Get to Know Ogden Produce Company

SHANE OSGUTHORPE:
Welcome out to the Ogden Wire, and this week we're going to have a pretty cool conversation with a kind of a local culinary legend. We've just been talking before he rolled tape about phases of careers and whatnot, and before we get here talking to Steve Ballard about the next phase of what's going on in the food world here in Ogden, let's just introduce him really quickly. Steve Ballard, we just gonna keep adding titles to what he does around town. You may know him as the owner and proprietor of Sonora Grill, the fantastic food that you've eaten there over the many, many years that they've been open there in the junction. You may be familiar with his concept, Thai Curry Kitchen, that he did that space just up there by the library, food truck version of that as well, I believe you may have bumped into most recently he's moved into Ogden Produce Company. We're going to talk a little bit about all that and where that, what's that all about? But welcome Steve Ballard. Thanks for coming on in.

STEVE BALLARD, OGDEN PRODUCE CO.
Yeah, thanks for having me, dude.

SHANE:
Let's just start. You've always been a food guy, and we, I think you've been, you've been a guest on the podcast before, and we talked about that. You, you started almost in high school at a kitchen supply shop, selling pots and pans, more or less, right?

STEVE:
Yeah.

SHANE:
That's where you began. And why don't you walk us through a little bit of where that has taken you in the food world here in Ogden?

STEVE:
Yeah, well, I think everybody plays a role in their community, and, and when you figure out what your role in the community is, and you can kind of settle into that, and so I, at some point, I don't exactly know when, I realized that my job in this community is to feed people, and so I'm constantly just trying to be better, and how do I, how do I succeed at that job in feeding people, and and I would just, you know, just say, as well, like, you know, thank you for you, what you do in the community. Your, your role as the storyteller is how I is how I would describe it. You're, you're here telling our stories, and you're at the events, and you're doing our marketing, you do our advertising, and you know, Ogden has a little more swagger because of you, so thank you for what you do in this community as well.

SHANE:
Well, so you started then from a from kind of the pots and pan retail side of things. You, your first restaurant venture here in town that everyone knows you for, Sonora Grill, and your goal with that, we were talking earlier, was to kind of let people know that, you know, Mexican food can be there, is there's different levels of Mexican food, there's there can be top shelf Mexican food that is, you know, talks a little bit about Sonora, just for a couple minutes, because we're familiar with it, but…

STEVE:
Well, I think one thing that's interesting to note about the location of Sonora Grill is my second job in the food industry was at the Chick-fil-A in the old Ogden City Mall.

SHANE:
Wow!

STEVE:
So some of the older people might not even realize that I was, I was that pimple-faced teenager serving chicken nuggets outside of, you know, it was right in the where Spencer's, you came out of Spencer's of the old mall, and the Chick-fil-A's right there, and I would just walk around handed people chicken nuggets, and I didn't realize then that you fast forward x amount of years, you know, from a 16 year old until I opened Sonora when I was 29 Yeah, but yeah, so that area, you know, and I used to ride the number 12 bus in from North Ogden, work my shift there at the in the old Ogden City Mall.

SHANE:
Think I've asked you this before, How far was the Chick-fil-A location from where the Sonora Grill sits?

STEVE:
It's got to be. It's I figured it's got to be within 50 feet, I think, of there. And you know, big difference between Chick-fil-A and Sonora Grill, but you know the, the reason that the way I got motivated to do my own Mexican restaurant was I was working for another famous or pretty popular Mexican restaurant that is known, I won't mention the name, but I was working, and I was really enjoying the business side of it, the hiring, the training, the serving, the bartending, just kind of the whole industry. I really had been attracted to that, but I hadn't quite decided, hey, I need to, I need to do my own version, and I was a new father, had two young kids, and I said, 'Hey, I want to learn a little bit more about Mexican food, and so, you know, at the time I said, 'Okay, well, we're gonna go to San Diego, and we're gonna do some research, a little bit R and D on Mexican food, so we picked up the kids, went to stayed right on Mission Beach downtown, and, and I, you know, this was before you just Google searched, you know, or Yelped.

SHANE:
You had to walk around and find stuff.

STEVE:
Yeah, or you had to talk to the concierge, so I'd go, I went to concierge, and I was like, “Okay, where do we go?” and they're like, “You definitely go to Old Town San Diego." So I don't know if you've been, so it's kind of like a period area, it's like a whole block, city block, that's kind of been kind of a historic hacienda style.

SHANE:
Good Mexican food?

