The Startup CPG Podcast

Mott Smith
We are excited to keep growing, especially as the world shifts away from, I think, ghost kitchens as a thing. There is a lot of opportunity for people like us to expand. Every region needs something like this. Every region needs a place where food entrepreneurs can make stuff that is fresh. And when you're doing stuff without preservatives, it really helps to be regional so you're not shipping things halfway across the world. And so all the major population centers need something like this, and the demand has been really strong, and we've seen so many communities around the country, places like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, you know, just really exciting CPG communities.

00:54
Mott Smith
We're excited to start bringing our product to places like this, and a lot of them have some kind of commercial kitchens already, but they usually don't have something like us that's targeting scaling companies. And so we're just excited to get out there and meet more people in this business.

01:11
Daniel Scharff
Hello, CPG ers. Welcome back to the startup CPG podcast with me, your host Daniel Scharff. I'm the founder of startup CPG and host of the podcast here. We've got another great operations themed episode for you here today, but I promise it's entry level. I'm diving in with Mott Smith from our partner amptkitchens for a 101 on what is a commercial kitchen? How do they differ from commands? How do you get started? How do they work as you scale? Who might it be a good fit for? How much does it cost? All the good stuff. After the episode, if you want to follow up with Mott or the AMT team, you could give them a call. Their number is 872240 8731. You can hit up Mott Smith on our slack channel. He's around operations a lot or on LinkedIn. Or you could email them.

02:02
Daniel Scharff
Amptkitchens is amped kitchens and their email is leasingmptkitchens.com. Enjoy the episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Today's guest is Mott Smith, one of our startup CPG partners, the co founder of Amped Kitchens, which owns and operates CPG focused commercial kitchen buildings in LA and Chicago. With more on the way. I recently got tour one of the LA buildings. It was so cool to see how a brand could start there, from getting your product ready to going through manufacturing and starting to scale, and you have pallet deliveries going in and out.

02:43
Daniel Scharff
I was so interested to learn how working in a commercial kitchen can be a really good option for some brands, as opposed to diving right in with a Coman where you might have a quicker route to scale up, but a lot less control and flexibility over manufacturing, which can be really critical in the early days when you're hyper focused on getting your product to where it needs to be and then also being able to flex as those early new orders start coming in. Mott, welcome to the podcast. What got you into this crazy world of commercial kitchens?

03:14
Mott Smith
Oh, man. Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Daniel. We're huge fans of startup CPG and the whole crew. What you've built is awesome. What got us into this crazy business is my business partner, Brian, and Albert and I are really into cities, we're into small businesses, we're into food.

03:32
Mott Smith
And during the time right after the great recession, so many of our friends were starting small food business, CPG and otherwise, and all of them were having the same problem, which is they had, like, some amount of money saved up and they were ready to go, and they were getting totally swallowed up by red tape and bureaucracy, and they were blowing their life savings on, like, building permits and HACCP plans and things like this that were not their core business of creating a great product and marketing it and getting it out to the world.

04:07
Mott Smith
And so we thought, because our background is in real estate development, and particularly building highly regulated buildings in really complex environments, which totally describes food, we thought that we might have something to contribute if we took on the part of building a building that satisfied, say, 90% of the things inspectors care about when they're looking at a small food business, a CPG business. Then we could rent out spaces to companies who could then spend their resources, again, on the things that make them great, which are their product and their marketing.

04:41
Daniel Scharff
So I think it's really interesting that you came at it from an alternative of, hey, maybe don't build your own facility and have to get all this other stuff. Whereas the way I naturally think about it is like, hey, maybe don't jump right in with a in and consider doing it yourself this way. So, I guess, I mean, both can be true. I wonder what the breakdown is of why people choose you or what their alternative would be.

05:04
Mott Smith
Yeah, it's funny. Our sweet spot, and I think the sweet spot for any company that's in a commercial kitchen is probably somewhere between, call it a couple hundred thousand dollars a year of revenue or pre revenue, all the way up to, say, $5 million, sometimes more. I mean, we've got clients who are in the 60, $70 million a year range. But the real sweet spot is about, call it 250 ish, up to about 5 million. And the reason for that is that famously, if you're trying to get a co manufacturer and you're not at the $5 million a year rate yet, the commands that are willing to work with you might not be the cream of the crop.

05:43
Mott Smith
I mean, there's some really great ones who are small, who work with small companies, but even with the good ones at that level, getting time on their lines, getting their attention, getting calls back, can really be a hassle. And if you just got a purchase order from an erewhon or a whole foods and you've got to produce 10,000 units in, you know, two months or whatever it is, you really don't want to be scrambling trying to find somebody who you trust with your baby. You know, the people who come to us, we like to joke that control freaks are totally welcome at AMP because a lot of them are, frankly, control freaks who are like, I want my product to be exactly right.

06:21
Mott Smith
I want to be able to deliver it when I promised it, and I want to be able to make it for what I thought I could, cost wise.

06:28
Daniel Scharff
And that doesn't sound like control freak at all to me. That's like, yes, that's absolutely what I'm going to require and expect. I mean, I have experience across both food and beverage. I worked at a plant based food company where, you know, even I was a product manager on the Mayo business for a while. But my more recent experience is all about beverage. To me, it seems like with beverage you're. You've got a better shot of having something that comes right out to the flavor and the feel of the product. Because I don't know. I mean, unless it's super complicated, like, you know, a lot of the products can be water and then ingredients and I don't know. I mean, it was pretty rare that it wouldn't be exactly what we expected it to be.

07:08
Daniel Scharff
Whereas with food, I mean, yeah, it's a process, right? Like, you get a coman and then you really need to go there and spend time with them. And the thing is not going to come out right at all at the beginning, and you got to have your, you know, your ops people there to help them figure out how to actually make it on their equipment. And, like, things can get stuck in the pipes and just so many different things can happen, right? So it makes sense to me that there could be a lot of risk, you know, immediately jumping in with a co man who maybe they're not going to care about you in the early days because you're small and you're going to be demanding even though you are small, if they're even willing to work with you.

07:43
Daniel Scharff
And maybe they don't even have the right equipment for the thing that you're trying to make the right way. Right. And so you're basically like a very needy baby asking someone to take care of you without offering a lot in return except the promise of bigger future business for a co man. Right?

07:58
Mott Smith
Totally, totally. And we've had companies large and small come to ant for exactly this reason. We've had refugees from Comans who thought that they found the right one and they went out and a year and a few hundred thousand dollars of lost ingredients later, they're like, I kind of figured I had to do it myself. I was just thinking about this one client we had who, that was their experience. They made this company called Keto Farms. They made delicious keto snacks available on Amazon and elsewhere. They didn't have a great experience with their first Coman. They came to AMT. They had the realization that if they were going to succeed in a coman, they were going to have to hire a quality manager who's going to have to sit on the line and watch everything that was happening.

08:37
Mott Smith
They were going to have to help the coman with their supply chain and sourcing the right ingredients. And they realized that by the time they'd done all those things, they might as well do it themselves. Like you said, they even had to buy the equipment that the Comand was going to use. And at that point just have your own facility at AMT or someplace else. And what was cool about it is they actually did eventually go out to a combat man again, but they did it on their terms, they did it on their timeline. And my favorite part of the story was they said that when they went shopping for commands, they actually brought a video with them of their entire process from start to finish.

