Scaling Kahawa 1893 Coffee

Jordan Buckner: [00:00:00] Scaling a CPG brand comes with a ton of challenges. One of the biggest ones is balancing sales and operations for your brand. The more company, the more retailers that you sell into, the more products that you have to produce and sell. And it gets really challenging as you are balancing all of those together.

So what I wanted to do today is bring on Corey from Kahawa, a really awesome coffee brand that's growing quickly. And Wiley, who's the co founder of Doss, a really great operational software tool to help you manage growth. On to talk through how challenges can be solved using automation tools in a way that supports your business instead of being another problem to deal with.

Corey, Wiley, welcome to the show today. 

Corey Stary: Thanks for having us. 

Jordan Buckner: So I want to start off with the Kahawa story. So Corey, why don't you tell me a little bit more about the brand, the products and how things got started. 

Corey Stary: Sure. I can't believe I'm saying this, but we got started now seven [00:01:00] years ago. So it's been a wild journey.

Kahawa was actually born out of. the tech stars weekend business plan competition in early version of Kahawa, which was more generalized ended up winning second place. And so following that, my business partner, Margaret who's the face of the brand who had the initial idea decided to leave her corporate job at Citi.

And begin building the brand full time. I was working on it as a side project for a number of years, but I've now been with the brand full time for the last two years. 

Jordan Buckner: That's amazing. It's so cool to see. I've tried the coffees. They're delicious and love some of the innovations that you're bringing out from the single bag coffees to to some canned versions as well.

What have been some of those pivotal moments in the In your growth, right? Like coffee is one of those things where it's very specialized and unique, but there's also 1000 different coffees out there in the world. And so how did you really set yourselves apart? 

Corey Stary: would say really, the primary thing [00:02:00] is the social impact component of the brand.

Margaret, my business partner grew up on a coffee farm in Kenya and actually saw firsthand that women provided Over 90 percent of the coffee production labor that surprises a lot of people. And so she came over to the US had a career on wall street also did a stint at the world's bank and saw that this was a problem.

That was pretty pervasive in the global commodity world. So she decided to found Kahawa 1893. Not only as a way to share wonderful coffee with the world and Jordan, you're correct. There's a lot of wonderful coffee out there, but also to empower the women behind the coffee. We do that through a QR code that we print on our packaging so folks can scan the QR code.

And send a tip directly back to the farmers when you account for the buying power of U. S. dollars abroad. Those tips are very, very meaningful. And they've been used for everything from [00:03:00] sending female children in certain remote farming communities to school all the way to disaster relief efforts in Congo.

Jordan Buckner: I absolutely love that. And I think just like with a lot of categories, a lot of people, first off, they're buying off of, of taste, right? For probably like coffee and finding something that they like, but then secondarily, they're looking for a really great story, a really great passionate, you know, behind the people who are making the products.

Both from like the brand and literally the hands they're making it to release important and feel good about. So I absolutely love that. What's been n , the growth looking like in terms of some of those pivotal moments of getting into retailers or selling online, like how things been fairly. Steady growth have there been very kind of exponential or step milestones along the journey?

Corey Stary: Yeah, I'm pretty thrilled that we've had a strong trajectory up over the last couple of years, starting particularly with 2020 obviously that was a. Very unique year in the world, and we saw that summer we began to see a huge influx of [00:04:00] orders on our website, seemingly out of the blue, but we realized two things were behind it.

1. all of a sudden, a lot of folks that were used to getting coffee outside of the home, particularly at work. We're now buying online, we're buying in the grocery store. It was really their only option to get their caffeine fix. And 2, we got some wonderful press that summer and found ourselves on a number of lists of companies, black owned companies, minority owned companies to support later on that year.

Trader Joe's came calling. We heard that we won that account in October of 2020, and we shipped our 1st order to Trader Joe's. In April of 2021, I'm now proud to say that we're available in all Trader Joe's locations on the West Coast and going inland. We won grocery store distribution more widely.

So, partnering with and unify, of course, 2 of the largest distributors nationally in summer of 2021. we filmed a shark tank [00:05:00] episode in the summer of 2022, which then aired in February 2023. That's also, by the way, on When the deal we secure during that episode ended up closing, we use the funds from that deal to secure a partnership with Keurig.

We signed that deal in December of 2022. we announced it in April 2023 and the products launched officially in summer of 2023. And last but certainly not least, we built up a food service line of business focusing on offices as well as hotels in the summer of 2024 and have now made partnerships with the largest distributors in that space as well.

