Shelley E. Kohan (00:01.628)
Hi everybody and thanks for joining our weekly podcast. I’m Shelley Cohen and I am thrilled to have with us Stu Leonard Jr. He is the president and CEO of Stu Leonard’s Grocery Chain. So Stu, welcome to the podcast.

Stew Leonard Jr (00:16.578)
Thank you. Good morning or hi, Shelley. I don’t, it’s not morning. It’s not morning anymore.

Shelley E. Kohan (00:19.122)
So for our list, go.

Well for our listeners who have not visited Stu Leonard’s grocery store, here’s what I have to say to you. Run, don’t walk. I love the experience. It’s like the Disneyland of Dairy store, which is what the New York Times quoted or dubbed your store. I always buy more than I planned because I’m having a good time. I love the experience of it. And actually…

The Stu Leonard started as a small dairy store back in 1969. It’s a family-run business. You started with seven employees, and now not only are you the world’s largest dairy store, but you’re one of the most renowned grocery stores. You have annual sales of more than 500 million, and now you have over 2,500 team members. So your stores are located in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and…

Here’s the thing, Stu, I know you’re not going to toot your own horn, so I do want to mention a couple things about Stu Leonard’s for our listeners. One is your management style, the family, how you run the business has actually been quoted in and looked at in two of Tom Peters books, A Passion for Excellence and Thriving on Chaos. Thriving on Chaos, by the way, is one of my favorite management books as a young executive.

The one stat that I know my listeners are gonna love is that you were actually in the Genius Book of World Records back in 1992. And here’s the stat that is amazing. You had at that time the greatest sales per unit area of any single food retail store in the United States. So wow, the world, was it the world? Oh my gosh.

Stew Leonard Jr (02:00.79)
The world, was the world Guinness Guinness book of world records. But I would say with that Shelley, even though we’re in it for sales per square foot, we would have been at the very bottom of the list. If you measured us for profit per square foot. Yeah. Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (02:17.532)
back then. I love your transparency. That’s great. But you know, today it’s a great business model that you have. in our podcast today, we have a very full agenda. We’re going to tackle tariffs, beef prices, artificial dyes, and something you are personally devoted to, which is water safety. So let’s jump right in with the tariff conversation. The CPI, which just came out for June, shows us some of the categories that are up.

in food. So food at home is up 2.4 percent. Meat, poultry, fish and eggs are up 5.6 percent. That’s primarily driven by eggs that are up 27 percent and beef prices, which we’re going to get to in a minute. But also, know, consumers are very worried about food prices and they’re also worried about what’s going to happen with the tariffs. So a lot of the food prices, some are related to tariffs, some are not. So maybe you can break this down for us in terms

of the impacts on tariffs on price categories or what’s happening with the rising prices in the grocery store sector.

Stew Leonard Jr (03:19.823)
Thank

Stew Leonard Jr (03:25.548)
Well, I think you have three buckets that you have to look at. One of them is tariffs. Okay. That’s definitely could impact the business. How nobody knows yet. But, you know, it’s, it’s really a wait and see. think everybody’s gonna pretty much have a good feel of what’s going to happen in this next month and even September. So we haven’t raised any prices. We haven’t made any changes due to tariffs.

The biggest thing that we get regarding tariffs is our liquor and wine from Europe. The second thing that affects pricing all the time is supply and demand. You you can’t really blame the egg prices on policy or people raising prices. It had to do with, you know, the avian flu and the herd size shrunk down. So was a supply and demand thing. And we’re getting hit with supply and demand things.

every single day. It’s how I grew up. I’ve been in the business 50 years. I’ve seen lobster prices go up because it’s rough water out in the ocean. So they can’t catch as many lobsters and so forth. So supply and demand is the second bucket. And I think the third thing is just your cost of managing your business or your farm.

Um, every farmer and rancher and everything that I talked to, cause we buy a lot of local from a lot of small family businesses. They all can, the thing they always say, I can’t get people. I can’t, you know, I’m short all the time. I, um, I gotta pay over $20 an hour, sometimes even more than that to get good skilled people. So labor has gone up dramatically and same thing at Stu Leonard’s. We’ve raised our starting rate.

