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Skip the paper, start making every hello measurable. Hit the link in the show notes or visit unicode.com/CPGbusinesscards. That's unicode.com/CPGbusinesscards and create your first card and get your brand into their phone, not their recycling fit. All right. Something I feel like I've definitely learned at my time in Gaza is a decision that was made six months ago. It does not mean it's like a decision forever. And it doesn't mean you have to keep on evaluating every decision you've made. But I think a lot of times we make a great decision in the moment, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't re-look at it. And again, because your business is changing so much at all times, you know, you picked up a new customer or you have changed the location of your co-man, so now you should look at free again. So definitely always, always optimizing. I feel like every supply chain is that way. Hey everybody, I'm Hannah Dittman, Operations and Finance correspondent at Startup CPG and the founder of Ready Basics. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Laura Romano, Director of Operations at Gaza, the olive oil brand that turned a pantry staple into a cultural phenomenon. If you've ever wondered what really goes into keeping a high-growth brand running smoothly, this episode is for you. We dig into what it means to have an operator's mindset, when and how to make changes to your product, and how to anticipate and correct logistics hiccups before they snowball. Laura also shares lessons learned from scaling at speed, including why strong systems and clear communication mattered more than any single tool, and how their right-opt strategy can set the foundation for a long-term group. Stick around to hear her insights on everything from building scalable processes to navigating supplier relationships and avoiding the most common operations pitfalls. Enjoy! Hey everybody, welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. I'm Hannah, and today I am here with Laura Romano, Director of Operations at Gaza. Laura, welcome to the show. Hi Hannah, thanks so much for having me. Of course, we're so pumped to have you here today. If you could share your title and a brief background of your experience prior to Graza and what led you there, I think that'd be a great way to get started. Awesome, so I'm the Director of Operations at Gaza, and I started in the CPG world over 14 years ago. When I was still doing my undergrad, I started working with a company called Blue Marble Ice Cream that's based in Brooklyn, New York. It's New York City's only certified organic ice cream. They hired me on as their first wholesale employee. They had been ice cream stores and they wanted to develop their wholesale side of the business. I did everything from bookkeeping to growing the wholesale business, and I loved it. I liked to outdo it and I was like, wow, CPG is something I could really learn and grow in. So after wearing so many hats and learning so much there, I grew all the way to the COO of the company. It was really exciting place to grow and learn because Blue Marble did so many different things. We had retail stores, we had a CPG business, we did food service, we had a co-man outside of the company, we had our own manufacturing inside the company. I just really feel like it was a great place for me to learn all the operations of a small food business. So I left Blue Marble during the pandemic and went to another small food business called Seed & Mill that's a Tahini and Hall of the Business that's also based in New York City. And it was a great place to learn about e-commerce. So being an ice cream, I hadn't learned about the basics of shipping things nationwide and that was a great place to learn it. And when I was on an event for Fair, which is a B2B dropship retailer, I met the co-founders of Graza, Andrew and Alan. And we had a great chat and a few months later they were looking to person one to join the operation side of the business. And I made the very difficult decision to leave Seed & Mill and come to Graza and it's been a very exciting rise to see the company grow so much in such a short period of time. That's so exciting. You know, I'd love to kind of pivot to a brief overview of Graza as well for context for anyone listening that's living under a rock and hasn't been able to try or at least see your awesome products. But we'd love to know through an intro of the company what compelled you in that first meeting to be excited about the opportunity, what was kind of the overview that made you feel like it could really be an interesting opportunity for you to work there? Sure. So Graza is an olive oil company that makes olive oil to use every day in every way. So we have three main olive oils. Two are extra virgin. Our sizzle is like a cooking oil that you can just use for anything you're cooking. Our drizzle is more of a finishing oil so it has more of a bold punchy flavor. You want to use that on like your solids or like after you're finished cooking your pasta you add it. And now even you oil it's frizzle which is a mix of pumice oil and extra virgin. So it can be used anywhere using kind of like an avocado or vegetable oil as a higher smoke point. I use it in when I'm baking or like when I'm making popcorn at home things where I don't really need a strong flavor. We were known in the beginning for a squeeze bottle of a Graza now in almost any format glass spray cans bulk and of course the squeeze bottle. I was really excited about the opportunity because I could just see the early growth. It was not just the like squeeze bottle getting attention. It was like quality of the oil and as someone who did use extra virgin olive oil every day it was tasting the oil immediately. I could taste the difference. I also finished an oil with