The Startup CPG Podcast

Austin Gardner-Smith
Forecasting. What we're trying to do is create a picture of what the future looks like for the business, that we can make decisions that we need to make today. And the better your picture of the future, the better decisions you will make today. The very simple example of this is if you thought you were going to order 10 million, it was too you thought you were going to sell $10 million and you ordered $10 million and you know you didn't sell $10 million, well, you've got a problem. And if you thought you were going to sell $3 million and you sold $10 million, well, you've got a different kind of problem.

00:40
Daniel Scharff
Welcome to the Startup CPG podcast. Today I am forecasting that our episode is going to be amazing for new and fast growing brands. Forecasting is really tough, but it's incredibly important. You could be out of stock at a big retailer or sit on too much inventory and not know what to do with it. On today's podcast, we've got Austin Gardner Smith. He's the CEO of drivepoint. They help lots of brands through forecasting and tons more through their AI finance platform that is built for scaling CPG brands like Me Oats Overnight and Graza. And speaking of Graza, we've also got David Such. He's the senior Director of finance at Graza. He's going to talk us through how this forecasting process really works for them. It's so helpful to hear how they forecast across accounts and SKUs during all this fast growth that they've had.

01:27
Daniel Scharff
By the way, it is no fun to actually create an Excel forecast template from scratch, but our friends from DrivePoint are giving you one for free. They've got this awesome template that you can use even if you don't subscribe to their software. So check the show notes for details on that. All right, here we go. All right, everyone. Ain't no party like a forecast party. Welcome today's episode. One of the biggest questions we get from early stage brands is all about forecasting. Early stage. How much inventory should I get as I'm getting these accounts? How much should I really be holding on to? Because it can really cause a lot of issues, right? It can be one of the worst cash fleets out there for your brand.

02:08
Daniel Scharff
And I think that forecasting overall is just one of the best examples of art meets science meets hopefully a good process. So I'm really happy to have a couple awesome perspectives for today's show. We've got Austin from drivepoint. We've done some incredible webinars with them and they are also giving out templates that can help you at these early stages. So they have this super cool tool that can automate a lot of the painful parts of forecasting and get it into your overall financials. And we are also so lucky to have David from Graza today. Graza, everybody knows it. It's one of the highest growth brands out there. And, and you can imagine that all of that growth was a lot to deal with from a forecasting perspective as they're expanding door count and adding cool skus on.

02:50
Daniel Scharff
So guys, I'm so happy to have both of you here. We're going to cover all the good stuff today. Let's start with some intros. Austin, do you mind going first?

02:57
Austin Gardner-Smith
Sure. Happy to kick it off and thank you so much to Daniel for having us and thank you to David for joining us. I think just to give you a sense of who I am, I'm the co founder and CEO of DrivePoint. We work with scaling consumer brands from sort of the early days of the business all the way up through several hundred million dollars of revenue and beyond. And what we're helping them with is exactly what we're here to talk about today. Finance, Forecasting, FP&A, Planning, all those sorts of names that this stuff goes by. But super excited to dive in and can hear from the master, David, and hopefully share lots of lessons from other companies as well.

03:28
Daniel Scharff
Let me ask you one quick question then about so for DrivePoint, basically this is the kind of tool that can maybe even replace a CFO for you in the early stages because if you get the whole thing spinning up right, you can immediately run all these what if scenarios, model out all the questions your board might ask you, all of that kind of stuff. Right. It's supposed to make that whole process really seamless.

03:46
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think what we see is, you know, for years and years basically the finance function has had what we call Excel and duct tape and lots of founders have been left to do this on their own and sort of figure it out. We've we a hundred percent believe that, you know, to your point about art and science, humans are somewhat irreplaceable in this mix. But that humans really shouldn't be spending their time doing the drudgery of moving data around and sort of building templates from scratch and having to do all that stuff that you should be using that time to use your brain and do the art piece. And we can handle a lot of the science piece on our side, I love it.

04:13
Daniel Scharff
You hear that robots? We are irreplaceable in some respects. Okay, David, over to you. Do you mind hitting us with the intro?

04:20
David Sooch
Yeah, thanks for having me on guys. I've been a senior director of finance at Graza for three years now and seen us grow on a rocket ship ride here and yeah, very familiar with all of the forecasting challenges that went through to get to this point now and yeah, excited to chat through them with you today.

04:40
Daniel Scharff
David, I love meeting people like you who are just in it in one of these high growth brands, who has one of these really deep expertise, skill sets, finance. Can you just tell everybody a little bit about all the stuff that you actually do there and where did you learn to do all of it?

04:55
David Sooch
Yeah, so I mean I got a great training ground at Waterloo Sparkling Water, another high growth brand was there for three years. And my day to day here at Graza, you know, really touch every aspect of the business. Being a, you know, early employee, getting in on the ground floor. My role has definitely evolved over time by dealing with, you know, cash flow forecasting, inventory management, planning, budgeting unit economics, profitability analysis, you name it. Anything kind of finance, inventory forecasting related, I'm kind of owning it.

05:30
Daniel Scharff
That's a lot of meaty stuff. And I've been in those businesses that are growing in that way and I know what it's like to wrangle an organization around a process like that. Come face to face with your numbers, make tough decisions. So I know it's not all just quiet spreadsheets and buttons. There's a, you know, it's very, it's a very dynamic role.

05:50
David Sooch
So that is awesome.

05:51
Daniel Scharff
Thank you so much for joining us today. So Austin, why don't we start and just do a little bit of basics around forecasting, get everybody on the same page. And then I'll be coming back to David for some more pro tips. So Austin, can you give us the basic Forecasting 101? What is the process like, what's the goal of it? What are the inputs, the outputs, all that jazz?

06:12
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, sure. Well, I'll do my best to kind of distill it into the one ones here. And David, please jump in if you disagree with anything or I get it wrong. But in my opinion, at a certain point there's sort of a unique part of running a CPG brand which is you have to forecast really well, right. Other types of businesses. If you're a software business or if you're A agency or you're a plumbing business, you can kind of get away without forecasting. You just wake up that day and see what happens and kind of get a sense for where the business is going to be. In cpg, we have to go buy inventory, right? And no one has a zero day lead time.

06:42
Austin Gardner-Smith
So you are making a judgment call, whether you know it or not, whether you are formally doing forecasting of any sort or not about what you are going to sell in the future and what that means for all other aspects of the business. And so fundamentally, when we're forecasting, what we're trying to do is create a picture of what the future looks like for the business so that we can make decisions that we need to make today. And the better your picture of the future, the better decisions you will make today. The very simple example of this is if you thought you were going to order 10 million, if you thought you were going to sell $10 million and you ordered $10 million and you know you didn't sell $10 million, well, you've got a problem.