09:12
Mott Smith
So there was absolutely no question about how the product was made, there was no question about what was involved. And it actually made their negotiations a lot smoother.

09:20
Daniel Scharff
Thats pretty interesting. And yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me just yet, reflecting back on the early days and the learnings and gosh, its expensive. When you do, like, you have minimum runs that you have to do with coma in and if it doesn't come out right, you've got a lot of product that's not right. So, you know, not having that chance to kind of test and learn because you're just going from zero to 100 pretty quickly once you're on those lines. And then also when you're talking about the ingredients, I was just remembering the horrors of, like, having the Ops manager order everything that we thought we needed and then having to check that they sent the thing that we actually ordered in the right quantity, which they didn't a lot of the time.

09:55
Daniel Scharff
And then, like, confirming it's at the warehouse, oh, now they can't find it at the warehouse. And then confirming it got from the warehouse to the coman and, oh, God, like, maybe some things didn't arrive and we're all panicking. And then, like, the worst is when you find out that, oh, all of a sudden, like, the quantity is different the day before a coman run that you've scheduled and you're going to have to pay for which, okay, I could see there being some benefit and peace of mind to just, like, knowing all of those answers at once, because you have the ingredients and you're planning the production. So I think that would have made the ops manager's life a lot less stressful.

10:29
Mott Smith
Totally, totally cool.

10:32
Daniel Scharff
Do you notice a type of founder that you think typically is more likely to choose a commercial kitchen off, going right for a comb in, whether it's the amount of funding that they have or the level of experience and maybe confidence they have about doing that themselves, or. What are the top five things, if this is true about a founder, they're probably going to choose a commercial kitchen. Yeah.

10:54
Mott Smith
So I'd say it's probably less about the founder and more about the product that if you've got a really conventional product that's all branding, like, I mean, the classic example being like, liquid death, it's water in our amazingly cool can. They could go anywhere. There's no advantage to them to self manufacture. There are a million people out there that will can water for you. If you've got a very standard kind of protein bar or something like that, you can find somebody who's going to co manufacture that, or a cookie, you can find somebody co manufacture that.

11:27
Mott Smith
If you have any kind of specialized ingredients, if you've got any kind of functional elements to what you're doing, if you've got a new process, if you've got new packaging, those are the things that kind of drive people into self manufacturing at that sub $5 million level. I mean, another great example of this is every time I mention one of our clients, I say they're one of my favorites. And it's actually true. But I don't want anybody to feel like they're not my favorite, but one of my favorite clients is Zab's hot sauce, and they're on the startup CBG's slack as well. They came to us because they had their recipe, they had their product, they had their concept, they had everything going for them.

12:03
Mott Smith
What they wanted was a bottle that was going to stand out on the shelves, a hot sauce bottle that didn't look like Tabasco or tapatio. And it turns out that all the hot sauce commands in the world use either tabasco or tapatio style bottles. And so they really didn't have a choice but to bottle it themselves. I mean, they could buy the bottle they wanted, which is a very kind of old style Louisiana looking thing. It's great when you see it. When you see it on the shelves, you recognize it instantly even before you read the label. And that was their motivation. And they probably will end up going to a coma and at some point as well. But again, it's going to be on their terms, not a volume where the deal really makes sense.

12:40
Daniel Scharff
That's pretty interesting. And we're in the middle of shelfies season right now for startup CBG. And yeah, the amount of hot sauce is coming in. I'm like, oh, boy. All right, I don't know how you stand out on that shelf, but I think a custom bottle might be one good way to do it. And I know Zabs has done really well, so that's great to hear about them. So overall, for anybody who has not been to a commercial kitchen, which I had the pleasure of doing with your team recently, it was super fun. What is it that you can do there if you're like, you know, just getting your business going? What are all the facilities and offerings that a commercial kitchen would have?

13:14
Mott Smith
Totally. So, well, maybe I could spend just a minute on like, the spectrum of commercial kitchens. Cause there are a whole bunch of them out there. There are a few basic types. There are hourly kitchens that you rent blocks of time at, and there's some really great ones in that space. There are places in La that we love, like crafted kitchens and the kitchen terminal places in Chicago, like kitchen Chicago. And these are really solid places where if you want to try something out, you want to experiment. They're wonderful places to go. They're incubators which provide business training, food safety training, things like that. Some of the originals were like La Cocina and San Francisco, Union Kitchen in DC, Commonwealth kitchen in Boston. Again, really beloved places, deservedly so. There are places to learn and grow.

14:02
Mott Smith
The hatchery in Chicago is maybe the biggest incubator kitchen out there. And it's awesome. I love that place. And then there are ghost kitchens that we all know about. These are buildings where you've got multiple individual kitchen suites. And so it's a room with a door that closes. Some of the incubators have like big open spaces. Kitchentown in San Mateo is an example of this. Again, another great place. Big open space, lots of stations. The ghost kitchens are for food delivery more than they are for CPG. Even though you will sometimes find a CPG company in a ghost kitchen. I actually don't believe ghost kitchens are that long for this world. There's just a whole other podcast we can do, but that's a thing. And then there are catering kitchens.

14:45
Mott Smith
They look like ghost kitchens, but instead of being exclusively for food delivery, you might find some food trucks, you might find some caterers. Catering kitchens tend to be extremely low service. So often there's nobody home. We kind of joke that they're the actual ghost kitchens, because it's like it's you and the ghosts and that's it. And then there are pilot facilities, R and D facilities. There were a couple, there's one great one called pilot works that was all over the country, then suddenly closed down and left a lot of brands kind of stranded. And I mentioned Kitchentown, and San Mateo is another great pilot and R and D facility. And that was a very long way around to saying what we are, what AMT is. AMT is a production oriented commercial kitchen. We are one of the largest facilities out there.

15:28
Mott Smith
Most times you go to a commercial kitchen, youll see there are four kitchens, six kitchens, something like that. Our buildings have between 50 and 60 plus kitchens in them. They range from as small as 150, size of like a, you know, a kitchen in a small house all the way up to say two to 4000 sqft, which would be like the kitchen in a relatively sizable hotel, or, you know, sometimes in the back of house at a food court. We have people doing everything in our building from pilot runs, testing. You know, Applebee's was with us for a while, doing recipe development to pilot production. So this is where you're off the benchtop, as they say, and out of the test kitchen. And now you're producing stuff that you're actually going to sell. But it's still early and you want feedback from the marketplace.

16:18
Mott Smith
Beyond meat came to us to pilot the beyond burger for national sales. And so they were making every beyond burger for every whole foods in the country out of amp kitchens. And then you've got people doing actual production. And again, this would be like a zab's hot sauce that's cooking it up, bottling it, labeling it, boxing it, and shipping it out. And so you can really do anything in a commercial kitchen that you could do in any food manufacturing facility, depending on that particular building's facilities, services, and licensing.