something that I used every day in salads and it was kind of more of an expensive product that you were using very sparingly and it was kind of like I have to save this up and I felt like Graza was bringing it to the table in a way that I had seen in Europe and in my travels in Italy where people just used it more frequently and it was a little better price point. So it was a really exciting place that I saw that you know I really thought this was going to grow and I just wanted to see what it would be like to be at a company that was going to grow really fast. That's really exciting and I love your guys' positioning and branding and frizzle such a cute name. I can like picture that was sound in my head when you're using oil as you're mentioning you're in a high-growth situation now but would love to know kind of what the early days were like for you coming in. There was already an established product so what kind of got put on your plate? What did operations encompass for you back then and what is it grown to now? Great question. So I was working with both of the co-founders to start one thing I was taking off one of their plates was really the warehousing side of the business so being that first point of contact to the warehouse for everything and trying to streamline our free operations and grow how we were using our software so getting set up with the DDI we were pretty actively onboarding new customers. I remember when my first project was getting the target setup and I had never set up target. I never reached the company that big yet so taking it step by step working with the resources around me using our brokers really strongly and just working through all the steps to get that going and the other big projects not were getting integrated into the supply chain in Spain understanding what was happening so far there and like how we were going to be growing with that relationship so learning like what was going to happen and how to integrate that into our ERP system in a better way. So they had an ERP right from the beginning which I think is pretty unique a lot of young companies don't have that going right away but I remember some of my first projects was just making sure we were utilizing it in a way that I felt was going to be successful for also the growth not just where we were on that first few months you know. I imagine there was a lot of kind of auditing and getting things streamlined getting things running as smoothly as possible and then taking and building upon that in your mind you know what at the a steady state of a business what are all the things an OBS leader should own and what do you think the optimal relationship between either a CEO or founders and an OBS leader is like and what has really empowered you. Yeah I feel like I've been super lucky in my career that the CEO and the founders have been true like mentors to me they've been really strong operators and have been able to teach me a lot and I feel like from an OBS point of view you have to both support and push back or make sure be a sounding board but also just make sure you're presenting if someone is bringing you an idea which oftentimes the founders are coming up with the great ideas and and
I feel like it's ops job to say not no, I feel like ops gets that reputation. But to say, sometimes you have to be the bad cop. I try to say more if we're gonna do that, this is what it's gonna mean. Either this is the timeline that's gonna be on, this is the cost it's going to be. So with the founders early on, I think that's ops role. And you also have to be the one to, someone wants to describe ops to me as like marketing and sales and all these people are like throwing a stuff on, you freeze one to catch it. So you, it's a great analogy. So I always try to think about like you, like don't let people throw the football, you're no one's going to catch it, but like with ones up to make things kind of go on and happen. So I feel like I've always been in great relationships with steos and founders who really really understand ops in a detailed way. But if they don't and you're not in that situation, I think even more you have to be like the voice of pushing back and making sure it's clear what the mostly time and effort and costs are going to be. - That's really helpful perspective. In the little time I've gotten to know you, I can tell you're an incredibly diligent and detailed oriented person. So I'm sure you were like an ops superstar on all of that. - Thank you. - Thank you. It's so sweet. What's your favorite part of your job? You know what about operations really gets you going and has made you really excited to work in that sector? - That's a great question. I mean, I think like the stereotypical thing is like the problem-solving aspect, but to be more specific, I think it's having an idea and executing on it. So seeing something finally come to late and I think mostly done ops and accounting. And I always used to say I like the accounting work because you would check box it off and it would be done. And that felt really good to check your list off and just like close the button then feel done with it. And I felt like ops, you're pushing projects forward that so many times don't end. There's continuous improvement. There's efficient studies we've done. There's like QA that you want to continue to improve on. But it is my favorite part of even moving it along and you're not like finishing it, but you just are trying to see something like happen and put a product into the world or e-commerce sale goes successfully done. And yeah, those are my favorite parts I guess. - You sleep peacefully when the to-do list is crossed off. - I do. - I do. - He definitely. - I think I'm kind of pivoting on to some best practices and your kind of mentality around operations. What do you think are, you know, ops pillars that in your mind