STEVE:
Yeah, they got some good Mexican food. So we went to the very first one that everybody recommended, we went, we sat down, and when we first walk in, it was like all the, you know, all. The flags and the bright colors and everything you kind of think traditionally of a Mexican restaurant and the servers in Goya Verdes and their waitresses are in the Mexican wedding dresses and I'm just like, okay, I'm in it, I'm in Mecca for Mexican food, right? We go and we gotta sit out on the patio, and this beautiful, gorgeous patio with ceramic tile, and you know, and then they had margaritas set up all around of the different patio parts, and I was just taking it all in, and just thinking, here I have arrived, you know, you know, tell me all about it. And then the server comes out, and hey, welcomes us, and is, you know, kind of talking to us, and I had been looking at the menu, and I didn't know why at that point, but I asked him what cheese was on the burrito, and he said to me, he said cheddar cheese, and I, there must have been something in my face, my jaw kind of dropped or something, but I, I just, I just thought to myself, and I asked him, “Well, why cheddar cheese?” I said, “Cheddar cheese comes from England, right?”, and I was like, “Why?” And then he totally broke character. He's like, "Yo, bro, I don't know.” He's like, "It just is what it is, and…”

SHANE:
“…it’s what comes off the distributor’s truck.”

STEVE:
So, so this facade of all of this, this is Mexican food mecca for me, just kind of fell away. And the server, who was pretending to kind of this role as a Mexican, he's some California surfer from down the street, or whatever, just putting on show, but I left, and that just that thought just ate away with me, and I was like, well, why, or why do they not have any good cheese from Mexico? So then I started going into the Mexican stores and ordering the Mexican cheese, and I'm like, these cheeses are incredible, they're not weird, they're all cow milk, they're all great flavors, like none of them were weird or funky, and I was like…

SHANE:
They’re not dyed. They’re all white.

STEVE:
Exactly. All white, which is, which is now my one of my rules in cheese, I like my cheese to be white.

SHANE:
Same.

STEVE:
Because that's milk is white, right? We add the color. So anyways, I started down this road of finding Mexican cheese, and then I started to find more and more of these ingredients, and once you start to realize that all of these rich cuisine is made up of all of this incredible Mexican food and ingredients, and that to me it was like now I felt like I had something to show the world, or at least show my community. It's like, "Hey guys, look at all of these great cheeses, look at all these different ways we can do it.” This is not Taco Bell, you know. I love Javier, but you know that's.. you know, I grew up eating at Javier’s my whole life, and I started going to Mexico, and the food at Javier’s.. it's not like the food in Mexico, right?

SHANE:
That's what I was gonna say. So now you, you took it very seriously, and that you would go to Mexico at least once a year, sometimes more than once. If I recall, for years, you'd go down there and discover new ingredients, new recipes, new new approaches to the food, which, which leveled Sonora to like this top-tier level Mexican food you're talking about here in Ogden. Then let's move on to kind of next chapter. Something interesting happened during the pandemic. You said it's interesting how your focus goes, like you wanted to learn more about ingredients, led you into Mexican cheeses, led you into Mexican culinary arts. So now with the pandemic, you began to focus more on the supply side of the restaurant business. We all know that. Well, maybe we don't all know. If you don't know, margins are very thin with restaurants, and so when there's any kind of blip or hiccup, and even in the smallest way in the supply chain, it immediate, it's going to affect those small, those thin margins. Yeah, tell, walk us through kind of the realization that hit you with the pandemic, and what that meant to our local food supply. And let's talk a little bit through what led to the beginning of Ogden Produce Company.

STEVE:
Yeah, two cents on the dollar, that's the, that's the independent restaurant margin. So, for every dollar you sell, you're making two cents, if you're lucky. So, two cents disappears real quick.

SHANE:
Yeah.

STEVE:
You know, you lose that in the couch, that's change, you lose in the couch. So, yeah, so the industry is tough, but in those early days of the pandemic, when they announced, you remember, they announced, “Okay, all restaurants are closed.”

SHANE:
Right.