Jordan Buckner: Boy, that's a lot. 

Corey Stary: It's been a busy couple of years. 

Jordan Buckner: Oh my goodness. How have you managed , the growth that all brings in terms of the changes with your business? Because every , new account and new category, you almost have to reinvent parts of your business. 

Corey Stary: Absolutely. We needed to overhaul our operations department really from start to finish in order [00:06:00] to accommodate this growth.

It's a huge, huge leap to go from selling online, usually in smaller increments to all of a sudden shipping pallets to grocery stores. And grocery store distributors across the country. I would say it was really 2 things financial considerations as well as software slash operational considerations.

In terms of some of those challenging moments, we needed to raise capital to fulfill our 1st trader Joe's order. We needed to raise 150, 000 dollars in a matter of months, which we ended up doing. So. If we hadn't, I don't know where we'd be today. We also raised a debt round in early 2023 for the same reason, to buy inventory as we awaited for the deal with and agreed to close.

Part of the use of funds aside from inventory was beefing up our team. So we were able to hire a few junior operations folks and then beef up our tech stack so that those folks [00:07:00] could use technology in order to make this supply chain possible. 

Jordan Buckner: So as you're growing, did you start off? I know a lot of brands start off like using either Excel or Google sheets or something to manage your business.

Were you doing that at the beginning or kind of what does your journey look like in terms of like managing everything? 

Corey Stary: I'd say as recently as maybe. 2 ish years ago, nearly everything was in a Google sheet in Google drive, probably not even in a folder. And it was an absolute mess as an interim solution.

Once we started receiving purchase orders, really at scale from some of these grocery store distributors. Where we'd be getting several purchase orders, at least in the course of a few weeks we did our best to spin up a relatively simplistic air table environment where we just keyed in data from the purchase orders.

It was stagnant air table obviously is a database. It's not really an, it's not an inventory management system and it, did the job to a point, but it's still [00:08:00] relied on generally myself. Going into air table, running calculations in Google sheets and trying to somehow ensure that we had enough inventory to fill these purchase orders which was hugely, hugely challenging.

And ultimately meant I needed to keep a lot of information in my head. So luckily within the past year Doss came knocking and it's been a wonderful journey with them since then. 

Jordan Buckner: Well, I want to say as well, it's like, I started TeaSquares. We were doing everything in Google sheets. And I think one of the.

The silent problems that come with like people that have experience with Excel or Google sheets, you're like, Oh, I can easily manage this. And then you look back and you're like, did I just build like a complete like software from the ground up just with Google sheets and like this database formulas and like, you can make it, I made mine pretty complicated until we had to add a new product line.

I was like, crap, everything just breaks. Like, I don't even remember how these formulas work. 

Corey Stary: [00:09:00] Exactly, and then try delegating usage of such a system to somebody else and relying on them to somehow figure out how all of those formulas interact with each other. It's just an absolute nightmare. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, you're like, this was a lot.

Don't touch it. We have to make another 1, but I don't even remember. I have to go back and spend 30 minutes to relearn all the association between them which is wild. So you mentioned Doss as a platform they came on. I want to bring in Wiley to talk through just like what the system is, because I used to be like a fan of like do everything in Google sheets for as long as you can.

And while I think that still to a point, I'm actually moved way over into like use a software that's made for managing your inventory and sales because If you're a CPG founder, you're not a software developer, right? Like, don't spend the hours and hours on your time basically building your own software when it all, the solution already exists.

And you should just start using it so you don't have to worry about transitioning later. So Wiley, I want you to come on board. Just give me a quick overview of [00:10:00] what Doss is and how it works. 

Wiley Jones: Yeah, really awesome to chat. it's fun to hear Corey's perspective on that, you know, that transition Doss is, you know, as simply as possible, putting it it's a lightweight ERP and a data platform, and we've designed the whole thing ground up from, you know All the way down to our databases and how we expose a lot of these concepts to our customers as the easiest way to automate your operations.

And, you know, kind of punch line version of it is for managing your operations from purchase order to point of sale. And that's especially relevant for a lot of the CPG founders that we work with. And so, you know, I think another good representation of it is we look at these businesses that we work with, you know, whether it's CPG companies or we work with, you know, like industrial manufacturing businesses and construction companies.

