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00:00This one is more precise.
00:10Yeah.
00:15All right, so this is seven ounces of milk and water.
00:22These are, this is really cool scenes. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely.
00:27This is my masala chai concentrate. I also sell the
00:31the tea and the spices separately, so people can like,
00:35you know, make it more cost-effectively at home.
00:38But this sure does make it easy.
00:44I think that when people try my chai and my turmeric, they,
00:50I hear from people that it's like a hug and a cup.
00:55It is something that is
00:59really my gift to the world. My tagline is the gift of good roots,
01:05which is not just about, it's kind of a pun, right? Because
01:10people call ginger and turmeric, which are in all my blends,
01:13roots, technically rhizomes, but it's not just
01:17those roots. It's my, it's the gift of my ancestors.
01:26Really? Wow.
01:31Did he have, like, did you hear? All right, so I'll
01:35give you two pours.
01:39Good. Yeah, have it. Don't twist my hair.
01:46Yeah, it's unique. It's cool. Yeah. It would make a good ice cream, too.
01:53My ingredients, my packaging, so many elements that are critical to my
01:58business come from abroad. You simply can't
02:00grow Assam tea in the United States. So I
02:05not only have an Assam tea, I have this beautiful Assam tea. I've built
02:08relationships over 11 years. I have incredible turmeric from Thailand.
02:14I have absolutely delicious ginger from Vietnam. My cinnamon also comes from
02:20Vietnam. My packaging, which I have taken
02:24four years to, you know, refine and get perfect so that it really stands out on
02:29the retail shelf, comes from China.
02:34And, you know, looking at a 79% tariff potentially, which is what my
02:40supplier told me yesterday, I just don't have the margin to absorb
02:45that.
02:59I have to make this work. I have to, at the end of the day, I got to make sure
03:03that I have a way to take care of my personal needs as well.
03:08And having done this for 11 years, I have done it
03:12by taking on more and more debt every year, knowing that I would get to the
03:16point that I was just reaching where I could scale
03:20things, get into more, get onto more menus, get
03:24onto more shelves, and start having the volume make up for
03:28my margins. And now I'm facing the fact that
03:34I'm 48 years old. I've taken on a lot of debt personally.
03:41And if I am forced because of this to give up products and maybe eventually
03:46the business, I don't have a way to pay those debts. I
03:51don't know where I'm gonna live.
03:55So it's a lot.
03:59Immediately I was like, I was like, oh, all my pictures.
04:02I just, I just went through a breakup and I was like, oh my god, so many of my
04:06pictures are in there. The efforts being made to
04:13consider small business. If all these small businesses can no
04:18longer source these ingredients and make their products, it is gonna,
04:24it's actually gonna remove American jobs.
04:27There are so many people from my co-packers to my fulfillment centers
04:34to the freight companies that I use that are all American companies.
04:38What's going to happen to all those people that my business and
04:42all of these small businesses support? I don't fundamentally understand
04:49how something can help America if it hurts small business.
04:57So,
05:00I have to make very smart decisions and to do that in the
05:30sort of economic fog where we don't know what the story's going to be a month
05:36from now. I don't want to make the decision that I'm gonna go for it and
05:39try to figure out a way to absorb these increased costs and then find out four
05:45months from now that if I just waited, you know, the tariffs went away.
05:50It feels like every entrepreneur I'm talking to, we're all
05:56smart people, we're all passionate people, we're all trying to make the best
06:00decisions for the integrity of our products, for our customers, and it
06:08feels almost impossible.
06:12Is that nice or would you prefer it in a glass?
06:14Oh, it's perfect.
06:16Okay, go for it.
06:18A little sugar, all right.
06:23So I like to have it just like that, like just as like a shot almost.
06:30Cheers!