STEVE:
And so then everybody's scrambling to figure out how to switch from, you know, to take out and whatnot. And I think most people made that shift really well. And the businesses that were already pretty heavy on takeout, it was a pretty easy transition to go. The sales, there wasn't a huge drop, there was, but not a crazy drop in sales, you lost all your alcohol sales, and you lost your banquets, and some things, but you know, there was still some people ordering food. We still had to feed the community, people were hungry, and it was obvious that people were not used to feeding themselves, right? And so I felt that extra, you know, you know, I felt like an essential worker, right, like I have to feed this community, whether it's right. So I spent a lot of those first few weeks, because the supply chain just got blown up overnight, so products we were getting from everywhere didn't come, switched, moved, and was this shuffle game, but you know, I would spend quite a bit of time every. Morning, I would say about three to four hours every morning going around town, sometimes five, six grocery stores, just to find the basics that I needed, you know, things like beans and rice, and some of those like commodity staples that we just take for granted, and there were a few times as it was, it was a little scary, and I would say, if the restaurants were only closed, I think it was like 30 days in Utah, was all you know, longer in California, and some other seats, but I think it was like 30 days, but but had the pandemic gone longer, or maybe we didn't get the vaccine, or whatever it was, but we avoided a lot of, to me, on my end, I saw a lot of scarcity, and I saw a lot of hungry people who might not have food, and the longer that pandemic would have gone on, the worse it would have gotten. So, yeah, that kind of opened me up to, hey, we got to do something about the supply chain.

SHANE:
Which led you to basically say, “Okay, what can we grow close that is sustainable that can feed at least a portion of our community?” which led you into a pretty interesting project up there at Oasis Garden. And tell me if I've jumped ahead too far, but that my first recollection is when you guys started when Oasis Garden went in, it's the Junior League's kind of community garden there, just off Monroe and 25th street, they're tucked in there, and if you go take a stroll through there, when you're out walking the dog, or whatever, you'll see a big shipping container. Tell us a little bit, what's going on with all that?

STEVE:
Yeah, so I mean, I've always been an avid gardener, like I love gardening, it's one of my hobbies, and and I love growing food and eating food, and you know, it's just it's part of my what I do, but I started. I had already started trying to do a few hydroponic experiments, right? So I'd already done a simple four bucket system, where you know you just had four buckets and you put a plant in them, and then you just had, like, a you know, fish tank supplies, which a pump and oxygen, and I had already grown basil, and I even, I grew a tomato plant that was like 15 feet tall and had zero tomatoes on it, because you know it was that was what I was learning, is how to control the light and the air and all that, so so I'd already dabbled and I knew that I was, I was, I knew that I was ready to take the next step, and so I, I pulled the trigger, and I purchased a pre-designed, pre-fabricated shipping container. So they took basically the company that I bought it from, they take refrigerated shipping containers, and then they custom put in some shelves, and some racks, and lights, and kind of build a whole system for you, which, which is partly what I needed. I knew the plant side of things, but I didn't really understand the engineering side of it. Engineering is not my strength, that kind of thing. So I bought something that somebody else had already engineered, and then I started on this journey, and I chose lettuce because it does really well indoors, right? So, in a 400 square foot shipping container, 40 by 10 basic shipping container, we grow about 1000 heads of lettuce a week, 52 weeks a year, range, snow, shine, heat, doesn't matter, it's a constant temperature inside, and we just are producing 1000 heads a week, so that was the closest, that was the product I felt that I could get the most out of with the least input and the least square footage.

SHANE:
And that was primarily to supply Sonora Grill's lettuce needs, right?

STEVE;
Yeah, the restaurants, local restaurants.

SHANE:
Yeah. And then you had enough overage, you started to sell to a few other places like Tona, and a few places, I think.

STEVE:
Yeah, first it took me two and a half, I would say two and a half years to even get a viable product. Yeah, so like I didn't, for the first while, I didn't even list it on the menu at Sonora Grill, because I didn't want to advertise the product yet. Yeah, and in fact, I remember I invited Pete Buttschardt from Roosters up, and it was pretty new in the process, and I invited him to come up, but the night before I had been doing some work in there, I left the pumps off, and so, and I hadn't been back in the farm until I was going there with Pete, so you know, we're talking, hanging out, walking, and I open the door, and we walk inside, and all the lettuce had wilted, and was all falling to the ground, and I was like, here to show my, you know, someone who I respect and look at my great product, and he's a chef and a restaurant owner, and he's like, yeah, you know, he's super nice.

SHANE:
Of course he is.

STEVE:
I failed and failed and failed for at least two years before I finally got to that, like, okay, I'm getting serious ounces and pounds of lettuce out of there.

SHANE:
And so now it's consistently 1000 heads [per week], and here's, and I mentioned this to you before we started recording, as well, that to me lettuce has always been a vehicle for whatever you put on it, it's just something you can stab your fork into that holds some dressing, and some bacon bits, and some onion, and some tomato, you know, but the lettuce that you're growing is probably. Probably the most flavorful lettuce I've ever, ever had, and that's just.. I mean, I don't want to rave about lettuce, but it's amazing.