07:16
Austin Gardner-Smith
And if you thought you were going to sell $3 million and you sold $10 million, well, you've got a different kind of problem. But in each case you have to try and get that picture of the future as accurate as you can. And so when I talk about forecasting, I think that's sort of the basic inputs. There's some idea of what you think is going to happen in the future and some idea of what the downstream effects of that decision are basically in terms of what you order, who you hire, how much you spend on marketing, all those things come back to sort of forecasting are reliant on that first core assumption of what you're going to sell in the future.

07:47
Daniel Scharff
Tell me if you disagree with this. I would say forecasting the stakes could not be higher because, you know, we learn in our first operations class in business school, we learned about the cost of overage versus the cost of underage. And you know, what that means is how much does it cost you to actually be sitting on a bunch of extra inventory? What's the true cost there? So the working capital that it ties up, storage costs, all of that stuff, versus the cost of underage, which is you might stock out at a key retailer or not be able to take on a new account. And here comes your other competitor taking that spot from you know, or not hit the momentum that you should have to fundraise and hit your next milestone. Right.

08:21
Daniel Scharff
But you know, I'll also say I've been part of companies that through just really did not do the process very well. They did it way too ambitiously to hit probably an investor forecast. And I would say it was the number one cash bleed for the whole business was just then sitting on tons of inventory that would go bad, you know, and then you don't have that cash available for a bunch of other stuff, especially if you have a lot of SKUs. So Austin, who typically owns this kind of a process because I know you see it across lots of different kinds of brands from ones just starting out to ones that are hitting hyper growth.

08:53
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, it's a great question and it certainly does change as you scale as a brand. For, for simplicity's sake I'll break it into sort of like 0 to 100 million and 100 million and up in the 0 to 10 bucket. It's, it's whoever's best with a spreadsheet. Right. So usually you've got a founder or a leader in the company who is more of a creative marketing style guy and then you, or gal and you've got somebody who is a little bit more numbers oriented and so that person is doing their best and kind of making it up as they go along and putting things together. And you know, there haven't been a ton of free resources and published tutorials on how to do this. And so a lot of it is trial by fire and you're kind of figuring it out as you go.

09:29
Austin Gardner-Smith
As you go into that 10 to $100 million range, you tend to get what I call the finance athlete or sort of the OPS generalist.

09:36
David Sooch
Right.

09:36
Austin Gardner-Smith
And it's someone, you know, with a background similar to David's, who's maybe worked at a brand before, has seen a little bit of this stuff, but is doing tons of stuff. So you know, forecasting might still only be a small portion of their job. They're worrying about closing the books and fixing whatever's going on at the warehouse and trying to true up numbers with the retailers and all those different aspects of it. And then really above 100 million is where you start to see dedicated FPA professionals and dedicated planning professionals. And so there's two titles, sort of demand planning and FPA that tend to go together. They are definitely a little bit different, but it's some flavor of someone who's really fully dedicated to looking at the forward looking part of the business.

10:12
Austin Gardner-Smith
Lots of variability in that setup, but that's a sort of broad strokes rule of thumb.

10:16
David Sooch
For you.

10:16
Daniel Scharff
So let me tell you how I kind of did this. And it was not the perfect way because I used to work at Mars Chocolate and they have the S and O P process, which is sales and operations planning. And then someone decided to add a plus in there probably because there's some cool extra thing that they do. And this is a once a month process that they run that is so exhaustive. And it goes all the way up and down the organization, I think, because they are a machine. They are an operations machine. They're the ones who can get, you know, bar to Walmart that's priced under a dollar and somehow have like a 70% margin on it. Right? That's what they do. So they have a really established process. As an early brand, what did we do?

10:55
Daniel Scharff
Well, we had our annual projection that were going after, but really in the early days, you know, I think we did our first run of product and we had a nice long shelf life. So were confident we could start selling through that. And we had additional production available for us. And then just, you know, really my job was to have a really good sense of the early stage accounts, what was going to hit and when, and what would the likely forecast be on that. And it's a little complicated because at the early stage of a business, it's so binary. And you're like, well, if I get Whole Foods national, that really is everything. And it could happen very quickly, but I probably won't get it. But I might have that same story with like 10 other retailers that I'm pitching.

11:38
Daniel Scharff
So it can be highly variable. And so what can you do? You really just have to rely on the people who know the most that are closest to those decisions. Probably your sales team in a lot of instances, to try to get something that's pretty accurate. Hopefully you have those good salespeople who really think with the business owner hat on and are like, no, I understand. I don't want to just argue for the inventory to make sure we can fulfill it. And even like, I might have to tell the buyer, if you say yes and ask me to get on shelf six weeks later, that could be an issue. We need lead time for this kind of stuff. Right?

12:08
Daniel Scharff
So, I mean, do you feel like that is a typical process where it would be me just talking to my brokers, talking to my salespeople, doing a bottoms up forecast at each retailer and distributor, really trying to have as close of a sense we could for what the forecast is going to be, even just for the next like 90 days? Which is kind of the minimum time frame where we would have to use current inventory instead of trying to produce something. Yeah.

12:32
Austin Gardner-Smith
I think in the early days that's generally right is you're sort of trying to get as much signal as you can from the end market about what you think people are going to purchase. And you are obviously very close to the metal on cash at that point at all times. And you're trying to sort of like order just in time to get those things done. There's not usually a super formal process and you're trying to figure it out. I think, you know, you bring up a really good piece about, okay, do I get Whole Foods national or not? Right. Like, we'll get into it more, I'm sure, as we go.

12:58
Austin Gardner-Smith
But the idea of forecasting to me is not necessarily about getting to one uber accurate plan, which you're really trying to understand are the guardrails in all of those different scenarios so that you can understand what you want to do or not. Because what you don't want to be doing is making a guess and then at the last minute sort of being like, oh my God, what if we get that order? And then, okay, well, I'll up it by 20% and sort of making these decisions at the very last minute, which people do all the time. Right. We see tons of that. Literally like, okay, we had a forecast and literally in the last two hours of that whatever the S and P process looks like, the numbers are changing dramatically. Right.

13:32
Austin Gardner-Smith
As people are sort of like having different gut feelings about which might go one way or another. And so I think that's where you can get yourself in trouble and you make these very life altering decisions for you as a business. And not quite on a whim, but not much more than a whim if you don't have the right process in place.

13:46
Daniel Scharff
Yes. So, yeah, good process. At the end of the day, it is going to be a judgment call, a decision that hopefully all the stakeholders hold hands and take that leap together, understanding again, the cost of overage and cost of underage. Because, yeah, I mean, you could stock out and really piss off a current retailer forever if you handle that the wrong way. Yeah. And then as you get to be a later stage business, hopefully then you have some kind of a process that happens on a regular basis. I will say I am kind of guilty of. When I ran a brand, I wouldn't say it was so regular. We would just every once in a while be like, oh, yeah, we should redo that and then find out that it was pretty different.