$5 an hour since back pre pandemic. So, you know, it’s just a, that where’s that cost go. And you know what? You know, I’m happy to pay our people more. mean, I really am, but I also can never dial that back. I have not ever met one person yet that said, you know, I’ll take a 5 % pay cut. So,

Shelley E. Kohan (05:21.136)
Wow.

Stew Leonard Jr (05:48.403)
Those costs are sunk. think the opportunities for us and the cost of running our business here has to do with fuel. All the farmers have to put fuel in their tractors and everything. To see that come down will help lower the food prices. Right now, even at our store, far as costs go, we’re seeing healthcare costs go up nearly 10%.

We’re giving great healthcare to all our people. happy to do it, but it’s going to be more expensive. I can’t absorb all these costs in our business because we’re on razor thin margins already in the food business. know, an energy or kilowatt hours have gone up quite a bit too. So, you know, those are three buckets, you know, the tariffs, supply and demand and overall.

a cost of operating a business today.

Shelley E. Kohan (06:47.634)
Let me just mention about the cost of operating a business and specifically the labor costs. So consumers are interesting, right? So we as American people, we want to have a good wage. We want to provide health care to our employees. We want to make sure there’s safe working conditions. So all of those things, you know, add up to higher labor costs. But sometimes the consumer’s not really understanding that that higher labor cost, you know, has to be covered in the price of goods.

Stew Leonard Jr (07:15.358)
Hey, they, they, know what? Look, the thing you care about is how much you end up paying when you get to the cash register. You know, I mean, I don’t, I mean, nobody wants their prices to go up. mean, even if you’re, you know, you’re going to buy something at a drug store or something, you don’t want to overpay. I, I, I, I get it, you know, and, and look, I got to deliver, you know, I got to offer really good products out there for customers.

Shelley E. Kohan (07:24.272)
Yes, of course.

Stew Leonard Jr (07:45.755)
and try to help them save some money on food.

Shelley E. Kohan (07:51.003)
Yeah, so you mentioned tariffs. So let me just talk a second on tariffs. So for those that are listening and aren’t looking at the visual that we have on YouTube, you have this huge lobster behind you. lobster prices are actually one of the things that tariffs actually benefited the US market with, right? So the tariffs out to China were so high, we had a lot of supply here in the US. So that was actually a tariff that benefited the US consumer, right?

Stew Leonard Jr (08:19.912)
Yeah, I think, I don’t quite understand the intricacies of the tariff because it’s not just about price. You know, I know even beef right now, you know, they want to open up even the possibility of the EU buying beef from the United States. Well, that’s great. The only thing is, that

The EU has no hormones, no antibiotics ever. Okay. we tend to give hormones, antibiotics to some of our cattle when they get sick, we remove them from the herd. Okay. And put them into sort of sick bay over there. They’re not really sick. It’s like you and I take them in Z-Pak, you know, but you, you, you get the cattle healthy again, you and you re they rejoin the herd again.

Shelley E. Kohan (08:51.558)
Right.

Stew Leonard Jr (09:14.907)
In Europe, they don’t do that. So that’s a negotiating point for the tariffs. I never would have thought of that. It’s one of the issues with the tariffs. there’s a lot of things. mean, what is it? Trump just did something with Indonesia and Cambodia here about, I’ll lower the tariffs if you guys create a ceasefire. So there seems to be a lot more in the tariff bucket than just actual costs.

Shelley E. Kohan (09:43.879)
Yeah, there is and it’s very difficult to monitor and measure. So right now I think what we can summarize is, and you’re going to correct me here, is that in the food categories some categories are hit hard, others aren’t hit as hard with tariffs, and to minimize some of those costs, Stu, I know you offer a lot of private brands. Is that a good way for consumers to kind of save money?

Stew Leonard Jr (10:06.194)
Well, definitely and, and you know, going and exploring private label. Some of it’s not as good as, as, as normal. Okay. But, but if you really work on getting a product that’s as good or better than the national brand, you can save anywhere from 20 to 40 % on that bag of chips or that, that whatever salsa or whatever it is you buy. So, you know, I think that, you know, you can’t.