STEVE:
Yeah, it is. And that was also, you know, getting into it, and then seeing that you could create that. I was like, okay, this has legs, right? This is a product that is not available in grocery stores. This is a product that most people haven't even experienced. So I thought that, okay, this is a good sign, this is something new to the market in there, and and it's a pretty easy explanation why it's it's happy lettuce, I call it, and reason it's happy is because we've removed a lot of the stressors on lettuce, so the two, or I guess three of the major stresses on lettuce are heat, so anytime you're growing out your garden, as soon as it gets over 75 degrees, the lettuce gets stressed, and when it gets stressed, what it starts to do is it starts to create compounds that will help it survive the heat, but those compounds happen to be bitter.

The other thing is, when a bug lands on a leaf of lettuce and starts to eat it, it triggers a response, and it makes more of that bitter compound. An interesting side fact, that's where we got aspirin from. So aspirin was actually a plant derivative, that's where we got the molecule, and everything of modern day aspirin. Is it's a, you know, it was made in plants, and so that goes to stop the bugs from eating it. And then the third one is the humidity, so it likes 65% humidity, so you know outside we're on a good day 30% and on a bad day in the winter we're down to 10% humidity some days, so that is really hard, all those factors are hard on outdoor lettuce, you take those and you adjust for that and put it into a happy conditions and it doesn't create the bitterness and so it's not that it's sweet, it's that it lacks bitter.

And one thing I've noticed is that young kids respond really well to it. And I think that as you're younger, you’re more susceptible to bitter, right? You're more aware of bitter compounds. As we get older, we like bitter, but kids don't like bitter, and kids will eat this lettuce, and kids that wouldn't normally eat a salad will now eat a salad because of this lettuce.

SHANE:
So it's bug-free. It's very climate controlled. The other cool thing is it's very low water use. What did you say? It takes 20 gallons a week to raise 1,000 heads of lettuce? Because the unit gathers the humidity from the air, recirculates it, turns it back to water. It's just amazing.

STEVE:
So, it is power heavy, power hungry, but I lose 20 gallons water a week. That's 95% less than traditional outdoor farming. So its the equivalent of two acres of farmland.

SHANE:
And the transportation is in your car. You don't have to have a semi coming from, you know, Mexico with your lettuce.

STEVE:
Yeah, I call it hyper local.

SHANE:
It IS hyper local.

STEVE:
You ate something that was grown two blocks away from where you're eating it, you know.

SHANE:
Okay, so clearly we mentioned it's available at Sonora Grill and a few other restaurants now. But here's the cool thing: now that Farmers Market is started, it's available at the Farmers Market, the Ogden Farmers Market, every Saturday. Other cool thing, and then this is where I come on, use this to segue into our next thing, is it's also available at the old place where Thai Curry Kitchen was there near the library at the corner of Jefferson and 25th street, and inside there, there's there's a small cooler where you can pick up some locally grown veggies and stuff, but also the bagged lettuce ready to go, so don't have to go to the restaurant to try this lettuce, if you're looking for a bag of lettuce, swing by there and grab it and try it, but also I want you to talk a bit about what's going on inside that space for Thai Curry Kitchen was it's not just a lettuce outlet, there's a lot going on, and I want you to kind of talk to us about the GIV Group and the idea of urban farming, and kind of your new job.

STEVE:
Yeah, so one of the, you know, one of the challenges I've always is owning a restaurant, and when you own a restaurant, especially the size and the volume of the restaurant, you have to plug into the industrial food supply, right. That's just it's the only way to operate, you know. When we, you know, when you need 80 gallons of salsa a week, the only people that are producing that kind of, it's the commercial food system, right. So, but the, and so anytime you try to plug in a local farmer or local grower, they produce such low quantities, and they produce it seasonally. So, I would, you would have to change your menu every single summer based on what the, what is there, what some are available. So, we noticed really quick, if we have this indoor farming, where we're producing every single week, we, we can't wait till the farmers market, that's just the summer, 16 weeks in the summer, that doesn't, that doesn't really, but it's also the same problem that other farmers have, is they can't build a living around 16 weeks of selling. So if they can't survive on the farmers market, and they can't supply the large restaurants, how. How do we get more growers to grow, and how do we get more local food to people? And so that's where the idea of a storefront - it's like, okay, you can grow food almost nine months out of the year in Utah, it just changes what you can do, but you can grow almost year-round. There's just a few months you can't. So we need a storefront that now is available for farmers to sell their local produce year round, so we have a one farmer, one outdoor farmer, his name is Tyson Lloyd. He owns a farm called Better Food Farms, it's up in the valley, and he's on payroll, and we pay him, and he grows everything he can grow. Right now, we're in the shoulder season, where he, you know, before the, but next week all of his crops will hit this shelf, and so we'll have all of his kale, arugula, radishes, turnips, and combining with our lettuce into a local produce display there.