are critical to scale early if you had to prioritize things, you know, what needs to be tight from day one? Where should you focus most of your time at the beginning to make sure that you're gonna be stood up for success down the road? - So I always tell a brand that are first starting out and what I really, truly believe on is you really have to know what your costs are. You can't work off of just forecasts of what the costs are going to be. It's so important to go back and analyze what actually happened last month or less production run or whatever your time period is knowing your full costs. I think the other thing to think about very early on if someone is really just getting started out is if you're going into like the natural food worlds, for example, and you wanna be in grocery and the natural food world to think about what are general retailer requirements that you should be thinking about from the beginning? So when you're setting up your case packs for the first time, what size makes sense if you are going to be happy to do free fills if that's something that's normally happening into this industry or did you print barcodes on those case packs because that's something that is going to help with the warehousing. What are some very common BUL and PAC list requirements so that you're not getting fines from people down the line? So I think if you're new to this industry or just really starting out the logistics side of common grocery things would be something that I would definitely look into and start with. - Yeah, you wanna make sure before you commit whatever limited capital you have essentially that you're gonna be able to make the most out of the sales for those products, it sounds like. And I think that is sage advice. When you're choosing manufacturing partners or you're setting these parameters, what some of the diligence or criteria that you're looking at to help get you to where you need to go on some of the things you just mentioned. When you're choosing a manufacturing partner and you're getting started out, I would really be looking at MOQs that they're going to require the flexibility they're gonna have for startup brands and what kind of companies are they working with that if you're going to require kind of special ingredients like are they gonna be able to work with that or they can help you if you need someone to help build or recipe are they gonna be able to help do that. The co-gam relationship is so important. You really wanna partner that's going to be transparent with you, provide the information you need. I think it's the communication like isn't there right from the beginning, you're probably not gonna get it down the line. And I think when you are gonna be managing this relationship down the line, this transparency and flow data is going to become so important. I mean, I would say you should be asking what data they're gonna share with you too, who's gonna be responsible for inventory counts and are they winner, they've been giving that information. There's so many key pieces you can go into, but I think just right from beginning, just seeing if they're giving you information you're asking for, if they're transparent about it, are they giving you full price breakdowns, those kind of things might help you tell if that's gonna be the right partner for you. - Very helpful. - What KPIs do you track religiously in your department? What signals health or risk for you and what's kind of the daily or weekly things that you're really looking at? - Yeah, great question. The KPIs we're looking at every single week are often around inventory. So both on our supply chain side and on our fulfillment and logistics side inventory is just something we feel like we have to know forwards and backwards. So my demand planner helps us create a weekly roll forward of what orders we have in our system, what inventory we have, what inventory we have coming in, and then we're looking out multiple weeks to see where our inventory position will be. And if we can say yes to every order that's in our system, if we can say yes to the rest of the orders that are coming in, and then we're doing this across of all of our warehouses, and then we're doing almost the same thing on our supply chain side, but for raw materials. So do we have all the raw materials we need to do the production that's upcoming for the next few months? What are cadence are we ordering the raw materials in, and what is position are we gonna be in for as production comes in? So I would say inventory is just the most important because all the other KPIs, we're gonna be tracking a special year-end fulfillment that I'm thinking about, are we on time? Did the orders go out? They can't be done without the inventory in the first place. So when we're really thinking about our Monday morning checks, it's definitely inventory, where are we, and it's just meager break for our off-steam. - Yeah, and that makes sense because you guys are so fast growing and you're servicing a lot of accounts right now. So I imagine the sellout risk is very high for you all, and you wanna make sure you're not leaving money on the table and really maximizing your sales. What about if you're in the opposite situation? Have you ever been in a situation in your career where you've had too much inventory? I know that's frequently something that a lot of founders or operators run into, and what advice would you have for people that are maybe a little over-immentoried? It definitely both happens. I feel like for everyone, right? There's just things and stages, and you're trying to optimize by doing production runs of certain sizes, and there's just so much unpredictability forecasting is such a hard thing to do. My other business, as I worked at for my ice cream company, what we were able to do is when we had an over-end pre-position is kind of sell it to