14:22
Daniel Scharff
But as you start getting more volume at an earlier stage, it's a little less volatile, I guess, you know, as you have more steady state accounts versus the ones you don't really know what you know versus what you don't know is a better ratio for you, right, as you're growing.

14:36
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, there's a stage earlier that I call like, buy a, you know, buy a container, sell a container, or, you know, buy a lot, Sell a lot. And you sort of are just in that phase until you're not right, where you don't have consistent flow over these things. You don't know who's going to take your orders, you don't know what's going on. And you do your best at that point in time, but eventually you have a repeatable business and you start having regular replenishment cycles. And that's, I think, really where you can start to do some damage in terms of using this as a weapon to improve the business.

15:00
Daniel Scharff
And what do you think is an appropriate frequency for this kind of a process as you start to really grow your brand? Do you tell people you work with you need to do this every month or every three months? You just. To really revisit the whole forecast?

15:16
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, on a super tactical level, like, yeah, I would recommend reforecasting and doing a rolling forecast at minimum monthly, especially in the early days. I think in the early days, you may even want to be changing those POs and those budgets on a weekly basis as you're getting reports back from your retailers. A lot of that changes based on your lead times and what your supply chain looks like as well, may dictate how frequently you're able to order things. What are your MOQs like, where do you need to be? But I think minimum monthly cadence is sort of the first point that we shoot to get people on a regular process.

15:45
Daniel Scharff
Okay, David, let's tap you in here. So now you've heard us talk about how maybe it works at a bunch of different kinds of companies, different stage. Let's talk about how it works at an actual company. So, David, first of all, do you have any reactions to all the stuff that we've just been talking about? Are you like, nodding? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Or like, actually, no, we do it a little bit differently.

16:04
David Sooch
Yeah, no, you nail it on the head. It's kind of the wild west as you're figuring things out. And there's no set rules or processes and every company is different based on, you know, a lot of different factors. If you produce, if you're able to produce weekly with your co packer, like you don't have to be as accurate. You just accept the POs and produce whatever somebody order place the PO for. Unfortunately, most businesses definitely don't work like that. So you kind of have to, you know, it's a guessing game of what, you know, what the orders are going to be like over the next, you know, 30, 90 days and you know, making sure you're comfortable with whatever you choose.

16:41
David Sooch
Do you want to lean towards having more inventory, tying up more capital into that, or do you want to run a little leaner and you know, based on where you are and your kind of cash flow position that might, you know, dictate your inventory strategy.

16:55
Daniel Scharff
So how does the process work at Graza and how has that evolved over time?

17:00
David Sooch
Yeah, so in the most simplest terms, you know, forecasting you took at a granular level. We look at on a SKU level basis, how many stores are you in and then what is your average sell through or velocity? Multiply those two numbers together, that's your like base demand. And so like that's the main premises for the forecast. And then there are things that can happen that will cause different spikes, mainly promotional lifts and then new store load ins. So when you launch in a new store, the shelf is empty, retailer is going to order one to two cases to put your product on the shelf. And no one could buy your product, but the retailer still has to order that one to two cases.

17:45
David Sooch
So you're kind of guaranteed a large order upfront and then it's anyone's best guess on what the sell through is after that. You obviously should have historical data from the accounts that you're already in and say, okay, this account is going to perform similar to this one. You know, Publix is going to operate similar to Kroger. Like we think, you know, they're both traditional groceries and you kind of go from there and then you are constantly tweaking, updating on a monthly basis. But it's mainly those key components of how many stores average velocity and then adding in any sort of lift for promotions.

18:22
Daniel Scharff
And so how do you account for it Sounds like you're doing a bottoms up kind of forecast based off all the retail doors that you know you're in, that you know you're getting in, that you're expanding SKU count in and then having some velocity assumptions. Here's the kind of velocity we do at typical Retailers, let's assume that'll be similar for other kinds. Maybe it's based off a channel, maybe it's just based off just. Yeah, that specific retailer knowing what kind of placement or promos you're going to get there, how many SKUs, anything like that. How do you account for all of the distributor stuff? Right, because you don't always have all of that visibility into all of the places that your distributors are servicing you. Maybe you know a lot of the accounts but you know, you don't always have total clarity into it.

19:02
Daniel Scharff
Do you add on some kind of a distributor level forecast as well or how does that overlap with your retailer forecasts?

19:09
David Sooch
Yeah, so we do try to forecast for the end retailer and then we kind of have a catch all bucket for the tail end of, you know, small mom and pop stores that are serviced through distributors. And you'll get monthly or quarterly reports from your distributor to know how many stores we are they're in. But you know, we might say we're in a 100k independent stores and you know, not forecast any of those buckets individually but look at it as a whole of this, you know, all other bucket to make sure that we're not missing those new accounts that distributors will sell in, you know, month over month. Okay.

19:44
Daniel Scharff
And so that makes a lot of sense. So you've got the bottoms up retailer forecast. Then you also have a separate bucket for kind of other. Right. Distributor stuff that doesn't necessarily tie into this bottoms up, but we need to forecast for it. So here's an assumption for that as well. And just overall, so you know, we have our production forecast that's like, okay, in whatever timeline we know this is how much we actually need to make and that might vary based on the business. I heard from somebody else about olive oil. Like, you know, olive oil, some people might think it's actually like a complicated business or simple business, but the reality is like a lot of olive oil is made once per year and you kind of have your.

20:23
Daniel Scharff
For some businesses they're going to be placing a big order very far in advance which might even make the forecasting process more important and maybe a little bit less flexible than businesses that maybe just kind of have an unlimited ability to just keep sourcing ingredients and churning out stuff at a coman. So yeah, back to my question, David, is basically. Yeah, what are the different kinds of forecasts or plans that you have that you're tracking throughout the year? Year. Like really, how are you using these forecasts when it comes to production?

20:52
David Sooch
Yeah, we have our rolling monthly forecast and that's the main driver and feeder into our production forecast. We have typically like a 60 to 90 day planning cycle. So right now we're in September, we're planning our November production runs and we're finalizing those quantities this week, which means that production is going to service December demand. So we really have to be thinking far out in the future of what's going to happen in December. Already, you know, anything that's, you know, happening next month, it's like we already produced that inventory back in, you know, decided that production run a while back so that the main driver of the production is that monthly rolling forecast, which you like to be accurate kind of 90 days in advance. And then in terms of the financial planning, we're looking at annual budgeting cycle.

21:42
David Sooch
So, you know, right around Q4, right around this time of year where we're doing all of our scenario planning for 2026 to kind of get a high level to all of our production and manufacturing partners so that they have line of sight of, okay, Graza did XYZ that last year. How many millions of bottles are we going to produce next year? And we're trying to give as much guidance as we can. And then, you know, I would say on a quarterly basis we have like a financial reforecast that we're using for supporting marketing budgets and hiring plans. And you know, we'll update kind of our operating model on a quarterly basis using whatever the latest rolling forecast is as the like base input.