There’s opportunities. The other thing is we have specials every week. Every supermarket, even with costs going up, you’re always getting the knock on the door all the time from a supplier saying, want to build my sales. I’ll give you a discount. If you pass that out to the customer to help them try my product and build my product, buy what’s on sale, hunt those sales out between the apps and the, you know, the

the circulars, if you still get them, you you can go on the internet online and look at them. But, so that’s another way you can save money. The other thing is don’t forget, you can freeze food. You know, most things with the water content in them, can freeze, know, grapes are fantastic frozen. Milk, you can even freeze and thaw out, you know, and it’s still delicious when you do that. So.

Buy in quantity, we learned this during COVID, the number of freezer sales at people’s houses went through the roof, myself included. So, yeah, right. So take advantage, free stuff. The other thing I would say is we do a lot of sampling like Costco does too, where you can get a taste of a product. Sales double or triple every time we demo a product in the store. what people say, ooh, I’ll grab that.

take it. So my I shouldn’t say this because I want to increase sales, but walk away from the demos. Stick to your shopping list. Okay, because, you know, that puts one more item in your cart and raises your grocery thing. And the last thing I tell customers to save money, leave the kids home. Okay. They’re always grabbing that box of cookies or that that

Shelley E. Kohan (12:27.64)
Hahaha

Stew Leonard Jr (12:33.253)
that juice drink or something that extra. I see it all the time in the store. The parents are saying, no, we can’t buy that. We can’t buy that. We can’t. So anyway, those are just some tips on saving money. My feeling is I think prices will go down on food when, you know, if you adjust out all this noise that’s happening right now, I think you’ll see prices decrease in the future. have high hopes about the tariffs.

I think it’s going to equalize some of the products. Like one thing that tariffs already did to us was we were buying those aluminum pans from Vietnam and China for our barbecue. We’d put fried chicken in them. We’d put, you know, chicken nuggets and stuff. Well, because of the tariffs, we found it was more advantageous for us to buy the aluminum in the United States. So

for just like a little bit more, we can get aluminum trays and it probably offsets the transportation at the end of the day. So there’s no net net increase to the consumer.

Shelley E. Kohan (13:44.477)
That’s great, Sue. So let’s talk about beef prices. So beef prices are unrelated to tariffs. They have been up, I think they’re up over 8 % so far in 2025. They’re over $9 a pound. And it’s really about this problem with shrinking herds, rising fee cost, increased demand, all of this stuff. So can you talk a little bit about beef prices?

Stew Leonard Jr (14:07.865)
Yeah, well, you know, they are high. We got a guy, Mike Dearvin, he’s been working with us over 40 years now and he’s on the phone. I just walked by him this morning. He’s, he’s talking to the Midwest, the different ranchers and stuff. he’s never seen anything like this in his whole career. You know, beef prices at this level, but you know, right now with the droughts, you know, the weather issues, the cost of feed, the cost of, of fuel for

Shelley E. Kohan (14:14.298)
You

Stew Leonard Jr (14:36.998)
for the ranchers, tractors and so forth. They don’t wanna invest in new cattle. It cost them too much money. Before he used to put them out in the field and let them eat grass. It was free. Now if there’s a drought and there’s no grass, they gotta bring feed in to feed the cattle. So it costs them more. So they put that on pause a little bit. I’m not gonna grow my herd.

Right now. that’s, you know, it takes almost two years to raise cattle up, up until when they can be harvested. but, you know, so you’re stuck in that dilemma right now with low herd sizes, supply and demand. The price of beef is up. One thing our families tried to do is, is everybody’s making hamburgers this summer. took our biggest selling ground beef. It’s a family pack.

but we’re selling that at 3.99 a pound. yeah, so we’ve just held the ground beef prices like that. You you’re trying to do that, but you know, then you got filet mignon and porterhouse. A lot of your center cut steaks have gone up in price. That’s why you see when you go to a nice restaurant or steakhouse that…

Shelley E. Kohan (15:36.518)
What? Wow.

