Maureen Ballatori
Appearances
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Whereas if a company makes a mistake or something happens, it is very common to publicly say this thing happened and here's what we're going to do about it. Because what does it all come down to is trust. Your brand is building trust with your consumer that you can know me for this product or service and I will consistently deliver on that and you can trust me to
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
that the apple's gonna taste relatively the same. The wine's gonna taste relatively the same. There's gonna be, those are agricultural products. So of course there's variation, you know, from the land and the wind and the rain and the sun, you know, year over year. But by and large, you are trusting that brand to deliver a consistency to you.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So then when something happens that the brand falls short on that, whether that's a cybersecurity attack or that's something happened in the supply chain or whatever it is, it is common for companies to send a message out to their followers that is transparency first. This thing happened. We are sorry. We take responsibility.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And here's what we're going to do to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And I should also I spent five years working at a law firm, so I should also preface that by saying I shouldn't say make sure that it's not going to happen again because you can't promise that. Right. Can't guarantee anything. We here's what we're doing to protect ourselves from this in the future.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
You know, something like that, right? From a legal perspective, I'm not an attorney. This is no legal advice, whatever, you know, but in the grand scheme of things, making sure that you're being transparent.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So dairy is currently my favorite food and my favorite food memory. You hit me with this right before we went on and I was like, oh my God, I don't know that I have one. I guess, you know, I grew up on a dairy farm And so maybe that's where some of my secret love of dairy comes from is just knowing where it comes from and being connected to that experience. So perhaps mine are connected.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Mmm. Well, probably depends on what it is. Because taste, you just made a taste reference. Taste is first and foremost. Yes. If someone buys your product and it tastes like crap, they're not going to buy it again. That's correct. And they'll tell their friends, don't buy this. Yeah. Because that is the number one driver of purchase and repurchase is taste. Everything else comes after that.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Taste is number one. It is the, do I think this is going to taste good? Studies have shown that that is the primary driver of purchase. Now, packaging makes a difference. Sure, it can catch your attention on shelf. And so packaging may drive curiosity, which...
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
might compel the purchase right they're like oh that looks kind of cool i might want to try that but if they don't think because of the way that it's it's explained or the way that it's shot or the way that it looks in the bag if they don't think it's going to taste good they're not going to buy it because why but why would you that's the primary use case of food is to consume it
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So you want it to taste good, you know? And then there's all sorts of other drivers that are sometimes personally motivated, right? Like if somebody's like, oh, I seek clean label or I choose vegan or I have a necessity to be gluten-free, right? Like those things are also factors, of course. What your question was more so about what do you do if...
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And that just growing up on a dairy farm and being close to agriculture, like eating green beans out of the garden. And literally my dad had this milk jug that he would go down to the tank in the morning and like fill it up with raw milk for our breakfast.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
something doesn't go right right and so like i think taste is a little bit of a of an outlier of a scenario if it's you screwed something up it is that transparency angle right of what what do you do to fix it
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Now, a really interesting thing that's happening right now that I think we could talk about for a bit is the milk contamination, right? That's happening right now. I'm far from an expert on that subject. I'm far from even an amateur. I just know it's happening and I know it's bad. And so I have...
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
I've spoken with some friends at BioISAC who are working on that and they're aiming to make sure that the farmers are protected from a cybersecurity standpoint because it's a big question of where did this start and how did it scale and how big of a problem is it and how big is it going to get and where did it come from and nefarious behavior.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Yes, please. Milk as a brand. So not, I'm not talking about a brand of milk, right? Like Coca-Cola owns Fairlife. I'm not talking about Fairlife. I'm talking about milk, the agricultural product. What does it mean for an attack like that for the larger landscape of the milk industry? It means exactly what we just talked about with the other issues. It means concerns of trust, right?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
For this new issue is just begging the question for people who were already, consumption of fluid milk has been declining for a number of years. I want to say at least 10. It's been declining rapidly. Value-added product consumption is huge.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
But if it's like a sharing thing, that's nasty. If you think about it, that's from a food safety perspective, there's a lot of issues with that. A lot of times that board is wooden. And so a lot of contaminants can- Very porous. Exactly, exactly. So, but all that, I digress.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
The point being people are consuming a lot more value added, but there's been a decline in consumption of fluid milk for the last 10 plus years. And so what will this mean? What will this scare mean for the consumption of dairy products? from the general public, what will this look like on the chart, right? When we look back at 2024, will we see a dip from this? Who knows?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And I think that that will also be determined by what happens from here because we're still new in the development of this, right? Yeah, very new. What's...