ourselves and to our retail stores. There's a great way to run through inventory. Not everyone has retail stores where there's a scooping ice cream of that they're also selling, but sometimes D to C can be in also another way where you can pull a lever of changing price or promoting in a more aggressive way. In the grocery world, it's so much harder to do some kind of quick sale or grocery stores plan these things a year in advance, but thinking about what other channels you might have where you can pull a lever. So fair is another one if we were overstocked in something we can put in a fair blast-and-message anywhere where you're more directly selling to a customer, you might be able to move inventory more quickly. That's really helpful. And kind of, if you had to break down, I know you're working with a demand planner, and I'm sure you guys are a little further along in the sophistication here. But if you had to break down, for someone who doesn't have as many resources or is kind of working towards it, what the key facts you need to know to be able to forecast your business the most accurately or any tips and tricks you can share on how to go about doing that, I think that would be really helpful. - Yes, I definitely, shout out to Grazes, a demand planning team, they're amazing. So I'm not the expert on demand planning for sure, but something we definitely follow is like an 80/20 rule. So think about 80% of your customers and don't worry about the 20% that are kind of smaller customers that you might not be able to track as closely. So if you are a smaller business, really thinking about your bigger anchor customers and helping, they might be easier to plug into a forecast and seeing if other retailers are gonna follow that demand or not, I think that's one place to start. - Yeah, that's really helpful. [BLANK_AUDIO]
take, is it better for you all to be under, I know obviously the right answer is to be exactly out of forecast, but is it preferred? Do you think to be slightly over-immentoried in a surplus of your forecast or slightly under-immentoried under your forecast? I feel like from an ops perspective, I always want to have a little bit more because I don't want to go into inventory allocation, which is a lot of work and it's difficult to then have to try to define exactly who gets what product. That being said, something that we do at Graza is we only want to sell the freshest oil, so we're always trying to really bring it down to zero at a specific time of year. So right one before the new harvest is when we would say, you know, right now we would rather be under inventory because we don't want to over-bottle last harvest, but at other times of year we might be over-stocked and like that's okay because we'll sell through it. So I think there is nuance in that. So depending on someone's business and the cycle of maybe one year or a quarter, there might be times when it makes sense to have more or less. Going into Q4 and more people probably want to have a little bit more for the upside opportunity, but other times of year it might be like, absolutely not, let's tackle us. That's really interesting and some interesting color specifically on your business. You know it's very much like wine where you've got a specific harvest and you want to make the most of it. So fascinating. I love learning little details about other industries and other people's businesses. I feel like that's what makes consumers so fun a lot of the times. Kind of pivoting to scaling a little bit. I know you guys are in a hyper growth situation. I'm sure coming into a pre-existing business there was a lot of optimization to be done as well. In your perspective, is supply chain optimization kind of like a one-and-done initiative that you really work through or a forever pain point where you're kind of circling back to things on a more regular basis? Definitely always circling back. Something I feel like I've definitely learned at my time in Graza is a decision that was made six months ago. It does not mean it's like a decision forever and it doesn't mean you have to keep on evaluating every decision you've made but I think a lot of times we make a great decision in the moment but it doesn't mean we shouldn't re-look at it and again because your business is changing so much at all times. Even if it's not hyper growth, it's still there's you know you picked up a new customer or you have changed the location of your co-man so now you should look at for it again. So definitely always always optimizing. When you're in a fast growth situation, what do you think are some of the big watchouts that someone should be looking for or lessons learned where you're like oh yeah that kind of bit us a little bit? I wish we had been anticipating that a little bit more or any kind of hot areas that you feel like is really important to focus on. I think something we've learned is or all of our forecasting we have spent so much time like giving it to our production partners and thinking about like maybe that being our biggest partner and maybe a few of the raw material suppliers so important getting them are forecasts but something I've learned is how so many of our partners need to know about the growth and forecasting of up and coming and thinking really systematically about how often each partner needs to get updated in different ways. So for example we have launched a bunch more skews. I talked about like the sprays in the glass coming out and we notified our warehouse partner you know no new skews are coming and where this is the timeline we're expecting more outgoing orders that's also metric we're giving them but we really didn't take into account how much more storage we would need because we're storing so many more um palettes and they're an awesome partner and amazing for a growth but you just physically run out of space sometimes