Sending JSON to Red Panda

[EKCoote]

I've been looking into switching over from Kafka to Red Panda and was wondering if anyone had experience with using Kafka producers to connect to Red Pandas in Rust. I can send strings to Red Panda, however any data that I serialize using serde_json is not received. I can however successfully send it to Kafka. My understanding is that it should be exactly the same, however if I swap out the Kafka brokers to my Red Panda brokers in the producer I do not receive the JSON data in Red Panda. No errors are thrown. I am using the rdkafka crate and the BaseProducer. The code is similar to the following:

let producer: BaseProducer = ClientConfig::new()
        .set("bootstrap.servers", "LISTOFBROKERS")
        .set("message.timeout.ms", "5000")
        .create()
        .expect("Producer creation error");

// works
producer
  .send(
        BaseRecord::to("topic")
            .key(&"some_key")
            .payload(&"some_value"),
  )
  .expect("failed to send message");

// Works with Kafka, not Red Panda, requires poll
let json_data = serde_json::to_string(&custom_strct).unwrap();

producer
    .send(
        BaseRecord::to("topic")
            .key("some_key")
            .payload(&json_data),
    ).expect("Failed to Send Message");

producer.poll(Duration::from_millis(100));