22:23
Daniel Scharff
So pretty interesting to think about also just from your SKU mix and how that could impact your forecasting. Because you know, Graza obviously incredibly well known for the squeeze bottles. And then super interestingly, you guys came out with the huge cans, right, that are refill canisters for the squeeze bottle, which I think is a really beautiful thing and is brilliant. And it's like you've never seen a can like that on a shelf before. It like looks like a mini oil drum almost and people pick it up. And you know, I think that's awesome because the, I mean, just obviously one of the brilliant things about Graza was just the insight that people really like squeeze bottles. I used to work at Just Egg and all the chefs all had their squeeze bottles of olive oil.

23:09
Daniel Scharff
This is like pre Graza, I think, and they would just put the olive oil in them. I'm like, well that's really smart. And I bought one of those squeeze bottles at home so I could feel like a cool chef and Then it turns out everybody actually likes that. So that was a cool thing for you guys. But then you came out with the refillable drums that, you know, great make them more kind of sustainable and reusable for everybody. So when you have those refillable canisters, how does that actually impact your forecast? Then for all the SKUs, like when you were launching those, did you have to think about, oh, well, how much actually of the velocity is going to move over to the refillable ones versus the squeeze bottles?

23:42
David Sooch
That was a very challenging time. We ultimately had to go with our gut assumptions of, you know, we think this is it going to be 100% incremental? It's, you know, it's technically the same product, it's the same oil. It's just in a different form factor. It's also a refill solution cared really towards a repeat customer. No one's, I would think, wanting to buy their olive oil and just drink it straight from the can. So we expected some, you know, cannibalization or mix shift from the existing customer base. And, you know, we really, you know, just, you know, put an estimate of, okay, we think it's going to do, you know, 50% of the squeeze bottle velocities.

24:21
David Sooch
And, you know, as soon as we got actual data, then we would, you know, update our forecast accordingly with, okay, we thought it was going to be 50%. It's actually 40%. And we're going to use this until, you know, we learn more. And yeah, it was a very challenging time to predict anytime you're launching something new, you have no data to work with. You are, you know, hopefully smarter learning from your existing products in market. But it's a guessing game. Anytime you don't have historical data to go off of.

24:49
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, that's a tough one because it's not as simple as when somebody launches a bigger pack size or something, right? Like, okay, people love this. Now let's have the value pack or the bonus size or whatever. I feel like there's a little bit more data out there for that kind of stuff versus we're launching something, it's bigger. It's also like, it's going to cannibalize probably some of the business, which is great. That's why we're doing it, you know, But I think that's a very interesting problem to tackle. So it sounds like you guys definitely did the art meets science meets good process. So, Austin, as you're hearing about how Graza goes about this, does that sound Pretty typical in terms of the kind of forecasts that are out there.

25:26
Daniel Scharff
Like, and just from an overall business perspective, like, you know, okay, you might have a plan at the beginning of the year, like, hey, here's how much we're going to do. It corresponds to a top line revenue number. It also has our volume number that we're expecting for the whole year and even all the way down to profitability probably. Right. But then you're going through and then you're going to have your production forecast, which hopefully is that same thing and even bigger. But you know, that doesn't always happen with every business. And what are all the different kinds of forecasts and plans and things that we have as businesses?

25:56
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, it's a great question. I think a couple of things struck me as David was talking in the first is and as you were asking questions, Daniel, like there are layers to the forecast, right? There's a top layer and what David was describing of sort of forecasting velocity at shelf, right, of saying, okay, I think at Whole Foods we're going to sell 3.4 units of sizzle, you know, per store per week. And getting, and getting to that level. Then you have to take that and then back it into your, what your shipments forecast is going to be, which David, I know is something that we worked on together in the very early days of getting drive points set up was, okay, how does that velocity forecast then turn into a shipments forecast? What actually is leaving your warehouse?

26:34
Austin Gardner-Smith
Because in order for those units to be sold, they have to get there, you know, several weeks before that velocity is going to take place. And so you're backing that timeline out and then you have to actually back up the production timeline. To your point, Daniel, of like, hey, there's actually, you have to back that timeline up even further to get to production. And then interestingly, when you bring the finance angle of it, there's actually a fourth layer which is the cash and the physical products don't move at the same time.

26:57
Austin Gardner-Smith
So you actually need to, you know, once you decide how much you're going to produce, well, there's typically some sort of a down payment that you have to produce with your supplier, some that's available fob some that's available upon delivery in terms of how much you have to output, the cash piece of it. And so there's a lot of complexity in the layers of this that have to get put together. And I think in the early days it's definitely useful to shortcut Some of that, like we see a lot of people saying I'm not even going to worry about the velocity forecast. I'm just going to start with forecasting shipments because that's what my sales team knows, that's what the orders that are coming from the retailers are. And I'm not even going to worry about velocity.

27:29
Austin Gardner-Smith
There are puts and takes on that is, you know, you can really get blindsided if you don't go all the way to forecasting at the velocity level in pretty short order where like you're expecting orders on some predictable cadence and then all of a sudden the floor falls out and you're left asking your rep like hey, that happened. They're like, well it's not moving. Like there's no push at shelf. Right. And so if you're behind that curve and you're not starting from the end consumer perspective, there's risk. So that's the first thing that sort of comes to mind are the, just the layers of this stuff and there really are three or four different levels of forecasting that have to get done to create a good process.

28:05
Daniel Scharff
Okay. So yeah, I really like that point you made about the timing of things as well. Cause yeah, it's great. You do velocity level forecast, you're launching it Whole Foods, you know, in October, whatever. The reality is the order that they're going to place via distributor is going to come in three months before that potentially or maybe it's going to have to warehouse two months. Like they need to get it, they need to actually set it up into their DCs, into the stores and yeah, so a lot of big timing impact there. And so you know, let's say for then an early stage range you're talking about these different layers in an ideal world at least there's a nice template for people to be doing this kind of forecasting.

28:43
Daniel Scharff
And I know for anyone listening, we are going to drop a very cool template that the Drive Point team made available. So it basically you can like, you can see this already in your head from all of the different inputs like oh by retailer, by SKU calculations about velocity over time because they also can change if you're launching, hopefully you're going to launch at one velocity and it's going to grow and just overlaying all these things and just to get it to where it can flow up into one top level forecast. Also obviously that needs to translate into dollars so you understand the cash impact, all of these things. So at least at my company were doing this In Excel. It's a nice Excel, but it took a lot of time to do it.

