expectations about, that, we've been waiting and we think that the opportunity is now there. And we want to find partners who, have the, the appetite and the skillset and the background to really, match with that, growth trajectory.

Jeremy: 35:29

That's awesome. how do people get in touch? How do people learn more? How do they figure out, I'm sitting here listening and I'm like, Ryan's awesome. I love having us. I was in Charlotte and I love the bowl. Now I got to have one in my hometown. I got to put one on my college, college campus for my kids, whatever it is, tell me more about what that might look like.

Ryan Black: 35:45

The easiest way to get ahold of us is on our website. there is, or you can simply, you can email info at samazon. com like we will get it, we will see it. or, if you want to go onto the, onto the website, you can go into the franchising, bull shop franchising section of the website. And you can find, next steps on how you get involved with Samazon and become a partner, on this amazing journey.

Jeremy: 36:10

Awesome. Ryan, I, I am grateful for your discovery 25 years ago. Cause I am a consumer. I enjoy the product. I promise you, I had no idea what it was 25 years ago. So it's awesome that you brought it back to the States and I get the privilege of having it. thank you for sharing your story and to our listeners, guys, we know that you guys got lots of choices. So thank you guys for spending time with us and make it a great day.