Stew Leonard Jr (15:57.094)
I don’t even order steak anymore when I’m there because it’s just so it’s like $55 or $60 for a steak. Yeah. So I would say, look, but you know what people love beef. They love beef. mean, say what you want with the vegetarians and everything. It’s, it’s really the beef. So, um, you know, if you’re going to have beef, you know, I would just really encourage everybody, uh,

Shelley E. Kohan (16:04.145)
Crazy, yeah.

Stew Leonard Jr (16:24.441)
We have great sales and eat it at home. You know, don’t go out because you’ll pay a lot of money.

Shelley E. Kohan (16:34.715)
So one of the things that I also heard was that we may look at importing beef from like Mexico and Canada, but I don’t know, is that a possible solution? If you’re importing it, then you have the tariffs, which then puts you where we are now with high beef prices.

Stew Leonard Jr (16:44.101)
.

Stew Leonard Jr (16:53.206)
Right. We, we, I don’t, I’m not a big fan of Mexican beef. was just talking to our meat buyer. guess there’s some issues where we banned Mexican beef from coming into the United States. I don’t know what just happened in the industry, but you know, Mexican beef’s not that good, you know, in my personal, mouth. So we don’t buy Mexican beef. Canadian has some great beef.

But you know, they’ve basically raised all our prices up to the US beef produce. So you’re not getting any relief there. Argentina has some beef we don’t really buy from them because it’s all grass fed and the US has created some grass fed. So there’s a lot going on, but right now the thing we want to focus on is to let us buy the best we get.

Shelley E. Kohan (17:22.853)
Yeah.

Stew Leonard Jr (17:45.836)
A lot of this Angus beef, which is a breed of cattle that we love. There’s Texas long, long horns down there, which we’ve tasted that beef. It’s we don’t feel the flavor is as good. So we stick with the Midwest. got some great ranchers. People want a great quality beef and guess what? They’re willing to pay for it. It’s like Haagen-Dazs ice cream. You know, you know what our

Shelley E. Kohan (18:11.633)
Yeah.

Stew Leonard Jr (18:13.155)
You know, what’s skyrocketed in, in, in sales this year is our prime graded beef category at student linens. So, you know, you have, you have select, you have choice and you have prime. Prime’s like going to be 20 % more even than your $9 number that you mentioned there. but people are gobbling it up literally.

Shelley E. Kohan (18:21.175)
Interesting.

Shelley E. Kohan (18:35.665)
That’s crazy. Okay, so let’s move on to another big change that’s going to be affecting the grocery store sector, and that is the food dyes. So the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Food and Drug Administration is planning to phase out all the petroleum-based synthetic dyes from our foods to make food more healthier. So I recently read a study that there one in five packaged foods and drinks in the US

contain synthetic dyes, which is kind of shocking to me. So that’s like, you know, over 40,000 grocery items, probably more than that. Most of those are targeted children. So aside from the potential health benefits of not actually digesting these artificial dyes, the biggest change that consumers are going to see, literally, visually, is the difference in products from a visual perspective, because the dyes really make foods more appealing, right? So…

This is going to be a significant change, I think, but I’d love to hear your view on that.

Stew Leonard Jr (19:41.165)
Well, I have some, I brought some, some, some visuals for you here. Here is, don’t know if you can see these. Can you see them?

Shelley E. Kohan (19:50.798)
Yes, I’m going to describe into our listeners their gorgeously decorated cupcakes. Those are purple cupcake, orange, yellow, blue, red, lime green. Matches my jacket. Love it.

Stew Leonard Jr (20:02.382)
Yeah, real vibrant, vibrant colors, right? Now what I’m gonna show you is we’ve done a package of cupcakes here with all natural dye. Okay, so look at them.

Shelley E. Kohan (20:18.991)
Yeah, not as vibrant. They still look delicious though. And I see you put some little, I don’t know what you call those edibles. Okay.

Stew Leonard Jr (20:21.089)
Yep. Yep.