29:20
Daniel Scharff
So, you know, you do what you need to do, right? Because that's just how it works in the early stages. But we had that. And then when our CFO needed to then report numbers to the board, it's an exercise, right? Like, okay, he needs to copy paste the new model that I'm giving, run it back through hits the cogs, hits the, you know, also the pricing by distributor, understand also the discounts that we're giving to different retailers, the promos that we're running to like tile that back in. So this is an ad for DrivePoint Austin that I'm setting up basically for you. But Reg. No, but like for real, that is basically a lot of what Drive Point and automated tools like that can offer, right? Is that like that all now is actually going to at least be tied together.

30:01
Daniel Scharff
You do need to go in and actually input all the assumptions and get all that stuff right. But if you have a tool like DrivePoint that's going to make it all flow together.

30:09
Austin Gardner-Smith
I think that's right. And I appreciate the plug. I would say two things. One, we love Excel. Most of DrivePoint is built on Excel. The model that David uses every day inside of DrivePoint is built on Excel. David and many others like David are Excel super users. And we don't want to strip that power away, especially because in this world too, as you get further into demand planning, like there still is a very large art component. And so I think the idea, like people often simplicity will sort of look at this and be like, oh, this is a math problem. Like AI should be really good at this and we should just be able to automate this whole thing. And my goal would be like, well, I want to automate the first draft, right?

30:43
Austin Gardner-Smith
But give the human the opportunity to use their unique insight and ability to edit. So we love Excel. Drivepoint Works is built literally basically on top of Excel. So that's one. But I think what we've learned is that as you get into that level of complexity and you were just talking about it of like, okay, let's say you know, Graz has done a great job, has still has a handful of SKUs. And so relative to some other brands, like in some ways a relatively simple forecast. Think about a brand that has 20 or 30 SKUs and has 10 or 15 accounts, right? And then has those four or five different layers for each of those SKU Times account mix, like the thing just gets complicated and hard to manage if you're managing every single input manually.

31:21
Austin Gardner-Smith
Let alone you sort of heard David talk about how important it is to use the historical data to inform future trends. Right. So it's not just managing 150 or a thousand inputs even. Right. It's about actualizing those in a seamless way. And so when David rolls forward his model, he's able to get up to date forecast data directly into that model with a couple of clicks and instead of having to spend three or four hours or hire a junior person to manually update all of that. And I think that's where, as you think about continuous forecasting, right. That having a tool like Drive Point gets really useful because having that data at your fingertips and using historical data to influence future projections becomes kind of mission critical in terms of getting this stuff right.

32:02
Daniel Scharff
Okay, so we've talked a lot about retail inputs, but also there's the whole E. Comm side of it for a lot of brands, maybe some that have heavier products are more interested in it as a way to get trial and, you know, let people order around the country, whereas other brands might even be Ecom first or E. Com only in some instances. And I know it's just, you know, not so simple as well, how much are people ordering it? That's our forecast. In a lot of ways there you have a lot of the same complexity or maybe even more than in the retail channel. Right. Because you have different cohorts of customers coming in that are buying at different rates and you're going to make different investments at different times into the E. Com channel.

32:39
Daniel Scharff
So, Austin, how do you see brands typically accounting for all of that? Any tips for them that might be different from the retail bottoms up?

32:48
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, great question. I'm actually going to. I'll go separate even further a little bit to say you sort of have direct to consumer E Comm and then you have Marketplace E. Comm. And they are. They are uniquely in their own right. So starting for direct to consumer, the big shift is that really instead of thinking about units sold, which is kind of the core measure, when you're thinking about wholesale, you start thinking about customers acquired. Right. And those customers acquired are really drive your sales math or your acquisition Math, you're spending $50 or I hope it's $50 for the brands out there, it might be closer to 100 for a lot of brands today to acquire that customer, they're coming to your website, but you don't have as much control over what they're purchasing at the point of sale.

33:25
Austin Gardner-Smith
And you don't know exactly how frequently that customer is going to come back. We do have more data than we have in wholesale. And so what we're typically encouraging brands to do and how all of the drive point models work is to go, okay, you have a customer, that customer is going to place an order, what are the likely components of that order from a value perspective and then getting to a unit based forecast that way. And then also you mentioned cohorts, like we go really deep into cohorts and now we're actually making a prediction for once that customer is acquired, when and how frequently are they going to come back and make a subsequent purchase? So there's another layer of repeatability that's easier to predict with the right amount of data.

34:01
Austin Gardner-Smith
On the direct to consumer channel, the marketplace channel is a little bit different functions sort of as a hybrid of these two things. In Marketplace, I'm talking about TikTok shop, Amazon Fair, things like that, where you're trying to really understand, okay, I'm going to acquire a certain order. Inside that order there may be one or more products, there's an order mix and that's how we translate down to the SKU level. And then bundle that all up, put it together with your wholesale forecast, try and figure all that stuff out. And you know, Peasy Bob's your uncle.

34:27
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, right. And at least you don't have the. With Amazon you will have some preloading kind of timing differences, but with a lot of the direct to consumer stuff, at least you don't have to worry so much about, oh, the distributor has to pick it up three months ahead or whatever. So David, how does that all sync with you guys for Graza? Obviously you guys have a healthy E comm business. Do you find it easier, harder to forecast? What role does it play in your overall business forecast?

34:51
David Sooch
Ecom is definitely easier to forecast because it seems to be a little bit more predictable. You know, there is definitely seasonality with, you know, Q4 spikes. And if you run promotions, you know that can definitely cause a lot of sales spikes. Or if you get some viral post about your product online, you might get a daily spike. But in general, if you're spending a consistent amount marketing dollars, you're going to see very consistent daily sales orders. Now with a mix of what people are buying is often changing. But you know, there's a pretty predictable kind of daily average in terms of orders and then the average order value of those orders. So that's kind of how we forecast as well is try we're not trying to predict exactly what everyone's going to buy.

35:41
David Sooch
We're just trying to say, you know, people are going to order, you know, a hundred people are going to order today and they're going to order, you know, $50 worth of olive oil today and they can buy sizzle, they could buy drizzle, you know, any certain combination. There's a plethora offerings on our site but that's typically how we forecast. I mean it's, you know, definitely we break down of the individual components. There's subscription, there's non subscription, there's first time customers, there was repeat purchases. But in general it is relatively predictable. Marketing spend is the biggest I guess driver of sales and obviously you can boost sales by you know, spending millions of dollars on Facebook ads. But absence of that, it's a little bit easier in my opinion to predict.

36:25
Daniel Scharff
Every time you talk about the complexity I'm like oh gosh, that sounds hard. Oh wait. And I remember there's a template though that everyone can use. Even if you're not at the point where you're ready to bring on something like drivepoint. They are very nice and have built the best templates out there that I've seen for it and you can access that in the show notes. So in case you were just starting to sweat with perspiration thinking of all of these different layers. Yes, it's a template, you can use it will be okay. So David, for your guys process, do you have specific goals? KPIs any theory around how much safety stock to have around?