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Yeah. Yeah. There's also a big controversy on milk for plant-based milk. What can be called milk? Why is plant-based? So I'm doing a talk for a dairy convention here in a few months, and I'm talking about consumer trends in the beverage industry. And one of the things I plan to reference is plant-based beverages.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And so when I wrote my description for that talk, I put in that we'll talk about the rising trends of plant-based milk. And they said, you cannot refer to it as milk.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
you have to refer to it as a plant-based beverage oh okay i could see i could see where people would be upset by that and it doesn't exactly reflect because it isn't milk right it is just a plant-based beverage right but nobody wants to say plant-based beverage that's well it's one of those things that that the brand sort of got ahead of the in the branding got ahead of the industry in that interesting right yeah your plant-based milk alternatives
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
started coming into the market and no one said you couldn't call it milk. And then all of a sudden there's all these milk alternatives on the market that are plant-based beverages. And then the dairy industry was like, wait, there's, why can they call it? That's not milk. Why can they call it milk? But it was, you know, the regulation takes a while to catch up and right.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So there's no there's no one saying that you can't say that. And I suspect that what will happen is we'll get to a point where the government will say in order to call yourself milk, you have to come from an animal of some kind or otherwise you have to call it a
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
alternative or something like that like we have a client that has a plant-based cheese it's a plant-based parmesan and so they have to on the package we had to designate dairy-free and so it says like in small letters dairy-free and then big letters parmesan and then below that style so dairy-free parmesan style cheese it works i mean i'm sure somebody will accidentally mistake it for parmesan but that's okay you're surprised or not i don't know
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Right. So like that was just my own understanding. That was my own understanding. Sorry, everybody. I'm just curious. A2 milk is a lactose free milk. And so yes, that is still milk. Wow. Okay. Like I'm actually learning things today. This is amazing. And again, in terms of what the regulations currently say, plant-based milks can call themselves milk. We have a sunflower milk client.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So it's sunflowers and water. And the way that they blend it, it is a milk, plant-based beverage. And so they call it a milk and they are allowed to. But technically it is, you know, it didn't come from an animal, it came from a sunflower.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Yeah. And throw a scoop of flavored protein powder in there too. And you're doubling the protein and got more flavor and then it'll taste even more like ice cream.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So I went to school for graphic design and illustration. From the time I was a kid, I always loved art. Like I, that was my favorite subject in school. You know, I won't talk about like, you know, you asked about a memory, like a favorite food memory. I have a favorite art memory. I remember the first time my art was on the news when like that was a thing.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And like I had made this mask in kindergarten or first grade or something and it was on the news. And I just remember distinctly thinking this is the coolest. I was just so amazed at the art angle, but I never wanted to be a fine artist because I loved business.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
from a young age to like not when I was in kindergarten or first grade, then I just wanted to like cut and paste things onto a piece of construction paper. And you know, it was all well and good then. But as I continued to do art through high school and college, and I just always loved the business angle.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And so that led me to advertising and marketing because I could apply my graphic design skills and art skills to a medium that I felt was making a difference. And so then I just really threw fuel on that and, you know, took it to a whole other level with Agency 29. So really the reason why we focus in strategy identity marketing is because the strategic direction is the most important part, right?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
I talked about that ready, fire, aim client. You know, if they had planned first and aimed strategically, right, at who they were looking at, then they could have done the identity to align with that. And the marketing would all fall in line. And that's how you build the brand.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And that's how you build longevity, build strong businesses, grow top line revenue, hire more people grow more communities, right? That was what I cared about. And so after I went to school for graphic design and illustration, I started the agency 29 as a freelancing side venture and did that for 10 years while I worked full time in professional services roles.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
I was at a law firm, I was at a scholarly publishing company. And then after my two kids were born, my daughter's eight. So my son is nine and my daughter's eight. And when my daughter was born, I just decided not to go back to work and take the freelancing side thing to a full time thing. So that was
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
eight years ago, and then we really saw the opportunity in food, beverage, and agriculture to niche down into those industries. I saw the writing on the wall, like probably five or six years ago, and then it took me some time to get convinced that there was enough volume there, right, to make sense, to support the business. Four years ago, we niched down. So that was in 2020.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