you don't have enough palette space so it was an oversight on my side and it taught me that throughout these stages of growth like that is something that you're trying to share information and you're trying to make sure it's getting into the hands three people but there's sometimes always more so what we're doing to correct that is just going going through all of our partners in different ways and thinking like what information and on exactly what Kate and so getting that more systemized and not just oh am I weekly calls and we mention this but like how are we going to have this external communication be like really systematic. That's a great call out yeah I feel like in operations it's kind of like you're trying to think through the journey of the product at every step and what would be niche in from every different angle it's a million balls you're juggling and especially as you make more skews it just gets that much more complex talking about your new skew launch when you're developing and launching new products what is the process like for you all at Graza any best practices that you can share or words of wisdom that you have launching news use has been super fun and something as simple as putting just the same oil in a different bottle we've learned is you're more complicated than you think and I think so many people in startup CPG world like what you're doing is new right so you're making this product but there is a twist on it like that's why I'm bringing it to market so you are have to go through these processes where you learn that it's these little changes that are going to actually create bigger ripple effects down the line for your product development things we've learned is working super closely with the sales team to know dates for what they need so they know when the retailer resets are going to be they know when the retailer meetings are going to be so we're working super closely with them to make sure we're lining with those dates and being probably over optimistic about that we can make those dates really trying to always make those dates and sometimes falling short product development timelines are very optimistic sometimes but we're as long as we keep our sales team in communication all times about any delays we're very happy to get the new products on the shelf yeah I feel like it's such a hand holding dance you know you want to say yes to everything kind of earlier to your point where you somehow have to catch the football you know you want to say yes to everything you don't want to let anyone down but you also can only run as fast as you can and I think especially with retailers it's like you want to capitalize on the opportunities and make sure you're making the most of it so that a lot of sense and as um a tight wire to walk I'm sure earlier you know we were talking about you know a core pillar being really having a good concept of your pricing and what your product costs and really understanding that kind of talking about that a little bit more what are your thoughts on negotiating price with your commands and setting what your cogs will be how do you typically like to go about that what do you think the important levers are and any best practices or awards of a vice you have on going through that process when thinking about pricing overall especially for services or like a co-pack fee or things like that I think it's super important to know why a price is where it is so before you're trying to negotiate down on a price and just understanding everything that's going to be included in it and that might give some insight into like why it might be higher than a competitors or lower than a competitors the other piece that is huge and that I've learned time and time again at Graza's you need to build redundancy into your supply chain so if you're always knowing kind of what else is out there and not just from a competitor point of view but once again because people are offering different levels of either service or value and even packaging or just what every aspect so having a kind of competitive market analysis is going to help you in your negotiations for your co-man and then thinking about different points of growth as being significant so maybe you're not asking for price increase right now but you're starting to talk about hey in 2026 I think that in the second half of the year my volume's going to double how will that affect my pricing might be another way to go about it all great points if I'm kind of fresh to the scene I've never done something like this before and I want to start a chocolate bar company how do I even know where to start or what price to ask for do I just go to a co-man and whatever price they tell me I try to understand and negotiate it down how do I think about the math or doing the research on my end to feel empowered to have that conversation I think you got to start at CFT and you great plug you have to start somewhere right so you're going to have to start getting price somewhere but I do think that is a great opportunity to use community use like coffee chats or industry knowledge I don't know if chat GPT knows that but I'm learning that it knows more and more every day I learn how to how to use a palette jack from chat GPZ that I didn't know I knew that that's great but the more information you can get the better and you artist yeah you're just going to have to keep asking and feel empowered because everyone has to start somewhere like you should feel like you're going to not know and that's okay too great advice and you know when you first came in especially with Grazesquees bottles it was one of the big different cheaters and kind of the obvious on shelf iCatches right away was the packaging and the concept and I know you've extended into different packaging formats since then but what are your thoughts on packaging manufacturers?