36:58
David Sooch
Yeah, I mean the answer is it depends definitely. Our goals are first and foremost to hit our revenue projections and our forecasts make our investors happy. All of that we want, you know, in terms of forecasting we're measuring forecast accuracy. There's actually kind of two layers of forecast accuracy that we look through is you know, what is selling through the register. That's what we hold the sales teams accountable. That's the way they think. But then there's forecast accuracy in terms of what orders were placed which ultimately ties into our revenue for the month. But those do not necessarily equal each other in the short term. But we'll look at kind of forecast accuracy really we're trying to, you know, in a perfect world you're getting every customer their SKU level, you know, number of units sold a hundred percent accurate. That's not reality.

37:48
David Sooch
And things are going to over and underperform. We're looking to, you know, ideally I would say 10%, you know, 90% accuracy on the forecast is good, but really what matters is the aggregate skew level. Like, if you know, Khe's up 50%, but Publix is down 50% and that nets out. And like, actually we sold, you know, the exact number of sizzle units we projected for the month. That's good. You know, obviously you can get the sum of the parts a hundred percent accurate as well. But that's the level of detail that we're looking at in terms of safety stock. It depends really on your flexibility of your supply chain and what your goals are. You know, you mentioned, you know, the cost of overstock and understock.

38:32
David Sooch
You know, if you have, you know, unlimited cash in the bank and you have a long shelf life product and you're okay holding 12 weeks of supply, that might be the right strategy for you. That way, if retailer XYZ calls you up and says, I want to place the PO tomorrow, you can say yes, confidently, but typically I would say it's like six weeks of supply is what we try to hold, but it's going to vary by sku and a new SKU that we're launching, you know, we just launched last this summer, you know, we're holding excess weeks of supply just because, you know, if one new account takes that skew in, six weeks of supply is going to be gone overnight. So. And we can't react as quickly on the production side of things. So wrong answer is it depends.

39:16
Daniel Scharff
But as usual, yes. Okay. So, David, another question for you. I'm wondering if you feel like you see drama around the forecasting process. We're going to launch a new show here called Real Forecasters of cpg. Be on Bravo shortly. But because I have seen this where, like past companies, I'm sure you guys are not like this, but where there was just, you know, a heated verbal argument between, let's say the people like the sales team who has this forecast that they have to hit. They're paid off this, they're bonused off this, which if you know, salespeople, their bonuses are very important to them. That's a lot of why they do what they do. And they're good at it and they want to earn those bonuses and if the inventory is not there, they might not earn that bonus and they'll get blamed for it.

40:01
Daniel Scharff
Right? And so I've just seen these shouting matches between sales and ops and finance, and people are like, you're a lunatic if you think you're going to hit that? No, there's no way they're going to order that soon. Right. And the salespeople, like, you don't know what you're talking about. You weren't on the call with them, you don't know what they said. So hopefully you guys don't have the shouting matches. But do you see that tension play out in the process that you have?

40:23
Austin Gardner-Smith
David? I think one interesting thing to add there is like, who. Because we get this question all the time from customers of like, who has the final stamp? Right. Because there is a healthy tension always between sales and OPS and these things. But how does it work for you guys to get to that number that actually goes into the po?

40:40
David Sooch
Yeah, that's where the S and O P process that you guys mentioned comes into play. You know, we definitely have our monthly flow forecasts. You know, OPS has a perspective, finance has a perspective, sales rep will have their perspective. Ultimately, you come together with one forecast that you can agree on and you know, that's what's built into the production plan. And you can always check the math and you know, month time, see who predicted the future the best. But, you know, it's a healthy tension to challenge the forecast assumptions. You know, we launch a new product and it's like, okay, it's going to start at this velocity and then it's going to grow to xyz. And you know, the OPS team will, in finance, we'll be looking at historicals and say, you know, did we see this elsewhere?

41:24
David Sooch
Like, does that make sense to just gut check, you know, what the sales teams is predicting? But yeah, there, that definitely can be some drama when POS don't get fulfilled. Yeah.

41:38
Daniel Scharff
Right. Okay, so we didn't get too much gossip from you there. I'm not sure we're ready. I don't, I don't know if we have our main characters for the show yet, but that is definitely.

41:46
Austin Gardner-Smith
I mean, the only thing I would add to just jump into anal is like, where it goes wrong. I think, especially for early stage brands, is when there is no tension. Right. And so the drama might be the far end of the spectrum of what you're trying to avoid. But no, tension is also not a healthy place. Like, we see a lot of early stage brands, especially if they're working primarily with distributors or primarily outsourced sales teams, where they just sort of like take the sales team's forecast as gospel. Right. And I think that's an incredibly dangerous Place to be in on both the upside and the downside. Right. If there's not some sort of attention in terms of looking at historicals or having a finance perspective to push back and make sure that all the boxes are being checked. So drama, not good.

42:28
Austin Gardner-Smith
No. Tension also not good. Right. We want to be in that. In that. Somewhere in that healthy tension zone in the middle, ideally.

42:33
Daniel Scharff
I like that. And I'm. Yeah, sometimes you might have an employee, it's like, why are they being so difficult? Like, no, that person is passionate and they want to do a good job and they take pride in their work and they care about this company and these products and that's why they're arguing that, like may. I don't know, there are maybe are some people who are just difficult. But often you're like, you want to embrace that. Be like, first of all, thank you for caring so much about this that you're in this debate. Right.

42:57
Austin Gardner-Smith
Well, on the other side of the sales guy who wants to hit his bonus is the ops person who is, you know, worried about their position if they end up with half their cash tied up in stock that hasn't moved. Right. So there's, you know, both people are highly incentivized and they're. A lot of times their comp depends on it. And I think if you structure as an executive and this is more for those later stage companies, but structuring the comp targets for each of those sides of the table correctly can be a really important tool in the toolkit in terms of creating the right level of tension in that S and P process.

43:28
Daniel Scharff
Yes, I think that's true. I think it's hard to do it the early stage to really get all that stuff right because it's just such a fear in the air exercise, even about the volume. But, you know, I really like to believe, having spent a lot of time in this industry, it's also, it's not just about monetary compensation to get things right. I know so many people, ops people, salespeople who just really take a lot of pride in what they do and they have opinions and they think things through very critically and they just like to get that opinion across and. Because they care. Right. And so like, those are. I think it's great for people to just recognize that when it's coming and just really try to understand their thought process and where it's coming from. Because, I mean, I'll tell you, I've.