We niched down into FoodBevAg. And the reason why we have why I'm so connected and why I know people is because I make a point of anybody that I meet in the industry because it's so it's so much of a community in FoodBevAg that when I find someone who's doing that work, I just like I call them or I email them or I DM them on LinkedIn and I reach out and like, hey, can we chat?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Because we both love this industry. And it's rarely a no, especially if it's agriculture. If it's food and bev, you know, and like you're really focused on like scaling a CPG, you know, and your resources are limited and like every second matters. I have had no's from CPGs on occasion. But if I ask a farmer, can I come out and see your operation?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Can you take me through or a manufacturer of food or a beverage? Can I come through and see what you're building? They love to show it off. And so I've built connections that way and it's a true personal joy.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So I will answer that first from a personal perspective, and then I will answer it from what I believe to be my, well, what is my perception of the industry from that perspective? So for Agency 29, it's really important from a risk management perspective for us to make sure that we've got our T's crossed and our I's dotted.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And so some of our clients, especially those that are in more regulated industries like banking, we have worked with clients that are in banking, insurance, you know, that sort of thing. They also have requirements for how we manage their data that we receive from them.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
But looking back now, I'm really grateful for that experience. And I'm sure it's one of the reasons why I landed in food, beverage and agriculture as our specialization at Agency 29. But it was a lot of like just walking through the creek and exploring.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So from that perspective, I've learned a lot about what sort of checks and balances are necessary for us to keep in place that it's like, Oh, well, and we don't treat anybody differently. If, if the financial firm is saying our data needs to be managed in this way. Okay, great. We had an opportunity to be educated and now we treat all of our clients data in that way. Right.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Where we're ready to go. Yeah. More protective. And then from the industry perspective, It's funny. So we both know Andrew Rose, and I'm sure he will be delighted to hear his name mentioned on this podcast. And he and I know each other through Grow New York, which is an international food and ag competition that happens in upstate New York.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
He was a judge in some of the early years, and I'm involved. He does an ag chat and chew every other Friday morning every which is just like an open session of industry professionals. If you're interested in agriculture, come and hang on every other Friday morning. That really, he's a cybersecurity guy and is as much as he is an agriculture guy.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And so it has really opened my eyes in conversations with him and BioISAC about how much cybersecurity actually permeates agriculture and food in Beth. I had no idea. I really didn't know what was possible there. And so it was blowing my mind in some of the early chats that I had in those meetings.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And again, especially like I keep mentioning BioISAC, but they really opened my mind to this of how cybersecurity actually is a risk for agriculture. and what that can mean. And especially for the perspective I have about the food, BEV, and ag industries, what we know is that their margins are so slim. Their risk is so high.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Last year in the Finger Lakes, so in upstate New York, there was a late frost that wiped out a huge amount of the grapes in the Finger Lakes region. And there was nothing the farmers could do about it. They knew it was happening. Some of them have fans that they could, you know, put on the vineyards to try and like push some warm air.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Some of them lit small fires in the vineyards to keep the grapes warm. There was a little bit that was mitigated from that. But by and large, there was a huge, enormous impact to the industry as a result of that frost. And so I was aware from that perspective. I was not aware from the cybersecurity perspective, how much that is a risk.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
you know visiting with the cows and the chickens and you know all of that walking through the barnyard thing that really stunk for me is I was allergic to hay so my sisters and my cousins and our friends and everybody always loved to climb the hay bales and the hay barn and I you know I'm I'm not one to be told no in life and it probably started there probably before that even
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Yeah. And I think when it comes to the frost, it was not an early harvest, late harvest scenario. It was, it happened at bud break. And so there's nothing to harvest there. You know, it was, and so I don't know. I mean, I'd love to see 20 years from now, 10 years from now, a product that exists that helps mitigate that. He heats everything around it without setting it on fire. Yeah. Who knows?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
You know, like a little blanket that goes around every vine.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Like, yeah, exactly. But like one of the things that is commonly being developed for wineries is one of the issues that they typically deal with is powdery mildew, which is a predictive weather factor.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
event that you know like the weather does the what the weather does and if it if the criteria meets these things then powdery mildew happens so there is some ag tech that's that's being rolled out to wineries that is helping with that which is great but going back to what you were saying about the about cyber security and kind of you're saying like hi i can help i'm here to help
