Apparently, I Forgot About Labor.

I’ve been here before.

That’s the part that keeps making me laugh.

I’ve built businesses before. I know there’s work between I have an idea and here it is. I know products don’t magically appear in beautiful packaging with functioning websites, reasonable margins, compliant labels, and shipping boxes that somehow cost nothing.

I know this.

And yet, somehow, I completely forgot about this part.

From what I’m told, childbirth has a funny little trick to it. Once the baby is here, eventually the memory of exactly how much it hurt to get them here starts to fade.

Apparently entrepreneurship does that too.

Because I remembered the fun parts.

I remembered coming up with names. I remembered choosing colors and packaging. I remembered the excitement of seeing something that used to exist only in my head sitting in front of me as an actual thing.

I remembered the baby.

I did not remember the labor.

And whew. Labor has been laboring.

The Pretty Jar Has a Backstory

Right now, I’m finalizing product sizes for Source & Savor.

That sounds simple enough.

Pick a jar. Put seasoning in it. Sell seasoning.

Cute.

Except choosing a size means figuring out how much product actually fits in the jar. And because a tablespoon of sea salt doesn’t weigh the same as a tablespoon of dried herbs, “one jar size” does not mean “one product weight.”

Then there’s ingredient cost.

Packaging cost.

Labels.

Shipping weight.

Margins.

Price per ounce.

Competitor pricing.

Refill sizes.

And the tiny matter of whether someone who has never tasted your seasoning sees the price and thinks:

Oh, that’s actually generous.

Or:

Girl. Absolutely not.

That distinction matters.

My natural instinct is to give people more.

If I’m looking around and everybody else is giving you two ounces, there is a part of my brain that immediately goes, Okay, so what if we give them three?

Because I want you to open the package and feel like you got something.

But I’m learning—or maybe relearning—that “more” isn’t automatically better.

More product costs more to make. It can cost more to ship. It can push the retail price higher. And if you’ve never tried Good Company, Yaji de Suya, or whatever else I’ve been in the kitchen fooling around with, maybe you don’t want four ounces yet.

Maybe you want enough to fall in love first.

And on the other side of that equation, giving away so much product that the business barely makes money isn’t generosity.

That’s just bad math with good intentions.

So here I am, trying to find that sweet spot where generosity, value, customer expectations, and an actual sustainable business can all sit at the same table.

Meanwhile, Behind the Curtain…

The funny thing about building a brand is how little of the actual work anybody will ever see.

You’ll see the jar.

I see the SKU.

You’ll see the label.

I see the three versions before it, the dimensions, the net weight, the ingredient statement, and the moment I stared at one tiny line of text for entirely too long.

You’ll see a product page.

Somewhere behind it are product descriptions, photography, alt text, metadata, SEO, search terms, shipping weights, inventory counts, costs, margins, variants, batch records, suppliers, samples, and approximately 847 decisions that seemed completely reasonable when I decided to start a food company again.

And batch numbers.

Can we discuss batch numbers?

Nothing brings you back down to earth after designing beautiful packaging quite like realizing you need a system for identifying which exact group of seasoning went into which exact group of jars.

Very glamorous.

Then there’s sourcing.

One ingredient comes from here. Another is better from there. This supplier has the quality I want but not the quantity. That one has the quantity but now I need to know how it was processed. Something arrives and smells incredible. Something else arrives and makes me reconsider the entire recipe.

Boxes show up.

Samples happen.

Spreadsheets multiply.

And every time I answer one question, three more little questions crawl out from underneath it.

I Thought We Were Making Spices.

Somewhere along the way, “I want to sell really good tea, spices, and pantry goods” became:

What are our standard jar sizes?

Should refills contain more?

How much more?

What margin do we need?

What are comparable specialty shops charging?

Are customers comparing the sticker price or the price per ounce?

How many units make a batch?

How do we track lots?

What goes on the label?

How should everything be stored?

What packaging keeps aroma from traveling?

What does this weigh once it’s actually packed?

What happens to shipping at that weight?

What keywords are people actually searching for?

Is the product name searchable?

Does the description sound like us?

Does Google understand what the hell we’re selling?

Does the customer?

And my personal favorite:

Can I make this better without making it more expensive?

Because apparently I enjoy giving myself homework.

But This Is the Building Part.

It would be very easy to only show Source & Savor once everything is polished.

Perfect jars.

Beautiful photographs.

Finished recipes.

Neat shelves.

A website where every button goes exactly where it is supposed to go.

That version is coming.

But this version matters too.

The one with boxes on the floor.

The one comparing cost per ounce.

The one changing a size because the math doesn’t make sense.

The one realizing something I was absolutely certain about two weeks ago needs to change.

The one researching competitors not because I want to copy what they’re doing, but because I need to understand the market I’m asking Source & Savor to live in.

The one learning when to say, Everybody else does it this way for a reason.

And when to say, Okay…but I still think we can do it better.

That’s the part I forgot.

Building something isn’t one big decision.

It’s hundreds of tiny ones.

Most of them will never make it into an Instagram post.

But eventually all those invisible decisions become something you can hold in your hand.

So This Time, I’m Writing It Down.

Maybe that’s part of what The Flavor Files needs to be.

Not just recipes and ingredients and stories about where flavors come from.

But this, too.

The building.

The mistakes.

The decisions.

The things I thought would take twenty minutes that somehow became my entire afternoon.

Because apparently once the baby gets here, you forget.

You look at the finished thing and think, Look what I made.

You don’t immediately remember yourself six months earlier staring at packaging dimensions wondering how a quarter of an inch became a business problem.

I know myself well enough to know that one day Source & Savor will simply feel like it has always existed.

The jars will have their sizes.

The SKUs will have their system.

The batches will have their numbers.

The prices will have been decided.

The website will be doing whatever websites do when nobody is obsessively refreshing them.

And I’ll forget what it took to get there.

So I’m leaving myself receipts.

Right now, the question on my desk is deceptively simple:

How do I give you a little more without making you look at the price and say, “What the hell? Nope.”

I don’t have the final answer yet.

I’m researching it.

I’m doing the math.

I’m looking at what other small specialty brands are doing.

I’m weighing generosity against sustainability.

And when I figure it out, I’ll tell you where I landed.

Because this time, when the baby gets here?

I want to remember the labor.

— RI