44:10
Daniel Scharff
I've seen somebody like that ushered out of a company and they were 100% correct. It turned out I had nothing to do with money. They were just like, this is ludicrous. There is no way that's going to happen. I cannot in good conscience actually support producing that. And it was bad. They were shown the door and they were right all the way out the door. It's just like, no, that's not the person. No, you don't like, just because they're not in the cult, like, you don't get rid of that person for sure. So, Austin, I'm wondering, you work with a lot of companies. Sounds like Graza has a really great process that they're following. It's consistent, people are bought into it.

44:47
Daniel Scharff
It sounds like for other companies that you work with outside of Graza, are there any that you look at and you're like, wow, those people really have the whole financial and ops process really dialed in. And if so, you know, what do you think it is about them that really makes that one of their core strengths?

45:05
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, it's a great question. There are definitely. There are a couple others I would go to if you guys don't do daily. The manufacturer, Servo wellness, shot across C2C and they do a ton of their own manufacturing and have gotten really tight on this process. And we help them from point of acquisition all the way through. They. They buy their own raw materials and ingredients and get all that stuff together. And so what's made them really good, I think, is that super tight linkage between the point of sale all the way through to, you know, to the point of production. Like where this goes wrong is there's gaps in that process somewhere. Or like the finance and marketing team is two weeks ahead of a plan and the supply planners haven't heard about it yet. Right.

45:45
Austin Gardner-Smith
And so you create these sort of natural gaps and it's usually human error or just timing or something that makes that happen. So I call out doses one and another one that's. That's sort of next level on this stuff is Oats Overnight. Again, another completely vertically integrated brand. They've got even more complexity in terms of almost all of their packs are, you know, eight or 16 packs with multiple different flavors that customers have complete control over in terms of what that product mix looks like. They're also constantly shipping and iterating on new flavors. So that new product launch piece is constantly there for them. They have two manufacturing facilities now that they're trying to merge across. And so they've done an exceptional job.

46:23
Austin Gardner-Smith
And I think, again, a great marriage of sort of a Three headed monster at oats of a CEO who's really super focused on marketing. Chief Strategy Officer and Chief commercial officer Nina McKinney who's phenomenal at managing the sort of both sides of it. And then an incredible CEO who has incredible chops on the operating side and is pushing back in that healthy tension and that sort of holy trinity of sales ops and finance basically working together to get that stuff done. So those are a couple, I would say sort of like superstars now. They're all well along the path, right. It took them a while to get there and they've got large teams to make that happen. But those are if you want to, you want case studies of other than Graza of it going super, right?

47:03
Austin Gardner-Smith
Those are, those are a couple I point to.

47:05
Daniel Scharff
I love it. Okay, so David, maybe last question for you is. Let's say you are starting David's new sauce and you're trying to find the perfect person to run your forecasting process. What are the qualities that you really want in that person?

47:22
David Sooch
I think he wants someone who's, you know, self starter, willing to just roll up their sleeves and figure it out. You know, when there's no process procedure, you know, you want someone with ideally some experience in the industry, you know, having done it before that gives you confidence in them. But you know, I think the most important, you know, factor is their attitude of how they approach the day to day. There's going to be uncertainty, things are going to go wrong. You know, you're going to have to figure stuff out as you go and you know, just want someone who's, you know, hard working, willing to roll up their sleeves and just figure it out and know they'll make mistakes, but own them and learn from them and you know, continue to iterate on the process and you don't have to make it perfect.

48:07
David Sooch
It's, you know, definitely the 8020 rule to start. You know, you want to keep the product on shelf, you want to, you know, have cash in the bank. You know, those are the two most important things. You want someone who understands those.

48:20
Daniel Scharff
Well, there ain't no party like a forecast party because a forecast party doesn't stop. It really doesn't. Right. It's just over and over. And that's why you need someone like that who is just tenacious and ready to take some hits and keep on going. Right? Because the good and bad news is you're going to get to do it over and over again all the time and you really need to be in the details and paying attention and talking to people and taking inputs and this. Yeah. Again, the stakes are high forecasting.

48:46
Daniel Scharff
It may feel like a painful process for some people who don't live in spreadsheets or haven't grown up in them the way some of us have, myself included or just, you know, really taking time out of, I would say, especially if you know, you, the founder or your sales team, they want to be out there selling, right? They're out there trying to sell the accounts. You're like, hey, okay everyone like come inside for a while. Let's all sit down and just really spend time doing these numbers. But they are used to that and they expect it. And you know, you really can task salespeople with these kind of requirements like no, I need you to sit in and put the account by SKU forecast in place.

49:23
Daniel Scharff
They do understand the importance of that and they also want to fight to make sure that they're going to have the inventory there. So I think as long as the process is explained to them well and you're not making it overly onerous on them. Right. Give them a nice template. Don't make them actually become Excel wizards. I will say I probably have never met a salesperson who is better at Excel than I am. I'm not the best at Excel ever, but I'm, you know, I'm pretty good. Never met a salesperson who just is a super Excel wizard. Like usually they don't, I don't know, I don't want to. I love sales guys.

49:59
David Sooch
I am a sales guy.

49:59
Daniel Scharff
But you know, they're typically, it's not so easy for them to whip their way around and Excel and pivot this and table that. They just, you know, they're, they are really good at sales and that's why David does what he does. Salespeople do what they do. Right. So I really agree with just like yes, ask them to do it but try to make it easy for them to give you the inputs that are in their email chain with the buyer or, and you know, whatever is that. David, what do you think is half.

50:25
David Sooch
Fair or am I just ripping too hard on salespeople? The most important part is getting buy in from the sales team. They know the retailers inside and out. If you are not leveraging the information in their brains into your production plans and forecasting, you're not going to be as accurate as you could. And so you want to take it as easy and painless as possible so that they enjoy doing it that they get buy in, they understand the importance. And yes, that's, that is definitely a key aspect of the forecasting process.

50:57
Daniel Scharff
Make forecasting fun. That's what we're here to do. Okay, Austin, as we're wrapping up here, any last thoughts on forecasting? And can you also just hit us one more time with just overall, if people are interested in DrivePoint, what should they do? How should they hit you up? What are the steps here?

51:14
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, the thought that I leave you with is sort of like, you know, one thing that I say a lot is that the importance of doing this stuff. You know, most founders will have had some scar tissue on a bad forecast or a missed forecast relatively early in their career. And I think CPG is unique again in that instinctive. It's sort of this constant loop of forecasting, replenishment, sales forecasting. And if you get that cycle wrong once, you probably are a little bit wounded. If you get that cycle wrong twice, you can find yourself in real life problems. And if you get that cycle wrong three times, you're out of business. Right. And so I think that's sort of the key thing. Most people will learn the hard way at some point, but there is really no substitute for getting this better.