and the importance of packaging and how you find a good packaging supplier that can work with your formulation, command and kind of your BFA process. Packaging is so important. I think you've accurately described that, but I'll say it again that I've learned at Garaza how important packaging is. And I think my ops point of view was always, oh, let's do its easiest for the co-man and let's do what's most cost effective. But Garaza has definitely taught me that you have to go the extra mile to get your packaging beautiful on shelf and that it's very much worth the time and energy to do that. It's definitely the place where we have to look for a lot of redundancy to just know everything that's out there to know like know how the quality can be different from different suppliers. So we're doing just a lot of research, but also ask your co-man who they're working with, what other packaging vendors have they talked to. That's like definitely a great place to start normally, but she'll definitely do your own research as well. When doing product development, your packaging is going to be huge part of it. It also is somewhere where sometimes there's long lead times. So if you're creating your own molds or doing something very unique or even just like doing a special color and in plastic where you need to source that as well as the plastic mold itself. Really get your timeline down because the co-man might be saying like, oh, packaging, I just ordered out it takes 30 days, no problem. So you're going to be doing something very specialized talking to that packaging vendor yourself to know exactly what the lead times are going to be if you're doing a mold or color. I think those are some of the longest lead times in a lot of the product development stage. So really knowing what that would be. Yeah, great advice. I feel like timelines can get away from you so much and all of a sudden three months get out of it and your whole world is upside down. So I definitely think having a good pulse on that is very important. Right back. You know it is so hard to raise money these days or really even know what VCs actually invest in early stage brands. But good news. We are bringing all those early stage investors together. I am so pleased to announce startup CPG's founders and funders powered by our friends at DOS. It's happening December 11th in New York City and it will be totally unforgettable. We'll have the top 50 early stage VCs meaning the ones really writing checks for pre-seed and seed stage brands and we're pulling them together with the top 100 brands of the year. They're going to be amazing panels one-on-one matchmaking and tons of networking opportunities. If you know anything about us, you know what a ridiculous opportunity this is going to be. So I really recommend getting your application in early the website to submit is in the show notes. It's f and f dot startup CPG dot com. Good luck. I wanted to kind of touch on you know having both sold D to C in retail. Your perspective on the differences and the impact they have on your team and your work. What challenges or process changes have you encountered depending on which channel you're either focused on or expanding into. So I think that's a great question. From the fulfillment and logistics side, I think D to C in retail is very interesting and important to be thinking about your values for both. C in the long grass, I both have very high touch D to C so like they want the experience to be very premium. We're always thinking about what kind of like marketing inserts are going to go in the box. The boxes are specialized. So this all comes back to like your warehouse partner thinking about can they do both a D to C high touch experience. That's what you're doing and meet all these vendor requirements around retail and have the capacity to like be sending out that those pallets and the larger scale work as well. So not everyone does one warehouse for all of this like you can also think about you know I really want to if you want to have a very specialized data C it might make sense to split it out. If you have the capacity also to manage that in both warehouses. So I think the first thing you have to think about is like is your warehouse going to be able to do both well inventory perspective is the other thing they were very different. Ecom if you've run out no problem you take it offline any problem you're losing sales but you take it offline for retailers if you go out of stock depending on how long it is you definitely risk getting that product taken off the shell fall together. And it just can be a bigger problem down the line. So I would say you making sure your inventory is in line for retailers would be even more important. But those are like the biggest areas where I think they have huge differences and both are important for like depending on what you're trying to do with your brand. Great perspective and goes back to why you're so focused on inventory. How do you balance scrappy execution with long term infrastructure. I know you guys had a lot of systems in place it sounds like when you when you first came in. And obviously I've had some funding and are in a high growth situation as well but I'm sure you're still experiencing a little bit of what startup land is like. So curious what's your framework for prioritizing speed versus sustainable long term implementation practices and just general thoughts. Yeah, I definitely come from the scrappy side of CPG worlds. It's a huge change to me to be like a bigger company. I'm learning so much for my teammates who've come from larger companies. And I think one of the biggest things I've learned is the difference between like that systems are so important that the general statement but I think in operation world especially between your small company. One person might kind of like own all the knowledge the spreadsheets might be very like self-owned and managed which like you're if you're not really showing your work to anyone. They just kind of work for you. And the notes might kind of be just like your internal notes and I think if you were kind of starting to think about your long term success. You have to think about these systems and external that internal but outside of your team maybe sharing of information as one of the first things. So how we're looking at that is what documents like these KPI sheets that we're looking at every week. Who needs to see them like what do the sales teams need? What do the finance teams need? What is my own team kind of asking every week? And then how can we build out like a more systematic way to show that and share that? We're still in the stage of dating these tools and updating our internal systems. But I think like that's one way that like even if you were scrappy you could still be thinking about your long term success is just how are we sharing internal information. And I was like huge thing for me to really think about not just like being prepared for like myself and maybe like one other person but just starting to think about like a team overall. Yeah, it's a great, great call out now that you've had experience that quite a few different companies and had some ability to reflect back on maybe some patterns you're starting to recognize. Are there any recurring pain points or watchouts that arise in operations that you've got a little bit of a playbook in the back of your mind now like oh yeah I always got a double check on that that other people should know. Definitely, I think in your relationships management we've talked about that a lot today like I think that's something that keeps on coming up in ops because it is such relationships heavy field. But I feel like the thing I tell people to watch out for is you have to make sure the relationships kind of working outside of the personal relationships. So I think people are like oh I have a great relationship with someone at this command it's going so great but I think you have to have your KPIs like is production getting down on time is your quality up to spec is your raw materials being managed correctly if they're managing your raw materials is your pricing coming in exactly what you thought it was going to be. So taking something that I hear a lot of ops people talk about in a very qualitative way into a very quantitative measurable success definitely with common and with warehouses but in like think about every relationship in your ops is just like what are the quantitative pieces to it. Great advice I'm sure things have gone wrong before I imagine is there anything that you can think of that's gone wrong before and how you navigated fixing it that you can share. I mean back to exactly the piece I was just talking about and we're talking so much about packaging so we had packaging that we are expecting to arrive from a vendor that we said you know they said it's going to arrive by the state and I said great thank you so much. And it didn't arrive by that day and it was for a product launch so all these things that you are expecting you carrying so much about you think you're on so in top of. And having to shift back a timeline because of that so what I've learned is when people say it's going to arrive at the state you say great what's the production date how is it shipping where is it shipping from and then did it ship is it on time. So getting so much more quantitative information if something is going to be on need to be on a specific timeline battle wounds I think there's so much trust that has to happen in operations because it's such a team sport I mean there's not one it's very different from every other department because it's not internal to the company it's so external you're relying on so many people having a really firm grip of what's going on also no external. Factors going crazy I mean I feel like you just have to be so.