SHANE:
A little, mini farmers market every day.

STEVE:
Yeah, a little mini farmers market, and that's kind of the idea. The cool feature that we added is I also knew that that probably is not going to be a big enough of a draw on its own, right. So I got together, so in January of 2025 I started working full time for the GIV Group. The GIV Group is a development company, they own that building up there. There's, they've got a lot of cool projects, we could, we could do a whole podcast just on the GIV Group, but they have a nonprofit side that's called GIV Communities, and so I was hired by GIV Communities, and my first job was to get that storefront open, so that they were also the same landlords in the Thai Curry building, so all my equipment was in there, and we were just rebooting, refurnishing, just kind of getting it ready.

SHANE:
Yeah, tell us what's going on with that. That food service side of it is really amazing. I want you to tell us about that.

STEVE:
So we had all those ovens, we had all the equipment in there, so we knew we needed to do some sort of a food service, but the problem is, is that what we wanted to do is we wanted to get healthy food out to people, so getting people to eat their healthy food and eat their vegetables is not easy, as you probably know. It takes some convincing, and we feel we kind of came to a point where we felt like, look, as long as we're charging market value for vegetables, people are going to continue to choose fast food. So, price is the problem, right?

SHANE:
Eating healthy is expensive.

STEVE:
Eating healthy is expensive, and you have to have money to eat healthy, and that means that's not equitable. It means the people who have the most money can eat the healthiest diet. The people who are poor, on the lower income, they end up eating, they look, they have to get their cheap calories. Right, so your cheapest calories for the dollar is kind of the king is McDonald's, right? I think the only thing cheaper per calorie than that might be the Costco hot dog. So, that's where people who are looking for calories, if you don't have money, it's where you have to eat.

And then you have diabetes, right, and you have all the health concerns that come out of it. So we knew that we were never going to make any ground or any progress in getting people to eat healthy, unless we could reduce the price, right? So we said, what's a model in that we can, that we can offer the cheapest meal in town that's also a healthy whole food, includes grains and vegetables and all that. And so what we said we decided to do is to start a non profit program that's called the Ogden Food Fund. So we take donations into the Ogden Food Fund. We put the donations into a bank account, and then we draw on that bank account to continue to be able to provide the food, and we chose one price that we figured 90% of people in Ogden could afford, and that was $3.95 So all of our entrees, whether it's a curry, a salad, a power bowl, a dessert, whatever it is, spring rolls, they're all $3.95 and then you can choose to add protein for $1 so $4.95 if you want to add chicken or tofu to that.

SHANE:
Unbelievable, and it's delicious, and a lot of it's locally sourced, like the local farmers, because that's the other thing you pointed out to me the other day, is that that's the other thing that local growers lack, like you said, the farmers market is a once a, once a Saturday thing for a couple months now, this storefront extends that to daily over even a few more, you know, around the year, but the other thing is it's like now you're getting locally sourced, freshly, you know, grown ingredients in the neighborhood, so it's, yeah, it's just unbelievable.

STEVE:
But we have to do more, right? We, if we want the farms to grow, and you know, we have one or two farmers working up. If we want to work with 15 farmers, right, and really build our resiliency in our local food supply, then we have to keep upping the ante, right? We're gonna have to move so that little small space on the corner of 25th and Jefferson, you know, it's 1200 square feet, and we can, max, you know, we max out at 35 customers. So, how do we get bigger? So, so we have a phase two and a phase three planned. So, phase phase three is supposed to be in the old original Weber State College, which some people might know as the Deseret Gym, or it was even a Gold’s Gym for a while there, but that building has been vacant for 11 years, and the GIV Group owns it, and the idea is that we're going to take that front area and open it up to a larger market, so taking what we're doing currently at Ogden Produce Company and kind of increasing it, adding some different food types, and some ethnic food, a bakery, you know, somewhere you can get a drink. All of these things that we need to use more products, so that we have an outlet. Because you know, I've always told people growing food is not nearly as hard as… That's the first step, is to grow it, the second step is to figure out what to do with it. You know, anybody can grow zucchini plants, and then they end up with 200 pounds of zucchini. What do you do with 200 pounds of zucchini, right? So I figured that rather than me spending all my time and growing, what if I could spend my time in using the produce and turning it into product line and things. But one of the features of that old gym is 30,000 square feet, three levels, 10,000 each level, and the bottom would be a market/restaurant kind of a concept with stalls for people to rent, like little micro restaurants, and things can come in, and then we're also building on that bottom floor a makers space for farmers.