51:56
Austin Gardner-Smith
And I've seen good companies that are not good at forecasting. I've never seen a great company that is not also really good or great at forecasting. Right. These businesses are just too cash intensive relative to other types of businesses to not invest cycles in getting that right. Obviously I'm talking my book here, like that's our reason for being. We love talking about this stuff. It's all we do all day long. The thing that makes us unique as opposed to any of the other forecasting tools out there, is that we're super focused on CPG and retail. We don't do any other types of businesses. This is all we do all day long. And so all of our templates are pre configured to sort of think about this stuff.

52:31
Austin Gardner-Smith
All the data source connections are pre configured so you can get that scan of velocity data that were talking about from all your end retailers directly into the platform and minimize as much work as possible. So if people are interested, we'll make the templates available. I think that's a great starting point to sort of get your hands dirty with something. Even if you're not ready to purchase something like DrivePoint, start using the templates. We've already done a lot of the thinking for you and then you know, when you're Ready? We're here. You can book a demo on our website and you can hit me up directly on LinkedIn. You can send me an email, we'll put an email in there. But I'm always willing to talk about this stuff even if it's not the right time to buy.

53:03
Austin Gardner-Smith
I love talking to early stage founders and sort of helping them get on the right path with this stuff so that we don't have to make those mistakes in the early days.

53:11
David Sooch
I love it.

53:11
Daniel Scharff
And the integrations are important. Integrating with your inventory management, with your retailer data, just try to take away a lot of the, let's say non value add steps of just getting all the stuff in there and leave you with a little bit more time to make decisions, analyze things. Right. Chase down the hard problems.

53:29
Austin Gardner-Smith
Yeah, we just did our deep integration with David to SIN seven on their side as well. So all the sales data, all the retailer data, the inventory, IMS data is all stuff that you can get inside of Drive Point. So it's been a fun couple years of building this thing.

53:41
Daniel Scharff
All right, so David, as we wrap up for you, any good way for people to follow along with you, connect with you on LinkedIn or just support Graza in general?

53:50
David Sooch
Yeah, definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. And yeah, to support Graza, best way is to buy our product. It's a great product. We got good quality olive oil available just about every grocery store or you can buy online. But we got a lot of exciting stuff ahead for 2026 as well.

54:12
Daniel Scharff
I love it. And then maybe just one final tip for me that I think we didn't really talk a lot about is if you do find yourself in a situation which you will at some point where you did over forecast and you're sitting on some inventory that you need to figure out what to do with, don't let it sit there because you eventually may have to actually even pay to destroy it, which is really a shame on all fronts to have to destroy it and then to also have to pay to do that. So I really recommend everybody also checks out ways like expiry product inventory channels. So I did this at a brand that I was at previously. We were sitting on all this stuff. I'm like, what can I try to sell it?

54:47
David Sooch
Okay, cool.

54:48
Daniel Scharff
So we actually created a whole resource that's on our website. If you go under the founder resources databases, there's an Expury product outlet database there and it has on there three different things. There are direct outlets so that would be like a grocery outlet or misfits. Like they would actually buy that expiry product inventory from you directly. Grocery outlet, which is a very beautiful thing. They, at least they were the fastest growing grocer in California. So many locations, you as a consumer can go into the store and buy stuff for about a third, I think what it would typically be in other stores. So it's a great place to shop and get good deals. And also, I mean, it's California. A lot of people want access to those consumers as well.

55:29
Daniel Scharff
So almost like you're going to get some really cool trial out of it and have your product be seen in a cool place. California is cool.

55:35
David Sooch
Come on.

55:36
Daniel Scharff
And that's a really good one. And I, you know, I think grocery outlet team for me, you know, they're, I think fair and straightforward. The pricing is not what you want it to be. It's not, you know, it might be a fraction of your cost even of making it, but it's way better than paying to destroy something, to actually get it out somewhere where you're going to get, you know, impressions and feedback and people carrying the product around. So I love that as an option for people. We also have in the database brokers. There are some brokers out there and they're looking at places like discount dollar stores. Some of them may specialize in things like prisons.

56:11
Daniel Scharff
And you can also, even if your product is actually expiring or expired, a lot of times you could contact your manufacturing partner and ask them maybe to work with the food quality team to get an extension on the expiry which would then allow it to be sold through one of those channels. Or you can even ask if you can resticker the expiry dates in a lot of instances. So a lot of things you can do there and then the other kind of outlet that's on that database are food banks. Unfortunately, in my experience, it's actually hard a lot of times to get branded product into food banks. A lot of them would prioritize monetary donations. They have a plan to do stuff with that versus actually being, you know, really equipped to actually accept deliveries. But there are a lot that do.

56:54
Daniel Scharff
And I found that the Feeding America network of food banks are the ones that are most likely to be able to take products. So we actually listed every single Feeding America food bank at the time that we released this in our database. So you can see which ones maybe are even nearest to where you're holding all that inventory. But we just, we really love making that available to everybody. Because there's. That's a tough one to swallow, right? Is destroying food and beverage and great products when there are a lot of ways that could be used. So I hope that everybody checks that stuff out. Hopefully you sell through all your inventory and need more of it and keep growing. But this will happen to you at some point. So I just want everyone to be aware of those tools.

57:32
Daniel Scharff
So I really want to thank David for joining us today. Because all of this stuff is just theory. If we don't have the brands here to give us the how it's actually going to on the ground. And I think also just it feels very special for everyone to get to hear how it works at a company like Graza that so many people look up to leaders in the industry having pioneered just so much stuff. So thank you, David, for all of your contributions and being here today. And thank you again to Austin. This is just one of my favorite things that we get to do as a community is really educate people, I think, on these kind of topics that are so important that take experts who are.

58:09
Daniel Scharff
Who have done it across tons of brands to explain to people and people who are just, you know, focus their whole businesses on innovating on tools for emerging brands to make this journey a little bit easier. Not so, let's say resource intensive to get things done. And you know, I know in the future we'll all just have all of this stuff that will be one click of the mouse away and we'll have all our forecast robots out there in the field translate all for us. But I really am excited about this process and progress that we're all making. So thank you everybody. I hope you all learned a lot and definitely check out the show notes for the templates. Trust me, you will love them there. It's so great to have those kind of templates. So thank you everybody.

58:50
Daniel Scharff
Hope you all had a good time.

58:52
David Sooch
Thanks so much.

58:52
Austin Gardner-Smith
Thanks, Daniel.

58:56
Daniel Scharff
All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. If you loved it, I would so appreciate it if you could leave us a review. You could do it right now. If you're an Apple podcast, you can scroll to the bottom of our Startup CPG podcast page and click on Write a review. Leave your company name in there. I will try to read it out. If you're in Spotify, you can click on about and then the star rating icon. If you are a service provider that would like to appear on the Startup CPG podcast, you can email us at Partnerships Startup cpg. Lastly, if you found yourself grooving along to the music. It is my band. You can visit our website and listen to more. It is super fantastics.com thank you everybody. See you next time.