16:49
Daniel Scharff
So let's say in the instance of, I don't know, a hot sauce or a protein bar or something, if you go to a coman, probably they're going to have the equipment that you need. If, you know, maybe there's like, hey, we don't run this kind of product. We can run this kind of product. Okay. Like probably you have the stuff to do it for your kind of facilities. Is it often that you would have all that stuff that you need in one of your kitchens? Or is a brand typically going to have to get some equipment to make the stuff that they need?

17:15
Mott Smith
What a great question, Daniel. I should say that a coma is either going to have the equipment or theyre not. Its pretty common that you go to a coma and maybe theyve got two out of the five things you need, and either theyre going to have to buy them or youre going to have to buy them if they have to rent them or whatever. Our kitchens are like unfurnished apartments, basically. They've got all of the stuff that the health department and the USDA and people like that care about. They've got the washable surfaces, they've got the hoods, they've got the various hand sinks and prep sinks, etcetera. They also have the gas coming out of the wall, the power coming out of the ceiling in the wall, and it's ready for your equipment.

17:51
Mott Smith
But it is a blank slate for you to put the stuff in that you need for your process. And so the reason we do it that way, because a lot of times people expect a kitchen to be fully equipped, that we've got everything from beef jerky makers who only need dehydrators to pasta manufacturers who've got very specialized machines from Italy with handmade dyes. We have a company that is doing boil in a bag seafood dinners that really just needs refrigeration. So it's a full range of things. And we work closely with all of our clients to help them outfit their room appropriately for their process.

18:31
Daniel Scharff
Okay. So there must be certain kinds of products where it could make sense and others where even just the filling, like, oh, it's just going to be too manual. So if I think back on my days at Hampton Creek and later renamed at just egg, like, okay, so they had things like dressings and mayo and stuff. And so it's, you know, I think it goes into the tank. Everything gets mixed up. I don't know, maybe it goes through some pipes, whatever, and then at some point it's going from a filler into the. For them, it was a pet twelve or 16 ounce kind of thing, and then it seals and, okay, everything gets stacked up great.

19:06
Daniel Scharff
How does that kind of stuff work at a commercial kitchen where, like, okay, you made the batch of stuff and now you need to fill all of it. And I've heard you talk about, like, you know, hot sauce and some other stuff, like, yeah. How do you do that in a kitchen on your own? Do they have equipment that they're buying then, to do that?

19:22
Mott Smith
Yeah. So different commercial kitchens have different facilities, obviously. At AMT, we've got several things that support that. We've got the individual production spaces which would have, you know, you would outfit with all the stuff you need to make, say, your hot sauce. You would probably have to get a filler, and you would probably want the filler that works with, you know, your bottle type, et cetera. That's. That would go in your room, and then outside of your room, we have packing rooms, we have staging areas. We have dry refrigerated frozen storage areas. So basically what you're doing is you're putting the product into a package in your production space. Then you're bringing it out into a packing room, quite likely where you're going to be labeling it and boxing it, and then you'll be assembling pallets.

20:08
Mott Smith
And we have a team that actually does help with things like that, moving the pallets into a staging area. And then we also have a team that, when the distributor comes to pick up your pallet, our people are all forklift certified, so they'll move it onto the truck for you, so you don't have to worry about that.

20:23
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so that makes sense. So, like, say, with, like, a hot sauce. Okay. Maybe they've put all this stuff into a big tank or mixer. Sorry if I don't use the right terms, but there's all the product and it's good to go, and then they need to get it into the jar. So the process of getting it from the tank or mixer or whatever it's into the jars, probably there's some kind of machine that they have purchased, which then pipes it from all of the good stuff into the specific jars. So probably that's somewhat of a.

20:51
Daniel Scharff
I don't know, semi manual process for them to then fill it, and then they're capping it somehow, and then they're taking all of that stuff, maybe on a cart or something, into your staging area, where then they're going to probably hand sticker it, or maybe you have a label kind of gun or something, and label those up, put them in trays, stack them on pallets, which your team can help with, and get those pallets or cases or whatever ready to be picked up.

21:15
Mott Smith
You nailed it. That's exactly right. And our clients have a full range from completely manual process to somewhat automated. And we've had people set up sealers and labeling machines and all kinds of things. It's really a complete range. One of the nice things about a facility like ours, and like some of the other ones out there is you really can customize it to whatever makes sense for you. And for a lot of people, especially when they're early stage, having a highly manual process is a great way to stay in touch with your product.

21:48
Mott Smith
It's sort of surprising, but hand applying a label to a bottle, you start to see, like, you're half the bottles, they're not sticking or something, and you start to develop an awareness of some really obvious things you could do to increase or decrease the error rate and stuff like that.

22:03
Daniel Scharff
That's pretty interesting. Okay, so I had the chance tour your facility, and I saw a bunch of different kinds of products being made. I saw, I guess, kind of like a flower company making stuff and, you know, big flower bags. They had a big mixer in there. One company, it looked like they were making kind of like, you know, ready to eat meals or, I mean, like, you know, salads, like box salads, that kind of stuff. And they had a big room and they were just churning them out in there, right?

22:29
Mott Smith
Yeah.

22:29
Daniel Scharff
You know, if you think of, like, it reminded me of, like, thistle or one of those, you know, like, kind of healthy delivery meal services. I know our friends from must love produced there, which is, well, was a frozen product, but I think they're transitioning that now into Graham crackers, maybe. Exactly right. I saw a bakery also making some pretty delicious looking products. I think my stomach just grumbled a little bit thinking about some of the baked goods I saw in there. So a pretty broad variety. So let's say someone like that or just, you know, any CPG brand is coming in. How do they even know what equipment that they're going to need? Right?

23:05
Daniel Scharff
If you put yourself in the shoes of a very early founder and they're like, yeah, I want to make pasta or I want to make chips or protein bars. Like, yeah. How do they even know? Is that something that, like, your team is going to help them with or they need to kind of have already hired a consultant to do all of that help, like built figuring out what equipment they need?

23:22
Mott Smith
Yeah. Yeah. Also an awesome question. It's the full range, so, you know, beyond meat. It was their process engineer that first contacted us, and she already knew the Marion Spectre. Awesome woman. She knew everything she needed. She almost came with, like, you know, her protractor and her pencil and was, like, ready to lay out the whole kitchen. And then on the other hand, we've got people with very simple products who know that they're just going to need, like, you know, a Hobart and that's it. And then in the middle are where most of our clients are. They have some idea of what they think they want, and usually they come to us and it starts a conversation because most everything that people bring in requires some kind of power or ventilation or plumbing or something.

24:02
Mott Smith
And so, you know, we start talking with them and what we usually will do. Quite honestly, weve got a lot of expertise on our team just because weve been through this for over ten years and we see what works and what doesnt work. But we very frequently will refer people to commercialization experts, people like Jamie Valenti Jordan, who I know is really active on the slack here and is a huge help. He works with several of our clients, people like Mark Haas of Helmsman, whos also great, or theres several others out there who we refer to.

24:30
Mott Smith
And often people will have a conversation with somebody like a Jamie or a mark for free for 30 minutes, get an incredible amount of advice as to what equipment they should have, and then quite often, people will engage them to help them design the line and not to be changing the subject away from commercial kitchens and instead to commercialization experts, that is money so well spent, because if you design an efficient equipment line, that can make all of the difference to your gross margin, which can make all the difference to your ability to pay yourself, which can make all the difference to your ability to attract investors down the road and actually have really good exit if that's what you're in the business for.