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
You know what I think the issue is with that of like why the farmers are not taking you up on that by and large is because of trust. Yeah. Farmers, they're so reluctant to trust. And again, that goes back to brand. Right. That you can continue to build the brand to be like we are a trustworthy organization. Right. And the farmers can trust us. But they're very reluctant to do that.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And so I would always go and just deal with the consequences later. And I would be like a sneezy, itchy mess afterward. And was it worth it? Probably. But it made for a challenging thing when all the kids were playing in the hay bales and I would come out just dripping.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So when organizations reach out and say like, I would like to help you, you know, they're like, but why? But what's in it for you? Why are you trying to help me? Yeah, yeah. What am I going to lose that I'm not, I don't know what questions to ask you to know what I'm going to miss out on by you winning whatever you is in it for you to come and try and help me with this. Right.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
But you're really coming from a place of like, I just want to like help you still exist. Yeah. You know, so I think that that's the issue.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And I don't know what the answer to that is other than, you know, I think that the agricultural community in particular is you get one and then you get their neighbor and then you get their neighbor and then you've got the community and then you get the next community. You know, is that that's the way that agriculture tends to agriculture, you know, products and services tend to grow.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Is that way because of trust?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And I think that the other, sorry to interrupt, but the other thing that is complicated there too, is that you're doing risk management, right? You are helping them try to protect themselves from these attacks, but you can't guarantee.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Yeah. So I think that that's that's another factor of like, OK, well, if you can't if you can't guarantee to me that you're going to make it not happen, then why should I?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Let me just make one other point too about that trust and like how you come in from the top, right? And like how you come into a community and build trust. I was at World Agrotech in San Francisco in March.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And one of the suggestions that somebody had made was making sure that you have a great relationship with the local Farm Bureau and extension agents because they're the ones that are in the community that are trusted. that are the responsible for bringing the new innovative ideas to the community in a trusted way. So I thought that that was a really interesting way to avoid, right?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
It's not feasible to go farmer to farmer to farmer, take me to your farmer, right? But it is, it is possible to go through channels like that, like the local farm bureaus and extension agents to get a baseline of trust.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Yeah. So I'm Maureen Bellatori, founder and CEO of Agency29, which is a creative brand building firm for food, beverage and agriculture brands. So that means we do strategy, identity and ongoing marketing work for folks who are in those industries. So sometimes we're working directly with ag producers. Other times we're working with industry folks. Like we work a lot with Cornell University.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
We just did a shoot at Cornell University's dairy research barn down in Ithaca earlier this week. And then we also work in consumer packaged goods as well.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Very minimally because it just, restaurant margins are so slim that it's really hard for it to make sense for them. So we do work with a restaurant chain has like 18 locations across the Northeast. But we don't work really with any small independent restaurants just for that reason. Economics don't make sense.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
But we do work with some breweries and wineries, like you mentioned, too, which when they serve food is kind of a similar space. I do want to go back to what you just mentioned about community building. That's a really important.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
thing to me, not only in the grand scheme of being a member of my literal community where I live, but also like building community online and creating a supportive place where I was just talking with somebody earlier today about the new trend for building in public and sort of sharing what it means to be building a business.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
and what goes on behind the scenes with that and the struggles and the wins, you know, and everything in between the mundane days, the should I do this inner dialogue that kind of tends to go through your head.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And so I last fall started posting more frequently to LinkedIn to share more about that publicly, you know, in terms of just the stuff that's going through my head, like I want to do more speaking engagements. And so that was a goal a year ago that I started and then I got really vocal about it. And Now I'm booking them left and right all over the United States, which is really, really fun.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