rigid and type A of how every little detail that's going on and still it will inevitably go wrong anyway. I think that's so true and you're right. It is very external to the company. It's your out of control of so many things. But the only thing I will say is outside of the being so type A is the other thing I live my life by is you have to be like perfect is the enemy of the good. Like you have to be comfortable moving on when things are not perfect or I just feel like an opt you won't get anything done. Yeah, I feel like as a founder founders doing ops that's normally where it's really hard because you have a vision you're such a perfectionist I fall into this camp I think having that 80 20 mindset on product development can be a really hard pill to swallow for sure. Yeah, definitely I think that's very good advice the 80 20 on product development because there's always going to be continuous improvement and you have to get things to market sometimes. You know when stuff does go wrong when something doesn't show up on time as you're mentioning when the price comes in different than what you thought or you know something like that. If you had to you know mentor someone or if I'm coming you and I'm like oh my god everything's going wrong. What do I do what would be some advice you would have for me to be able to start working through some of those things and getting it figured out. First thing is communication so you have to communicate within your team what's happening at all times however you're going to do that. The worst thing is for something that you kind of knew it's going to go wrong but it didn't get communicated to the right people so however needs to know like let them know immediately and then just really focus on next step so learn from it figure out any other things at risk that maybe you didn't know think we're at risk before and put into place plan B I feel like every ops person has their plan B and see. And at Graza what I've learned is like when things do break they break bigger rates or because there's just more inventory there's more product moving there's bigger retailers than when I was at my previous companies and that was definitely learning for me so your plan B has to be like a little bit more fleshed out than it would have been when I was at smaller companies that maybe I didn't have like the resources or time to build out plan B so much but it's just not an option anymore so. You have to communicate what's going on. Pivot to that plan B that hopefully is a little bit more fleshed out learn from it for the next product launch or whatever the situation may be and for me that means putting everything down to my checklist figuring out my next steps are and like getting going on it. A master class in resilience I feel like yeah you you must be fearless because I'm sure the break bigger point I think it's a great one it's really easy when it's just kind of you on your website and of course you care about the world doesn't care so much but when it's like the more people relying on you the more responsibilities the more external factors you've got going on I'm sure that the pressure just starts mounting and mounting and mounting even more what is the most exciting thing you're looking forward to operations wise with Graza next. I'm so excited about everything operations really okay I think what I'm most excited about right now is improving automation and our workflows so integrating new tech tools and just helping my team not do any manual tasks whether that's AI or software's some really excited about just what that looks like in the future. The systems queen as you know startup CPG has the largest flat community in the industry with over 30,000 members now I love to pull a question directly from our channel and have you answer it as a case study for any founders that may have a similar question. The recent question is how do you know when you should upgrade your packaging or formulation if you know you have changes you want to make when is it the right time to pull the trigger on them. This is this question because I think it's a great community question so this is the question you should be asking at the coffee chats or when you're at sort of CPG events or meeting other people in the industry because there's so many details and nuances to formulations or packaging or that you can learn little things for that might be different for beverage or powders or olive oil that you might not know. So I have been involved in a lot of different packaging changes and formulation changes blue marble for example we went through a stage where vanilla extract pricing went through the roof so we were really worried really can we change our formulation can we change the amount of vanilla we're using we change the type of vanilla we're using. And how we made that decision was two ways we did a cost benefit and analysis like we just decided that the pricing was too much and to we did testing in our community so we had the opportunity where we did have ice cream stores so before we had to change our CPG product which is you know a bigger change we could test things with our stores so there might be an opportunity if you're just like considering a change that might be based on something that might affect something like flavor. Where you can try it with a small subset of your customers of the IP list or something like that that could make you feel more comfortable to do a formulation change so that was one experience with regulations