25:09
Daniel Scharff
So, speaking of margins, what do you think is going to be the difference in margin or just cost per unit for somebody like a zabs or something for making it with you, which obviously has a lot of benefits, especially in the early days, versus going out to a coman and obviously, there's a lot to consider here, right? Of, like, well, you probably aren't going to waste as much inventory because you didn't have to hit a minimum of stuff that you might not sell, especially in the early days when, like, the volume forecast is so binary. Like, did we get Whole Foods SoCal or not? Right?

25:41
Mott Smith
Yeah, exactly. Well, it depends hugely on the volume, as you say, and also on the nature of the product. So one of my favorite examples of this was fourth and heart ghee, which, before they sold, the original founders of Fourth and Heart were with AMT. And, you know, they became Americas second largest ghee company, operating out of, I think, a 350 square foot kitchen at AMT. And they were using all the additional resources. They were just in our packing rooms constantly. They were at our loading docks constantly, and they were just churning out that ghee, and it was amazing. They went to a command, and their unit costs increased substantially. I don't want to give out specific numbers because it was somewhat confidential, but they increased substantially. And I remember asking, so why are you guys doing this?

26:27
Mott Smith
And they said, well, we, you know, we're at the point now where for us to grow and to be go from a $5 million company to a ten or $100 million company, we need that additional capacity. And also, we're kind of tired of running a kitchen, and we kind of run want to spend our time focusing on other things. And so that's really the thing. Your unit cost at Amped or at another commercial kitchen can be extremely efficient compared to a lot of commands. And then it's really just a question of, can you achieve the scale that you want at a place like amped versus a coman? And do you have the quality control at a place like amp versus a coman that you want?

27:05
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so that makes sense. And, yeah, the now CEO of fourth and Heart Max is a pretty good friend of mine, actually lived just down the hall from me here in my building in Marina Del Rey for a while, and then he ditched me to move to a cooler part of LA, according to him. But I know now they have their own manufacturing, which I don't know this from him, I'm just guessing, was probably a result of that. Like, okay, went to comin and, gosh, that was expensive. Like, what are they doing over there? Maybe they don't have a fit for what we're trying to do. And so now I think they have their own manufacturing and are doing that pretty efficiently. Yeah, that's great to see.

27:38
Daniel Scharff
But also kind of, it's like, okay, let's go back to having our own kitchen, but times ten or 50 or whatever it is. Okay, must love, for example, they were working with you, and that's a frozen product. What's it like then, to be making a frozen product in a commercial kitchen? Verse shelf stable? Yeah.

27:54
Mott Smith
So one of the big questions you should always be asking yourself, I'd say like, the three big questions, aside from cost and all the sort of basics that you should always ask yourself when looking at a commercial kitchen are, number one, do they have the facilities that I need to make my stuff? Can, you know, if I'm doing gluten free, can they accommodate gluten free? If I'm doing kosher, can they accommodate kosher USDA, whatever. Secondly, can I get the license or certifications that I need in that spot? And a lot of people who are selling wholesale ultimately need to be able to get third party certified if they want to sell at a target or Walmart. So you want to find out if you can get the kind of licensing certifications that you need.

28:34
Mott Smith
And then finally, are there the services, are there the people there that can help you with this? And so, to answer your question about a frozen product, a lot of frozen products require a dairy license in addition to the traditional wholesale license. And it's funny. California, this is a little bit of a sidebar. Back in the sixties, the dairy industry lobbied to make sure that if anybody is selling anything that might be confused with milk, they still need to get a dairy license, even if it's not milk. So people doing almond milks and oat milks and things like this, all the dairy licenses, which is utterly absurd.

29:10
Daniel Scharff
Nice pun. Utterly absurd. Nailed it.

29:13
Mott Smith
Thank you.

29:13
Daniel Scharff
All right, I heard that churning butter ghee one before, too. Just calling both of those out points on the board. Let's keep going now.

29:20
Mott Smith
Oh, thank you. And you know, my kids would be rolling their eyes right now if they were in the room with me. So for a frozen product like must loves or some of the other frozen dessert makers that we have, it usually requires working together with us, and we will work with them to get their dairy approval as well as their wholesale approval. So there's the licensing component of it. Sometimes people need a temperature controlled room, and again, that's something that we can work with them on as well, you know, providing custom h vac so it maintains the temperature that they need. And usually, frankly, it's just getting the right machines in there. And as you're manufacturing the stuff, being able to move it into our frozen storage as soon as possible.

29:56
Mott Smith
And our buildings all have substantial amounts of frozen storage that keeps things below zero. Negative four, negative five, which is important for the quality of frozen desserts.

30:06
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so that makes sense. And then you mentioned certifications. And just to dig into that a bit, then, so what certifications could someone go for working with you guys, for example, versus what might be difficult. Yeah.

30:20
Mott Smith
So we pride ourselves in being one of the commercial kitchens that supports the full range of certifications. We have people who get their one extreme, just your typical retail license, which means that you're allowed to legally sell at a farmer's market or direct to consumers. You could have a little mail order business. Wholesale is our biggest segment at AMP. So people who come to amp manufacture goods that are sold by third party markets, sold by restaurants, that sort of thing. Once you start getting into meat products, you need USDA, and we can accommodate that. There are a few commercial kitchens around the country that can accommodate it. It's often a function of what the local USDA office is willing to allow for.

31:03
Mott Smith
We even have people operating at a vamp who have what's known as SQF, safe quality food certification, which is the highest international standard. It's a private standard. It's almost like you get a private health department come and inspect you. And when you've got SQF certification, that's usually what you need to sell at a place like Costco or some of the larger retailers out there.

31:23
Daniel Scharff
And some of those first licenses you mentioned, like wholesale retail, like, do you need those if you're a brand? Because I don't really know. I wasn't the ops guy, but at least for the beverage business, I don't know. We had the Coman and they just did what they were going to do. And I don't even know if, I mean, maybe we had licenses that the ops team had gotten and I didn't know about it, but like, do you need some special licenses as a brand to just start selling, let's say, you know, delivering it yourself or selling it at a farmers market in California, or fulfilling orders to air one or something?

31:53
Mott Smith
Yeah, 100% you do. And it's only getting stricter. Back in 2011, the federal government passed something called FSMA, or the Food Safety Modernization act, which raised the bar on what's required. And in addition to co manufacturers ability to manufacture stuff, the number one thing that they provide usually is licensing. Like, it's up to the man to hold on to their retail, wholesale, USDA, whatever licenses they have. And it's such an Alphabet soup of requirements that it can be quite daunting, especially if you're a new brand and you're not the ops person.

32:31
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I remember, I think maybe five, six years ago, there was some cottage law that they passed in California that was like, yeah, it's okay for very small brands to produce limited quantities, like, not in their bathtub, but, like, you know, at least in, like, a kitchen. Some kitchen of some kind.