SHANE:
Yeah, now we talked about that briefly the other day, that a lot of the people you know, you may have grandma's famous salsa recipe or grandma's famous raspberry jam recipe, that there's a hurdle to you can't just make that in your kitchen and then start distributing it and selling it to the public. One of the major hurdles for people that have that capability is a commercially certified and, you know, approved kitchen that's been inspected, and one, and that's what this makers space is going to be, right? Where people can bring in or purchase the produce there, bring in their produce, and actually work it in a real commercial kitchen, develop their recipes, eventually maybe work up to a booth in this, in the area, eventually, maybe even a brick and mortar space, right?

STEVE:
Exactly. Yeah, I would say maybe even a little more, because, because we do have a little bit of that, so we do have the Ogden Can building of the old Madison, that is a commercial kitchen for people to do products, you can rent space, and it's still getting going, and they're they're adding equipment, but there'll be that'll be a space where you want to finalize a product that you want to sell, this would be just, it might be that as well, but it'll also be so. If I'm a farmer and I grow, if I want to sell product the farmers working on Saturday, that means I have to harvest it on Wednesday, so then I can clean it and process it, and then I've got to store it in a fridge somewhere, and then I've got to get it to wherever my farm is, which is generally rural, so I have a lot of travel time to get to the farmers market, and so our idea is like, look, we're two blocks away from the farmers market, let's build a makers space for farmers, meaning we have washing stations packed, and if you ever pulled a carrot out of the ground, it takes a lot of effort to clean a carrot. And when you have to clean them by hand, like if you don't have the right sink and the right stuff, it's really hard to get a nice clean carrot. So you spend as much time growing the carrot or washing the carrot as you did growing it. And then you got to package it, and then you have to have it stored somewhere, so it's fresh and ready to go Saturday morning. So the idea is to, you know, farmers, growers would be able to rent refrigeration and cleaning and packing sites, and they kind of share it together.

SHANE:
So very much, you're sticking with your calling in life, which is getting food into the bellies of this community as quickly and as nutritiously as possible.

STEVE:
Yes.

SHANE:
Well, thank you for everything you're doing, and as these different phases roll out, I assume I'm going to be bringing you back to keep talking, keep us updated in the meantime. How did folks find out about you? I mean, website wise, where do they go, or socials? What are we looking at?

STEVE:
Yeah, we have an Instagram account, just at Ogden Produce Company, and then we are open Fridays and Saturdays on the corner of 25th and Jefferson, right across from Weber County Library, between 11 and five. And tomorrow we kick off our five-day week schedule, so we'll be open tomorrow, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we'll close Sunday, Monday, then open Tuesday through Saturday from now on. We'll be five days a week, 11 to five, and I always tell people that, you know, there are there are some delicious ways to support the nonprofit, the Ogden Food Fund. One of the most delicious ways would be just come and eat some food, right? The more people come and eat, the more we can make, the more we use, and it kind of, it gives, it gives gas to the system, right? It gives breath and air to it, in addition to just eating there, when you buy the lettuce, that helps. If you buy the lettuce, then that gives us, it creates a demand, and we can continue to increase. We have a second hydroponic farm that should be up and going in the next three weeks, and we'll be able to expand our product line to kale and spinach. So, coming and eating the greens, eating in the restaurant, you can also donate. We have a Zephyr account and QR codes you can scan. We do, and you can just do. We have a pay it forward option, where it's just $3.95 So it's the cost of the meal. You could just buy one meal and pay it forward, and that's a great way to support as well.

SHANE:
Awesome. 25th and Jefferson, you can check it out there. Sometimes you'll find Steve at Sonora Grill, sometimes you'll find him working the Farmers Market, sometimes you'll find him working on the board at Visit Ogden, he's always on the go, you're never going to pin him down. But thanks for joining us today, Steve. Thank you so much.

STEVE:
Thank you!