— Kathy Gold

There's a few different kinds of cinnamon. So one is the cinnamon verum, which is I think a good like kind of marketing, marketing in Latin cinnamon verum, true cinnamon. There are multiple kinds of cinnamon. This one is called true cinnamon. But uh, you, you would be hard to argue that one is truer than the other. Uh, cinnamon is tree bark. And I know that Patrick has some photos of, of the cinnamon tree bark. Um, if, if you'd like to bring those up. So this is a photo that we took my, my business partner and I, uh, in Vietnam, this is literally them removing the bark from a cinnamon tree. The outer bark is bitter. And so that gets shaved off. And then the inner bark is really what gets powdered down into cinnamon. You can see the farmer kind of naturally curls here. Cinnamon sticks, as you can imagine, are younger bark so smaller, thinner bark as it dries, it kind of curls into that classic cinnamon stick shape, but it's from younger bark. And the reason why cinnamon is more flavorful as as it grows is when you bring in bark from 10, 15-year-old trees, and we were spending time in Vietnam, we saw that parents would plant cinnamon trees for their children to harvest. And so it's really not in the same timeframes that we expect, it's almost like a saving account. It's almost like an asset saying, here you go, wait until the cinnamon is 10 years old, 15 years old, and you'll be able to sell it for even more when you bring down the trees. The wood is used for firewood, the wood is used for furniture and all kinds of things like that. But the farmers take great care to plant as they cut down and to replace and to keep growing because these are their assets. And so it's a really beautiful thing of this really tree bark that we're eating, this flavorful tree bark that's really beautiful. So cinnamon verum, the, the, the cinnamon verum, that's, that's traditionally the Sri Lankan cinnamon, that's where it's native to. We bring our from Zanzibar where it's also been planted and grown, and that's a much less sweet cinnamon. It it's known for its medical properties. Um, and it's also the classic cinnamon that's in like Mexican cuisine that's in savory dishes because it's not overpoweringly sweet. It's a much more balanced cinnamon. It's citrusy, it has a little bit of like salinity to it and it still has that kind of whisper and that kind of flavor of cinnamon. But it's not like red hot. It's not that like classic intense cinnamon that, you know, the Vietnamese cinnamon is that. And so that's the total other end of the scale. This thing is sweet. It's got some spiciness to it. And everything that we know is Saigon cinnamon, which by the way, no cinnamon grows anywhere near Saigon in Vietnam. It was just exported from there. So everybody called it Saigon cinnamon. Most cinnamon in Vietnam is grown in northern Vietnam. It's really the cassia variety, the Chinese traditionally grown cinnamon variety. But what we were able to kind of meet is farmers that were actually growing in central Vietnam. The classic different cinnamon. It's, it has a different Latin name, it's cinnamon Leroy and it's a even sweeter, even spicier cinnamon. And we called it royal because it was grown near the city of Hui, which was the old traditional capital of Vietnam where like the royalty was. And so it was the, it was served to royalty. It was the cinnamon that was grown and cultivated for royalty. So we called it a royal cinnamon. But this is the knock you over the head really sweet, kind of spicy cinnamon. And that one is our bestseller because everyone loves cinnamon.