32:47
Mott Smith
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you'd be surprised how many bathtubs are probably part of the process for certain things. But, yeah, cottage food laws swept the country several years back, and they usually have a revenue limit. So, like you say, you got to be under $50,000 a year or something like this in order to legally be manufactured under cottage food. But what's important is a cottage food license is an actual retail food license. And health departments do inspect cottage food licensees. It can often be kind of, like, hilarious, almost like this is spinal tap type experience of manufacturing food in your laundry room and having the inspector come and needing to show them where you wash your hands and how you keep it clean and lint free or whatever it is.

33:32
Mott Smith
And so there's some pretty comical situations that arise from cottage food, but it's honestly been a great resource for a lot of people to get them started. And a lot of our clients actually had cottage food licenses and just got so popular that they went through the $50,000 revenue limit and needed a separate commercial kitchen.

33:51
Daniel Scharff
Got it. Okay, cool. You know, for anyone who hasn't been to a commercial kitchen, if I can just walk you through my experiences, like, okay. So I showed up in LA. It's a beautiful building. Like, you know, walking around the floors. There are just many doors, like, kind of nondescript doors. And those doors, if you open any one of them, are going to lead to the kitchen, which is that particular brand's space. And, yeah, you said there are some smaller ones. There's some much bigger ones. Obviously, you know, there's a bigger cost for the bigger ones, so you want to choose the one that's right for you. Probably. You couldn't, you know, graduate to bigger ones as you get bigger than some of the other rooms. So, like, I saw trucks coming in and out of there, like, a lot of them constantly. Right?

34:31
Daniel Scharff
So there are deliveries coming in with ingredients. There are, you know, pallets going out, fulfilling orders. And then we walked into a dry storage area, which is a, you know, just had a couple racks in there, pretty big room. And so brands are storing their ingredients and maybe some finished product there as well. And then, as you mentioned, there was also a freezer. And I got some respect from you.

34:55
Mott Smith
Because I just walked right into the.

34:57
Daniel Scharff
Depths of it trying to get that good, you know, inside.

34:59
Mott Smith
You could always tell who's hardcore by whether they walk into our frozen storage and stand there. And that's what you did.

35:04
Daniel Scharff
Well, not many know this. People know this about me, but I was a domino's delivery boy back in the day, and so I used to have to go into that freezer and pull some stuff out of it. So I'm not afraid to go into a freezer. I'm just afraid of it closing behind me.

35:18
Mott Smith
Totally.

35:19
Daniel Scharff
So, Matt, I think I have a good understanding of the kind of stuff that can go wrong at a coman, having worked with ins in beverage and food. And, you know, a lot of tough scenarios there that you might have to problem solve with their team or call in a consultant. What are those scenarios? At a commercial kitchen, I'm sure a lot of your clients have had issues over the years. What's it most likely to be?

35:42
Mott Smith
Yeah. So all the same stuff that happens in business happens whether you're at a command or you're at a commercial kitchen. You could have vendor payments that are slow, supply chain issues, all those normal things. The things that I'd say are specific to a commercial kitchen. Staffing is probably the number one challenge people have, because you've got a big order coming in and suddenly you need to double your team size, and they need to work all night long for three weeks to get it out. And the way people in our community often solve that is we've got a lot of great workers in the building, and our clients tend to know each other and say, hey, do you have anybody who wants to pick up extra hours? And sometimes people can do that, but it still can be quite a challenge.

36:22
Mott Smith
We also have a partnership with Insta work temp agency that provides kitchen your food handler certified team members. So if you do have a big job, you can get temps. That's something that helps out as well.

36:32
Daniel Scharff
Oh, cool. I've never heard of that. That's good to know about as a resource for the community, because people do ask, how do you hire people to staff your commercial kitchen spot in general? You're looking, you're like, I don't know why. It didn't even occur to me. I'm like, no, the team's in there. You're doing the thing like, oh, no, of course you don't want to spend all your time actually doing that. You're going to hire some people. So where do they go to do that?

36:51
Mott Smith
It's a variety of sources. It's everything from just putting ads up on all the normal.

36:56
Daniel Scharff
Indeed.com.

36:58
Mott Smith
Exactly, exactly, indeed. Or monster.

37:01
Daniel Scharff
There you go. There you go again.

37:03
Mott Smith
One of the benefits of being in a commercial kitchen community is it really is often a community and the network is really good. And we've got clients who will actually tell everybody in the building like, hey, I've got somebody who needs extra hours, anybody need any extra help? And people get each other jobs constantly in our community. There are also places like community colleges around have job training programs in culinary. They can be a great resource. As I mentioned, insta work is a great resource. We've got several clients that use them and quite frequently people in the neighborhood are a great network and you hire one good person, it's often amazing how many good people they know and can bring with them.

37:43
Daniel Scharff
Is it a community? Like, okay, startup CPG, we have a slack and everyone can talk to each other. Do you have some kind of a forum or is it mainly you're seeing people in the halls and you have an email list or like where does the community live?

37:54
Mott Smith
It's both seeing people in the halls and we've got little coworking spots in each of our buildings where people hang out. And it's funny, we've got people who have worked in the building for literally like eight, nine years, for five or six different tenants that weve had whove just sort of been around. And when you go to the office area youll see them typing it away at a different computer every couple of years and its kind of funny. So there is the in person element which I think is the best not to in any way say something bad about online communities, which are amazing, but in person is still the best, and go to the co working spot. It's amazing what you can learn.

38:29
Mott Smith
We also have our own sort of slack like thing that all of our clients belong to and it is a great resource where somebody can post like hey, I need an organic certification, but I'm really small and I can't find any organic agency that's willing to work with me. It's very much like what happens on startup CPG, although I'll say your slack is a lot more active than ours.

38:52
Daniel Scharff
Okay, well that's good. I mean it's great to have just a people to reach out to and man, I agree with you, in person is better than online. So it's sort of like, well, you can have one really high quality conversation with somebody in person, or kind of a low quality one with a lot of people, but each have their benefits depending on what you're looking for. But I agree, the more in person stuff, the better. Cause that's when the good stuff really happens. So, yeah, that was pretty cool to see. Also, at your facility, you did have office space where people could come and on their laptops, and you had a conference room as well that I think people can rent out. So if they're.

39:21
Daniel Scharff
If they wanna host, you know, a buyer or investor, whoever, for a meeting, there is a space to do that. It doesn't all just go down inside of the kitchen. Right? Are there any other shared services? So I know, okay, there's. You can store ingredients and obviously fulfill orders and stack pallets. I know your team helps out with that. Like, do you guys help on ingredient sourcing or, you know, any other stuff that would be, like, ancillary services?

39:46
Mott Smith
Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of informal help that happens again, like somebody saying, hey, I'm doing a big order from Uline, and I'm going to be ordering 50,000 boxes because the price is a lot better. Anybody want to go in with me? And so we have things like that. Our managers, our operations team, Sean Hennessy in Chicago, who's our head of operations, and Jason Sheps here in Los Angeles, who runs the region. They're both food guys and have decades of experience between them. And just being around so many early stage CPG companies, there's just a wealth of information that they have informally to advise people. And I'll say people are often wondering, should I go to an incubator space, or should I go to, like, amped if I'm an early stage company?