Stew Leonard Jr (20:27.587)
No, they’re little toys. It’s like Ariel and all of that stuff. It’s a kid’s cupcake. You know? So we went and did that. Here’s the challenge is to go with all natural dye. This pack of cupcakes right here, we’re selling for $8.99 in the store. If we go to all natural, we’ll have to raise the price to $9.99. So we’ve done

Shelley E. Kohan (20:47.267)
Okay.

Shelley E. Kohan (20:53.465)
Wow.

Stew Leonard Jr (20:56.739)
An Instagram survey right now, 82 % of 20,000 people that responded, 82 % said, I’ll go with the all natural die, even though I have to pay more money. I also write this newsletter every month and I asked our customers to vote and we had about 2000 votes and 92 % of them said,

All-natural. So we are going to switch over to all-natural cupcakes in the store, but we’re to have to raise the price. So how does that fit into the CPI? does that, you know, where does customers are willing to pay that, but it’s going to in a little tiny way, make, make it look like food prices went up.

Shelley E. Kohan (21:37.785)
Yes.

Shelley E. Kohan (21:49.455)
Yeah, mean, I think baked goods were nearly up 1 % without all this change. So you’re right. That’s interesting. But here, I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a second, Stu, because this is what I found in retail unrelated to the grocery store sector. So a lot of our consumers in retail told us we want sustainable goods. We want to buy ethically sourced sustainable goods. And we did all these surveys and we did, out to the consumer.

Stew Leonard Jr (21:54.935)
Yeah. Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (22:18.608)
And they said, I absolutely are going to pay more for sustainable goods. Yet when we have two genes on a table, one’s sustainable, one’s not. And the gene that’s sustainable is $10 more. They’re actually buying the one that isn’t. So what’s your take on kind of what consumers are telling you versus what you think they’re going to do?

Stew Leonard Jr (22:30.498)
Right.

Stew Leonard Jr (22:36.46)
Well, you know, in, in wine, they have a saying that you talk dry, but you drink sweet. So, so what people say sometimes is, is not when it comes to paying, like you said, sometimes they don’t want to do it. And it doesn’t work. You see this with a lot of these drinks today that have all these different antioxidants and

Shelley E. Kohan (22:46.886)
That’s so funny.

Stew Leonard Jr (23:04.641)
But you know what, you go buy it and it’s like four or $5 a container on the shelf and they don’t sell that well, even though they are better and healthier and cleaner for you. So, here’s what we did. We actually, the reason I have those two boxes is we have two displays of, of cupcakes down in the store right now. And so what we’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks is monitor, which we have beautiful big signs.

You know, the all natural ones are flavored with like beet juice, you know, and some turmeric, you know, for the yellow and everything. But it might, you know, touch the taste a little bit. Like if you add beet juice to the red, it’s going to taste maybe a little like beets. So you really want customers to take them home and let the little kids eat them.

Shelley E. Kohan (23:47.364)
yummy.

Stew Leonard Jr (24:04.691)
and see if they, I don’t like this, you know, a red cupcake with the beet juice in it. So we’ve done it and we’ve seen that right now they’re selling about three to one in the store. So three to one for the natural ones and, and to one. Now I would say also that could change by store depending on the economics around it. You know, we happen to live in a more affluent,

Shelley E. Kohan (24:16.848)
3 to 1.

Wow!

Shelley E. Kohan (24:28.058)
Sure.

Stew Leonard Jr (24:33.632)
community down in Norwalk, Connecticut. Martin Stewart, you know, used to live in town and so forth. So it’s a little bit of a fluency. Maybe that customer will pay a little bit more. But if you go maybe up to a store near Hartford or something, which is more rural, they might not want to pay the extra dollar.

Shelley E. Kohan (24:46.533)
Right.

Shelley E. Kohan (24:58.874)
That’s interesting. And so if we didn’t put any dyes in it, it would just be all white cupcakes, right? Or beige or something, right? And consumers…

Stew Leonard Jr (25:04.115)
Yeah, exactly. And guess sales would go through the toilet if you did that, you know, white. It’s like we were working with this. have strawberry ice cream right now. Now, of course, all little kids, I love the pink one. I love the pink. They don’t go by flavor. They just go by color. So if that falls on your shirt, it’s it’s staining your shirt because the red dye that’s in the strawberry.