for packaging and want to talk about a little bit about case packs because that's something that comes up a lot at. See to Mel we had 12 packs of Tahini and salesperson came on our team and she was like why are we doing 12 packs when you do freefills this is going to be so expensive and she was right so we changed to a six pack and when we went to a meeting with spout they said they're only taking us because we're a six pack and if we were 12 they wouldn't have taken us so that was a situation that was we weren't why they distributed yet so it wasn't a huge deal to change from a 12 to a six. Grazz is kind of in the opposite position now where we have wide distribution for some of our skews like our two course use that we started with the sizzle and the drizzle squeeze bottles and we're now taking into account like should we change from a six pack to a 12 because we've done almost for freefills that's one of the biggest costs in getting in the door so what are the other things we should be taking into account. We're looking at all of the labeling fee we have to pay for at warehousing warehousing like pick fees in general is there going to be a difference in the tolling cost if we could do bigger case packs the quagget is obviously another cost and after we come into a cost analysis from it now we're also talking to the sales team to see like what they would say on their side what the ask the brokers for their opinions as some of the buyers that they're close with their their opinions. So that situation it's not just going to cost one but one that you're we're taking into account the whole teams opinions. These are really tricky things for businesses because they're pretty big changes and going to be some costs involved either way normally with a change those are like some situations of where I've been able to like weigh those costs. That's really helpful and I love the anecdotes you shared I feel like they're both of them kind of indicated to me there was some sort of external cost saving benefit or opportunity benefit that really pushed you over the hump of needing to make a change versus kind of what we're going back to with that like perfectionist mindset of well I know this product I've been wanting to make it better so maybe now's the time to make it better so. What's your hot take on waiting for an extra like what you're mentioning an external opportunity cost to arise that it makes sense to make that change or you've been in market long enough that you think maybe if we've improved this it'll be more of a revenue growth driver for us I feel like I wear the ops hat so I would say you have to take into the external cost factors but that's why I think I would be a good balance for a founder who might push me in the way of you have to do more markets have he and things like that I think that's a really helpful perspective to just understand I think great operators I find the common thread between all of them are they're really good at thinking through in very tangible terms what's going on and what the implications for things will be in the rational for doing things the grounding feet of the industry that we all stand on before we wrap up. I want to take a second to make sure our audience can have an actionable next step to apply all this amazing knowledge to for founders that may want to get in touch with you or continue to learn from you where can they find you are follow along with you and for operators that might be interested in a role working directly with Graza or in a career transition what advice would you have for them you can reach me at Laura L.A. you are at grassa.co.com and people can also find me on LinkedIn reached out by. My inbox on email is a little crazy so LinkedIn might be a better way to reach me sometimes and anyone who wants to get involved with ops and or work at grassa I'd say you should reach out to me because we're always looking for more people to join our team it's we're definitely growing still keep an eye on LinkedIn we post misper jobs there and in the startup CPG group if you are a like problem solving if you like numbers if you are great at managing relationships and strong communication those are all the qualities that make great operators and yeah
that we would love to hear from you. - Well, thank you so much, Laura. It was such a pleasure speaking with you. You have clearly amazing operator chops and such a humble learning-oriented mindset. So it's been a great conversation, and I'm sure a lot of people will love to be learning from you as well. I really had a great conversation. Thanks again. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much for tuning in everyone. If you like this episode, show us some love with a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/startupcpg. I'm Hannah Dippman, podcast host and correspondent here at Startupcpg. I hope you'll join me again as we dig into more juicy topics, like ops, finance, and all the real talk founders actually need. Come say hi on LinkedIn or ping me on Slack. I'm always eager to hear your questions or brainstorm future episode ideas. If you're a potential sponsor and want to get in on the fun and appear on the podcast, shoot us an email at
[email protected]. And last but not least, if you haven't already, don't miss out on our free Slack community for emerging brands and CPG lovers alike. Join us at Startupcpg.com. We'd love to have you. See you next time. (upbeat music)
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