Takeway AMI – Innovation and Leadership

So takeaway from the single serve, from the AMI single serve coffee conference. A couple of things. Very happy that we did the headline sponsorship. I think it gave us huge opportunities to get the brand in front of everybody. I learned that there's a few things as satisfying as seeing your competitor wear your lanyard with your name on it. So it was, it was very interesting to see that, to see the brand, see Tecniflex everywhere. I think it was really, really good. Also, at smaller shows one of the things is, and I heard this from, an ECD and from the Trico brand as well is, if we invest a little bit more in how we present ourselves, or just do things differently, I think there's a huge opportunity to stand out. That was clear over the last two days. The second part is very interesting. There's a scene in Talladega Nights when Richard Bobby's father goes, If you're not first, you're last. We laugh at that, but at this conference it was a little bit of that. What was very interesting in the conversations around compostability, around recyclability, is to see how everybody's working towards the same thing. We were just on the floor in terms of the main exhibitors. We were at least, you know, five, six of us were all working towards same objective of creating this capsule. And out of the blue, this one company, that decided to put, take advantage of, their expertise on the equipment side has done it. I think everybody has been working for many, many years. There are people who made presentations that they're almost there. We're almost there. In fact, I think two of them. Some of them also had solutions in market, but this one company had literally the ideal solution. And it was incredible to see that the investment in innovation when done right, bear fruit because in the room everybody wanted to talk to them, everybody, including some of our clients. So, yeah, if you're not first, you're last. It's, something to think about. The other part is, again, on these same guys, they took a different approach. Think one of them, and somebody brought it up in the meeting in terms of how we look at innovation and how we invest in it. And obviously investment needs to be there. But one of the way they did it is a little bit different is they created a consortium to be able to move forward to what to the solution that they wanted to do. The part that's that struck me is, again, a quote that my brother says all the time is take advantage of what you have by using what you don't. They did exactly that. They put to, they leveraged their expertise in making machines to start to solve a solution, which is this compostable, coffee pod with all the characteristics of the traditional carrier cup, but compostable with no PLAs. So it was an incredible, incredible scene. And, really, I think all of us, we have to look at what are the the nuggets of expertise that lie across our organization, across the different facilities that we have. Who are those people that have this knowledge that we can, tap into and bring real innovation to life? It was, it was very, very exciting to see. Look forward to next year.