Shelley E. Kohan (25:11.28)
Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (25:31.322)
Right.

Stew Leonard Jr (25:32.798)
If you take that out, looks like vanilla. So what’s going to happen? Another thing, we have rainbow bagels downstairs, you know, with blue and red. The kids love those things. Forget about any other flavor. They want the rainbow bagel. Well, now what we have to do is put the coloring in and take the dyes out of the rainbow bagels the same way.

Shelley E. Kohan (25:41.86)
right.

Shelley E. Kohan (25:57.179)
Wow. So it’s interesting because you mentioned don’t bring your kids to the store because they’re going to add up the bill. But here’s something I did learn over the summer. I had two Gen Z boys and I was in a restaurant and I thought I picked a hibiscus juice because I love hibiscus and I picked it. I bought it. I set it on my tray. We sat down to eat and my son looked at me and he said, Mom, that has red dye.

Stew Leonard Jr (26:17.332)
Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (26:26.254)
red dye in it, you’re not going to drink that are you? And I said, no. I mean, I didn’t even think, I mean, I should have looked, you know, at the ingredients. I’m usually pretty good at seeing what’s in there. I look at the sugar content for obvious reasons, but it’s this younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha who actually, I think you may agree, they influenced that shopping trip and they’re the ones that are going to be looking at the dyes and wanting something different, I think.

Stew Leonard Jr (26:33.021)
Yeah, exactly.

Stew Leonard Jr (26:42.345)
Thank

Stew Leonard Jr (26:55.679)
Well, you know, you almost have to, and that’s one of my jobs. You know, we have over a hundred thousand customers a week coming through stews. And so we can monitor things pretty good, but sometimes you hear a little drum beat out there about some health benefits and it’s not that big at the beginning. Like take protein. Okay. Protein every, you know, a lot of people are saying it’s good for us to eat more protein, you know,

Shelley E. Kohan (26:56.974)
you

Stew Leonard Jr (27:24.298)
for our muscles and so forth. Now that has reached a crescendo right now because people want to buy, mean, even look at Coca-Cola just bought that company Fairlife and all they have on the front is 20 grams of protein. You you start looking at the yogurt’s, Chobani and the different yogurt’s all has protein. So that that’s hit. You know, some of these early ones like dye for instance,

We can hear about it. There’s always these customers that everything’s something that in food is bad for you. Some research study has, you know, olive oil, olive oils or spam that you put on your pan or something. So there’s always something you have to wait and see how big the audience is out there. I think it’s reached a point right now with the dyes where it’s on every mom’s

Shelley E. Kohan (28:03.962)
Yeah.

Stew Leonard Jr (28:23.087)
mind, you know, who has little kids and they don’t want to feed them even conventional milk. We find most of the moms want to go organic whole milk right now because they, they, they’re not so, you know, one customer even said to me, you know what? I’ll buy the, I’ll buy a package of cupcakes for without the diet for my kids.

Shelley E. Kohan (28:24.474)
Right.

Shelley E. Kohan (28:34.192)
That’s right.

Stew Leonard Jr (28:49.96)
But I don’t care if it was for me, I’d eat it with the diet. So a lot of the older generation doesn’t care as much like you mentioned. So, but you know, you just have to monitor these trends. There’s so many of them going on all the time. And I would just give Robert Kennedy Jr. some credit for bringing to the forefront this whole issue about the potential medical effects of.

Shelley E. Kohan (28:54.53)
Interesting.

Stew Leonard Jr (29:18.8)
of having dye in food products.

Shelley E. Kohan (29:22.116)
Right. Okay, our last topic today is you and your wife started the Stu Leonard III Water Safety Foundation. You’ve actually raised over six million dollars for water safety awareness and education. I love how you’re so connected to the community in this way. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the program?

Stew Leonard Jr (29:43.87)
Well, sure. You know, this is really, uh, uh, very dear to our hearts because, uh, we, we had a little, uh, a 21 month old son that drowned in a pool, uh, a little over 30 years, 35 years ago. And we took it upon ourselves at that time. said, Whoa, how did that happen? That was like two or three minutes and, and, and what happened here? And so.