40:29
Mott Smith
And I think for a lot of people, incubators are a great choice if you want all of the wraparound business training and marketing resources and things like that. And then if you're the sort of person that wants to really build your own network and your own team and plug into something bigger and sort of pick and choose, those are the people that usually will come to a place like amp because we don't require that you work with any particular resources. If you have your own commercialization consultant already, that's awesome, and welcome that. But if you're going for USDA and you need help with your HACCP plan and you don't know who to call, we've got a list of, like, five people who will help you out and it's just having been around for a long time, you develop that kind of informal network.

41:11
Daniel Scharff
Got it. Okay, so probably a lot of people listening are wondering like, oh, this sounds great. Like how much does it cost? And a little afraid because, you know, every dollar counts for an early brand. Can you give us a ballpark? And I mean, I know, like, okay, you're in LA and Chicago, probably the costs are going to be different, but, and those are both major markets, la obviously being one of the most expensive markets in the country. But can you just give people a sense for like if youre this size, it might be this much. If youre this size, it could be at this level. Totally.

41:37
Mott Smith
Well, so let me start by saying how we kind of think about the cost. And you can get it at a super entry level at AMT or another commercial kitchen and kind of dip your toe in, get your license, start producing. And usually it starts to make sense to do that when you are producing at least 20 hours a week or something like that. If you're just going to be doing one eight hour run in the next six months, you should probably go to an hourly kitchen because that's going to be your best bet. But if you're doing about half time production, you should be at a full time kitchen. And our entry level starts at about, call it, you know, 2000 a month, give or take. And that's fairly standard in the industry.

42:21
Mott Smith
So once you've paid for everything, you know, your licensing, your storage, your utilities, all that other stuff, you're probably going to be in for about 30 ish thousand dollars a year at the entry level. And the way we look at that could be less than the overhead at a co packer for a single run. And so you sort of buy yourself a year of production capacity and you can come in and out and you can iterate and you can refine and you know that's your home base. And so again, for about $30,000, that's what you get. Obviously, it goes up from there. And we have clients who are, who've taken down massive amounts of space and are doing, as I said, like 50, $60 million worth of production. And so their facilities cost are going to be a bit more than that.

43:05
Mott Smith
But you can get your foot in the door for, call it about $24 to $30,000 a year.

43:10
Daniel Scharff
Okay? So that would get you one of those smaller spaces that you talked about like could be 200 sqft or 300. Then obviously the cost scales for the bigger kitchens as your business scales. Can you kind of swap around like hey I want to get foot in the door, like oh no, we have a lot of orders now I need to move into one of your bigger spaces. Can I hop next door if it's available?

43:29
Mott Smith
Totally. It happens all the time. Weve had people who were in our smallest space paying the tiniest amount of money selling at farmers markets who got a call on Friday saying thrivemarket.com wants 10,000 units and they have, I dont know if Im allowed to say this on your podcast, but an oh shit moment.

43:47
Daniel Scharff
I also dont know the answer to that. So lets just go with yes, its okay, cool.

43:52
Mott Smith
So they have their oh shit moment that how am I going to do 10,000 units? And they call us up and over the weekend we move into a space thats twice as big and get them set up and theyre selling a thrive market in three weeks.

44:04
Daniel Scharff
Thats very cool. Okay. And then conversely, lets say youre moving into a bigger space, then you have all this equipment and then something beautiful happens and all of a sudden you need to outgrow your commercial kitchen. But you have that equipment now that youve purchased and what are you going to end up doing with all of that stuff when you move to the comin? Whats that process like?

44:25
Mott Smith
Yeah, so it does happen that people end up with equipment that they need to unload. And the good news is there is usually an amazing market for used equipment, often within our building. And some of the most frequent posts you see on our internal slack like system are people who have that happy thing where they're graduating to a coman and they want to sell. Usually it's pretty common stuff that they're selling. It's like I want to get rid of my metro racks or I want things that anybody can use. They always find a home.

44:58
Daniel Scharff
What would be the top couple pieces of equipment like? Most common, somebody's going to need for different kinds of products. For somebody who knows nothing about equipment, like, yeah, what are the top couple ones you're going to see in commercial kitchen spaces?

45:10
Mott Smith
I'm almost afraid to tell you. It's such a boring answer, but it's like it's prep tables and speed racks. Those are the things that everybody needs because no matter what you're doing, you're going to have a food safe stainless steel surface that's washable, where you can prepare stuff and stack stuff and that sort of thing. As far as what actually goes into the kitchen, it really depends on what you're making. And it could be anything from a tilt kettle, if you're doing, for example, ghee and you want to boil off the water and get the dairy components at the top. We've got a lot of people using dehydrators these days, and so you'll see those coming into the building, and you'll see people using kind of.

45:51
Daniel Scharff
What's a dehydrator?

45:52
Mott Smith
A commercial dehydrator. At the entry level, it kind of looks like a closed dryer, except you put food in it, and it literally, it's exactly what it sounds like. It dehydrates the food. And so if you're making beef jerky or if you make certain kinds of preserved foods, it's really cool. And a lot of people now are starting to use them not just as a way of creating more shelf stable foods, but as a way of changing the texture and experience of the food. We've got a great company now doing dehydrated candy out of one of our facilities. They'll turn a gummy worm into something that looks and feels like a cheeto in your mouth, but tastes utterly different, and it's awesome.

46:30
Daniel Scharff
Oh, cool. I know. Freeze dried candy is all the rage on TikTok. That's been pretty. My little niece had some, and I tried it, and it was actually fascinating.

46:39
Mott Smith
Yeah, actually, I got to give these guys a shout out. They're called kanpai foods with a z at the end, and they are just crushing it, and their flavors are so good and so exciting. My wife and I actually did a wine pairing with their full range of freeze dried candies the other night, and I highly recommend there's one they call cosmic crunch, which is sort of like nerd clusters that have been freeze dried. That, plus a nice, dry italian wine. It'll blow your mind.

47:05
Daniel Scharff
Wow. All right, I'm coming over to the Mott household for a wine pairing and freeze dried candy night and a music jam also, maybe anybody who's just listening to the podcast can't see, but both Mott and In our backgrounds, both have a bunch of musical instruments. Mott's got a couple axes there, some nice guitars. He's got his piano keyboard. I've got my trusty ukulele. I've got my cajon drum.

47:31
Mott Smith
I see your cajon.

47:32
Daniel Scharff
That's right. That's right. And probably anybody listening to the podcast has already heard my music without knowing it, because it is the intro music where we strip the vocals. We play you the nice instrumental lead in, but you can you check it out. Why, yes, of course you can. If you just go to Spotify or Apple Music and search for super fantastic two words. It has a nice Mondrian like black background with some bright colors. But yeah, maybe check it out. I don't know. While you're product in your commercial kitchen, give you some tunes.

48:01
Mott Smith
Actually, the connection between music and food is not a small one. And so many of the people at amp are musicians. It's crazy. And when you walk through the facility, so you're describing the experience of coming in the door. You go to our locker room, you get your hair net, you get your beard cover, maybe a smock. Then you walk out through the second door into the food safe area to the hallway. And as you go down the hallway, you will hear just the most awesome tunes coming from people's spaces because people are partying while they work. And it is a total vibe.

48:34
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, why not?

48:34
Mott Smith
That's great.