But I'm also a what's the next thing on the horizon person that I feel like now that I've reached that goal and I'm very happy with where that sits. I'm thinking, what's the next thing? Should I write a book? I feel like I should have a book. What should the book be about? And so I go to that well of communication. community to get their opinions, you know, from the people who know me.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And so like that's and those who don't write that are like finding me and learning about me and like I can hear from them. What's resonating is just a really fun thing for me. I love it. That's that's great.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So in terms of what a brand means, the first thing that I want to emphasize on that is that a lot of times when people hear brand, they think logo. Yeah, that's true. And there's so much more to it. That is like one minuscule part of your whole brand. It's important for your logo and your look and feel. So your visual identity, your logo is part of your visual identity.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Your visual identity is part of your brand. It's important for those things to be consistent, but they are just one piece of the puzzle. The important part of what a brand means is the story that you tell, the strategy behind what you're building and why, how you intend for that to resonate with your target audience, who your target audience is. Is there demand?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
You know, those are like some external factors as well, you know, kind of mixed in there. But all of those alignments are what get to a strong brand. And so when you are consistent with that visual identity, as well as your story, as well as your strategy, that's where you have a strong, cohesive brand.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So I'll tell you a story of a client that whenever I reference them, this was from way back before I got loud with my voice of that's stupid. If somebody had a stupid idea, I don't say it in that way. Right. But, you know, it's a learning moment. We're having a learning moment. Yeah, I will. Young me used to take instruction from clients and then say, that's what you want me to do.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
OK, and go do it. Whereas now we are advisors. Agency 29 is advisors, right? So like our role is to hear from you what you're looking to do or create or where you're looking to go or what you are trying to sell and who you think it's for and all that stuff and then check it, right?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
And provide feedback on it and do the market research to determine if the alignment that you think is there is actually there. We had a client who we, when we talk about them, we reference them as ready, fire, aim. Why? Because they would, they pivoted their, they were, they are no longer in business. They were in business for years.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
about six years and they rebrand not only rebranded multiple times in terms of changing their look and feel multiple times but they also changed their core customer their core offering like everything about it it was a food place a food business but like are we this are we that and it just it was like whiplash
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So I think that whereas where you see strong brands and one of the reasons why I love agriculture is that it's frequently generational, right? It's that there's a lot of learning from one generation to another that, you know, has a lot of a lot of longevity in it in terms of the lessons that are passed on and over time, right? To strengthen that story.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So you were mentioning like, why do we need it? Why do we need a brand? And so it is in that vein of alignment that I was just talking about. So who is your customer and how are you trying to reach them? So we need branding to create that alignment and cohesion, right, with a potential customer. So we'd said apples, right? Like with something, and it's especially in commodity products, right?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So currently I love dairy and which is probably a controversial thing in today's day and age, but I'm discovering a sensitivity to fluid dairy, which is new and interesting, but I eat a lot of cottage cheese because it's so high protein, it's so versatile, it's great for breakfast. So I would say that that dairy in general and cheese, right? Who doesn't love that?
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So like apples, you could argue what's the true difference, right? Between this apple and that apple that you pick up at the grocery store, they're apples. They're by and large, pretty similar across the board. But a Honeycrisp, which is an apple that many people are, a variety many people are familiar with and love, tastes very different than like a Granny Smith.
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Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
or a Macintosh or an Empire, right? And so like apples, I think is a really interesting branding story where the variety name has come through as something that resonates and people look for. I like this apple. I don't like that apple. And so the branding is what helps people find that differentiation between the products and alignment with what they're looking for.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Now, one of the new things that's happened in the apple industry in particular is premium managed apple varieties. So that's your Snapdragon, Ruby Frost, Pink Lady is another one. There are licensing fees that the growers
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
of those apples pay to specially market them so that's where the managed part comes in and they're like an ultra premium apple they're you know they're genetically bred to meet a certain taste profile and that sort of thing all that to say that's probably more than these cyber security listeners ever wanted to know about apples
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
Yeah. And wine still has that, right? Like I like a Chardonnay or I like a Shiraz, right? Those are also varieties that are agnostic to the brand. And so there may be a brand that you enjoy of Chardonnay, right? It's different. the brand is what helps people find that alignment. And I think that's I think it's a good way to explain it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
Brand & Butter of Agriculture with Maureen Ballatori
So the other question that you asked was what happens when someone stopped when some someone suffers and how to stay resilient? So like a bad thing happens? And what do you do? How do you respond? One of the things that I think has been great about how today's founders and companies are typically conducting themselves is with an amount of transparency that didn't used to happen before, right?