We’ve spent our last 30 years really plus just educating parents about the danger of being around the pool and not really watching your kids 24 seven. And you see it happen all the time. Unfortunately, I just had to, I get about a half a dozen phone calls every summer from, and I call them. I initiate a lot of them for parents that have lost children.

try to console them and try to help them out. It’s just painful, terrible, worst thing in the world that could happen to any parent. So we’ve been doing that. And then a couple of years ago, we decided let’s now put this thing on steroids, you know, and let’s teach the kids now to swim. So we opened the swim school up. We’re getting over 1,000 children a week.

It’s a 501 C3. what we do is we basically donate all the profits back to needy inner city kids. I can’t believe it. Some of them have never ever, ever seen the water before. Can you believe that? I mean, these are all like under five year old type kids, you know, but they never been brought to the beach or the pond or a river or, or even a swimming pool. So.

Shelley E. Kohan (31:25.379)
Mmm.

Stew Leonard Jr (31:39.197)
We gave 50,000 free lessons out last year. Yeah, it’s just makes my heart feel so good to be able to help these little kids. One’s cuter than the next. know, they mostly are single parent families, you know, and we’re able to give them free lessons. So we’re building a second swim school right now. And as you could see back here, you know, we have in the past, we’ve done a couple books.

Shelley E. Kohan (31:42.927)
Wow.

Stew Leonard Jr (32:09.616)
a number of hospitals across the country, have, have, purchased them, to, give out, to help prevent, cause they see a lot of drownings coming into the emergency room. So it’s turned out to be a great thing. We started our charity. We’ve got a couple of Olympians, on our, on our board with us, which is great. Yep. Rowdy games and, and, and Ali true.

Shelley E. Kohan (32:22.191)
Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (32:32.586)
that’s fantastic.

Stew Leonard Jr (32:38.652)
And so with the Paralympics, so it just turned out to be this wonderfully amazing organization. And we’re helping so many in the community and these needy inner city kids. And so it makes our heart feel great. And to me, that’s like, I’ll never retire from that business, you know?

Shelley E. Kohan (33:06.317)
love it. So it’s called Stewie the Duck Swim School and I love your mission to save lives one lesson at a time.

Stew Leonard Jr (33:12.604)
Yeah. And Hey, if anybody wants, if you want, I’m going to do a little video on this thing coming up, but, uh, uh, if you donate $10, that provides one free lesson.

Shelley E. Kohan (33:26.489)
Just $10?

Stew Leonard Jr (33:26.876)
Yeah. $10 you donate $10 and we will provide a free lesson for a needy inner child kid. that’s what make would make you feel good as you’re, you’re, you’re actually enabling one of these kids to take a swim lesson like that. So, um, but you can go to it’s it’s actually stewy the duck.org. Oh, RG. Yeah.

So you can go to that if you want to make a donation, I’d really appreciate it. The kids would appreciate it. You’d be helping the community out. you know, if you see these, the delight and excitement of these kids when they get to come take a free lesson, it’s like they went to Disneyland or something, you know? It’s just, it just makes, you can’t take the smile off your face by seeing the joy in their face.

Shelley E. Kohan (34:24.505)
Well Sue, I love it and I love just talking shop with you. It’s one of my favorite things to do. And I’m gonna give you two commitments. One, I’m definitely gonna make a donation to the swim school. Because I love what you guys are doing and it just makes me cry. I I think your goal is to fund 20,000 swim lessons a year and I think you hit 50 you said last year, which is amazing. The second commitment is I’m gonna get myself over to the Norwalk store.

Stew Leonard Jr (34:35.39)
isn’t that nice of you. Thank you.

Shelley E. Kohan (34:52.495)
because I wanna check out, I’m gonna check out the cupcake display.

Stew Leonard Jr (34:56.345)
Yeah, well, you know, call me before you come. I’ll meet you down in the store from around. Okay.

Shelley E. Kohan (35:01.881)
Great, absolutely. Thank you so much.

Stew Leonard Jr (35:04.023)
All right, Shelley. Okay.