48:35
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I actually thought a lot about the parallels with music and food. I mean, just for me, having recorded an album, actually, the process was really helpful, especially when it came to working with a formulator. Because, you know, when I worked with a producer or with, you know, artists who are sitting in for my album, like, you really learn how to tell them, like, hey, here's what I like. Here's what I don't like, here's what I'm looking for you to be able to do. Can you do this to it? And it's just like that, working with a formulator, which is really like a food artist, and if you can figure out how to decide what you like and really give them the feedback in ways that they can then understand and work on it, like, they'll make it happen.

49:12
Daniel Scharff
They have the technical skill, a lot of time. It's just making sure that you communicate the vision to them and be. Be specific totally well.

49:20
Mott Smith
And it's also parallel if you've ever made an album, like, you've got a schedule and a budget that are driving the production of this thing, and you could spend the next three years trying to get your guitar tone exactly right. Or you could say, that's good enough, and I want to get it out. And one of the big differences that I hear between commands and self manufacturing facilities from our clients is that at a coman, you usually, especially when you're a small scale company, you don't get to set the priorities for when it's midnight and they have to get this run out and their machine is gumming up because of your formula. And they got somebody else coming in at 08:00 the next morning, they're going to make the decision about how to deal with that.

50:02
Mott Smith
Maybe they're going to change the formulation a little bit so it stops coming up and you might or might not be happy with the result. If it's your kitchen, you get to decide, well, I'm going to go an extra day and I'm going to deal with the gumming or I'm going to change the formula, but I'm going to make sure that I'm happy with the food experience at the end of the day. And so it is closely related to making an album.

50:24
Daniel Scharff
I'm just like, if that's true, then I personally should probably not try to make a product in a commercial kitchen because of my album, where I basically redid it, like almost the whole thing three times because it was my first album ever, which means, like, okay, it's a little all over the place. Like, the music style is very eclectic. Cause I didn't have, you know, one style. I had a lot of different songs.

50:46
Mott Smith
Sure.

50:46
Daniel Scharff
And then I was just growing as a musician, and I went in and I laid down all the vocals, and then I had one friend give me some very good feedback. I was like, oh, shit, I need to redo all the vocals. Which, I mean, for an album, you know, I don't have a lot of listeners to it or anything, but my goal was just, you know, it's an art project and I want to always like it because I know a lot of musicians who if you're like, hey, play me some of your stuff. Like, no, I don't listen to it. I don't want to hear it when you're in the car, like, I don't like it, or it's embarrassing. I just didn't want that. I wanted to always like it and always like sharing it with people.

51:19
Daniel Scharff
And so I worked on it until it got to that place and I redid whatever I needed to redo. And I got session musicians to add stuff if there was a hole in the music. And then that actually kept. I was in San Francisco during the pandemic and had kind of almost finished at the beginning of it, and then basically spent a whole nother year, which kept me in SF when everyone was in, like, Mexico or Miami having a good time. I stayed in SF because I was still going into the studio, which was very empty those days, so you could get a pretty good deal to go in and redo stuff until it was just like, let's say 99% of what I thought it could be.

51:54
Daniel Scharff
And then I learned to live with that final 1%, although that's still bugs me, and I hear it, but the producer was like, it's time. Like, let it go.

52:02
Mott Smith
So totally get it.

52:04
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so maybe I then am the control freak or perfectionist who'd be like, it's just. It's not ready. Like, let's just. I would never get it out to market if I was making it myself. Whereas if somebody else just made it for me, I'd be like, it's fine.

52:15
Mott Smith
Like, well, actually, I mean, this is honestly one of the reasons we do recommend that people work with commercialization consultants, because they will keep you honest, and they will make sure that you don't get trapped in that perfection enemy. The good situation.

52:28
Daniel Scharff
Yes. It was very helpful in definitely some instances where the producer could be like, nobody is going to hear that it's just you, because you're so in the weeds on that it's time to move on. Like, okay. Yes, you're right. Thank you.

52:40
Mott Smith
Totally.

52:40
Daniel Scharff
Yes. So the help can be very valuable. So, Matt, just before we wrap up, what is. What's coming down the pipe for amped kitchen? And by the way, now that we're talking about music a bunch, I understand.

52:53
Mott Smith
Why it's called amped bam. So we are excited to keep growing, especially as the world shifts away from, I think, ghost kitchens as a thing. There is a lot of opportunity for people like us to expand. We see every region needs something like this. Every region needs a place where food entrepreneurs can make stuff that is fresh. One of the trends that we've seen lately is very clean label products. And when you're doing stuff without preservatives, it really helps to be regional so you're not shipping things halfway across the world. And so all the major population centers need something like this. And the demand has been really strong, and we've seen so many communities around the country, places like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, just really exciting CPG communities. And you can see them on your slack.

54:00
Mott Smith
You can see the activity in the location channels. We are excited to start bringing our product to places like this, and.

54:13
Daniel Scharff
A.

54:13
Mott Smith
Lot of them have some kind of commercial kitchens already, but they usually don't have something like us that's targeting, scaling companies. And so we're just excited to get out there and meet more people in this business.

54:26
Daniel Scharff
All right, so scaling into some new cities sounds like to be announced. That's very cool to hear, because, yes, we always hear people on the Slack channel asking about commercial kitchens in the various cities and so far in LA and Chicago, they'll know to check you guys out. And just last question on that ghost kitchens part. What is your thesis around why those are going to go away? And I don't know a lot about them, except I know that when I order off Uber, some of uber Eats or whatever, some of them are real restaurants that I can see here on the west side of LA. And some I either don't know where the restaurant is or it doesn't exist. It's coming from a ghost kitchen. But why do you think that those are going to go away or greatly reduce?

55:10
Mott Smith
Yeah, so this could be also a whole additional podcast that I would love to do. The thing about Ghost kitchens is, the original thesis that Travis Kalodek from Uber had when he started cloud kitchens was that there's all this crappy real estate that's just sort of sitting there underperforming all over. And if we turn that crappy real estate into kitchens, then through the magic of apps and gig workers, we can connect it to these high value consumers who'll, you know, buy up a storm and suddenly high value real estate. The way it actually has come out is that, well, first of all, in order for a ghost kitchen to be successful, it has to be in a location where you can deliver food within ten to 15 minutes to the customers, a high volume of customers.

56:01
Mott Smith
And it turns out that if you can do that, it's not crappy real estate, it's actually really good real estate. Even during the peak of the pandemic, delivery only reached about 30% of total restaurant revenues nationally, if you could imagine, still 70% was drive through, grab and go, stuff like that.

56:21
Daniel Scharff
Even dine in, if you think about.

56:24
Mott Smith
It in really big terms, if youre in a good location and your business is ghost kitchen and youre only selling to that 30% channel, youre leaving that 70% channel on the table, which is crazy. It's also tough because ghost kitchens are a business that's entirely predicated on companies like DoorDash or Uber Eats being willing to lose like $0.80 an order on every meal. And it's like, I don't know if I'd make a real estate bet that requires the main channel to my customers to be losing money in order to stay around. And so they just haven't performed. And what we've seen is cloud kitchens is having a lot of trouble. They're operating at like a 50% vacancy and had to restructure their debt. Kitchen United which was one of the good companies that was out there.

57:19
Mott Smith
They were good guys, but they still basically folded up their kitchen operations. There's a lot of consolidation going on right now in the industry, and I think some locations and some operators will continue to thrive. And then you're going to see new concepts that are going to come out to replace ghost kitchens. I think delivery optimized food halls are the future. There's a place called revolving kitchens in Dallas operated by a really good guy named Tyler Shin. They're high quality, they've got it down. And I think you're going to see more places like that coming out.

57:52
Daniel Scharff
That's pretty interesting to me. That's exactly where my mind was going as well. Man, when I go into Uber eats, like, I don't know, all of the different names of the restaurants, there are almost. They're just like, different themes to me because I don't know most of the restaurants, and it honestly gets kind of tiring to, like, look through all of them. If you're in a pattern where you're ordering a lot, I would almost rather pick something that's just bigger and has more options. That's just one place. And I don't necessarily even care if it's like, a specific restaurant. I care more about the ratings on the food from people like me. And speaking of food halls, that was always my dream.

58:27
Daniel Scharff
Like, when I used to live in New York, I always wish that there was a, like, college style food hall where I could just have a meal plan and go in there and just have, you know, just like I had in college. I don't know if maybe you and I can start that as our next business.

58:43
Mott Smith
So, I mean, you got Italy, you got Chelsea market. You got places like that.

58:48
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. With a meal plan.

58:49
Mott Smith
The meal plan. That's brilliant.

58:50
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I want a meal plan. And it would be very social, too, right? Because, I mean, pretty much everybody enjoys eating around people. Like, I loved those days in college where it's like, oh, mealtime. And you go, even if you're sitting by yourself, you're kind of around people. You might see people. You know, there are obviously some challenges. Like, the meals that you don't use up are going to burn because, you know, you're paying for it, at least in college, probably, like, for a lot of people anyways, maybe your parents were paying for it. You wouldn't worry about as much. Those costs will be very significant. Like, yeah, the meals are still are. They're not going to be cheap. But, you know, what's expensive is ordering uber every meal, because then you have the charges. Like, I mean, I've gone now.

59:29
Daniel Scharff
Fortunately, I'm in a better place where I'm not just ordering in every meal.

59:33
Mott Smith
But when you do, it's okay if you are, Daniel. It's okay.

59:36
Daniel Scharff
I mean, it's. Well, it's hard to do anything to order a meal for under 30, $40, right? So definitely, if you can do something that's, like $20, even, that might feel expensive, but that's actually a lot cheaper than what you're really doing. So I personally would like that. I'm putting that onto the universe. Somebody please start a food hall. But it has to be near me. So I think New York also is a really good market for it, because I think everybody would feel that way. It's like, I know it needs to be within three, four blocks, but then I'll eat most of my meals there, especially now that we're working from home. Might be a pretty good option. Go and get. Oh, yeah, I want some good salad options.

01:00:10
Daniel Scharff
Grab a little bit of whatever, and then I actually also don't feel like I need to be able to just choose whatever, because in college, like, you just ate the thing that was the meal that day. Maybe there are three or four options, and you picked one, and it was always fine. Right?

01:00:26
Mott Smith
So there's a protein, there's a carb, you know.

01:00:29
Daniel Scharff
Yeah. It's like, what's that term? Like, the paradox of choice or. So. I don't know. I don't know what the right word is, but it's like you can get kind of frozen by all of the different options that are out there. Whereas if someone just gave you a choice of three things, you'd be like, well, I'll have that then. So I feel like a food hall would make my life a little bit simpler. I wouldn't have to make so many decisions.

01:00:45
Mott Smith
I honestly think that is a great idea. Thank you.

01:00:49
Daniel Scharff
I have a bunch more, if anyone wants to hear them, of things that I hope someone else does to improve my life. All right, so, Mott, on that brilliant little brainstorm we just did, I'm going to wrap us up here. So for anybody who's interested to learn more about you and amped kitchens, what are good ways for them to follow along? Yeah.

01:01:10
Mott Smith
Well, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm Mott Smith. I'm on LinkedIn. Feel free to send us an email at leasings, ampe dashens.com dot. You could hit us up on Instagram. In fact, tag me on startup CPG. Send me a DM on startup CPG. We're all on there.

01:01:32
Daniel Scharff
We love it. And then you guys probably have an office line somebody could just pick up an old fashioned cell phone and give a call on.

01:01:39
Mott Smith
Totally. Our general phone number is 872-240-8731 a live person should pick up that phone if you're calling during normal business hours and direct you to the right spot.

01:01:58
Daniel Scharff
Okay. And that would be using the phone app on your phone. And if you all still use that. And I guess just. Yeah. Maybe one more last question, which is, let's say you're not in one of the cities that AMT is in, or just generally, how do you find a good commercial kitchen? Probably a lot of people are wondering that.

01:02:20
Mott Smith
Yeah. And even if you are in a city that amps in, I mean, there are so many good providers out there that you should explore. One of the best resources is thekitchendoor.com. It's a listing service. And you can find both kind of one off kitchens, like some restaurant that's leasing itself out, or you can see the real formal commercial kitchens, like the amps and even some of the hourly places that are on there. I definitely recommend checking out. Call your local health department, too, because quite often they'll be able to tell you who the licensed facilities are. And that way, you know, you're going into a quality space and then also, you know, on the slack. I'm sure if there's a brand you like, and you know that they're self manufacturing, this is sort of the obvious answer.

01:03:07
Mott Smith
But ask your network, because people will tell you what's good and what's not.

01:03:12
Daniel Scharff
Very good advice. Yes. Always feel free to ask that in the startup CPG slack, maybe in one of the community channels like Los Angeles or Chicago or Miami. And usually people jump right in with some recommendations. Ma, thank you very much. We really appreciate you being one of our startup CPG supporters. You can always find him on the operations channel and follow up with him on LinkedIn as well. See some cool content, ask some questions about commercial kitchens, and maybe join us for an upcoming to be scheduled music jam here in LA. Let's do it. We'll play only food related songs.

01:03:48
Mott Smith
I mean, we really should do this.

01:03:51
Daniel Scharff
I'm in. I'm in. We'll make it happen. All right. Thank you, Mott.

01:03:54
Mott Smith
Hey, thank you, Daniel. Hey, thank you to the whole startup CPG community for what you guys are doing. I mean, this like, building these networks is where it's at, and what you guys are doing is awesome.

01:04:03
Daniel Scharff
Thank you. We have a great team that loves to do it.

01:04:06
Mott Smith
All right, talk to you soon.

01:04:09
Daniel Scharff
All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast today, it would really help us out if you can leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I am Daniel Scharff. I'm the host and founder of startup CPG. Please feel free to reach out or add me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. If you're a potential sponsor that would like to appear on the podcast, please email partnershipstartupcpg.com and reminder to all of you out there, we would love to have you join the community. You can sign up at our website, startupcpg.com to learn about our webinars, events and Slack channel. If you enjoyed today's music, you can check out my band it's the super fantastics on Spotify music. On behalf of the entire startup CPG team, thank you so much for listening and your support. See you next time.