They're all managing the flow of goods, the flow of dollars and the flow of data. And we make it really easy to consolidate that down and get this high level representation of your business so that you can kind of wrap your arms around it with, like you said, Jordan, having to go through and be like reverse engineering every single formula every time you want to think about how something functions that's not [00:11:00] what's valuable for our customers to be focused on what's valuable for them to be focused on is, how do I grow my business?

How do I make myself more effective as a leader? As someone who can delegate work and things like that. So we're trying to give time back and give people more leverage. 

Jordan Buckner: I love that. And I think a lot of people hear the term ERP and they think of the big, like net suites in the world. The way I usually like to think about it is like, how can you better make sure your business is operating smoothly by having operations, information, and data.

Talk with your sales information and data so that you can very clearly see how your business is operating and performing to make sure everything's online. 

Wiley Jones: Yeah. the thing that you just described is. Basically the number one problem that we see every single time, regardless of the business industry, regardless of the shape of the business you know, like the way that they're structured, whether they sell directly to an end customer, whether they're a business to business type of company.

It basically boils down to is the place where you go and recognize revenue and the way that you touch and talk to your customers, the way that you touch dollars, does it connect in with the end mechanism by which you deliver [00:12:00] your goods and services, if those two things are separated.

You're in a world of hurt. Almost all the time, because you're like, how do I go and understand what demand is going to look like some number of months in the future so that I can go and make decisions about what we need to go and purchase what we need to go and procure. So I can go and make decisions about how we capitalize the business to go and do that.

If you separate these concepts out, you're going to, like Corey said. Start having to hold it all in your head, which prevents you from actually taking any of that and delegating it to other people on your team. And it's kind of then turning, it kind of turns into this downward spiral where it's really hard to get out of that reactive loop and turn it into a proactive loop.

Jordan Buckner: So, Corey, I want to bring you back in to understand at that moment, you're seeing all this growth. Did you experience a moment where like your system started to break and it was a matter of like you have to like you had to upgrade like what was that pivotal turning point for you to actually move from a spreadsheet or air table or something into working with Doss?

Corey Stary: I would say the pivotal moment was when I was talking to [00:13:00] and she mentioned, this is ultimately a logistics game, meaning you can have a great brand, and you can have a great product. But if you don't have inventory to fill orders, nothing else. And we started getting purchase orders at such a high velocity and typically with lead times that were too short for us to manufacture to order that we realized we needed to start.

Making an effort to build up inventory in advance and also with the pressure to get it right, because this is a food product and it goes bad. It goes stale. And so it's important to get the math right. You need to have enough inventory to fill orders at a certain velocity. But not so much that you risk food waste and short of a ton of very expensive custom development work in air table.

That would have been impossible to manage long term. We were [00:14:00] really out of options. We knew that we needed to buy an ERP. It was just a question of which started shopping around and it became clear very early on that Doss was the right answer for us. 

Jordan Buckner: One of the biggest problems and barriers that I see founders have for moving on from one system to another, no matter what it is, is that Changeover and implementation process.

What was that experience like for you of going from Airtable essentially into Doss? Like, how long did it take? What happened? Were there things that you had to plan for to make sure that orders weren't getting missed and inventory wasn't getting lost so that you could have a smoother transition?

Corey Stary: It was, of course, a little bit scary. I come from the tech world. I worked in software for a number of years. So I had personally seen a lot of migrations happen and I knew that they were typically a time when things could go wrong. If the details weren't managed correctly. But Doss made it easy for us. I would say the [00:15:00] overlap between Airtable and Doss was maybe a month.

We did a reconciliation process with the Doss team. We downloaded every single record from Airtable. And Doss able to cross reference with their system to make sure absolutely nothing was missing after the migration happened. So the changeover was incredibly simple and the Doss team was responsive, understood the importance of getting this right, not missing a single order from a large customer and really made this again, as easy as it could have possibly been.

Jordan Buckner: So I know you have been custom making a lot of these like air tables and stuff. What was that transition like for you of going from air table into Doss and how did it change how you did your job? 

Corey Stary: It was a huge relief. And I would say. The biggest thing, even about the question is that now processing all of these sales orders is not my job.

And without Doss, it [00:16:00] would still be. With Doss, I can delegate this to more junior team members because the burden of data entry and data accuracy has been lessened So, so much since Doss has a lot of logic already built into it. So what used to be a very sensitive process of keying in data, double checking it numerous times, and still being a little wary when pushing enter is now no longer an issue for us.

Jordan Buckner: I love that. I mean, talking about some of this automation formula, Wiley, I want you to kind of share your viewpoint, on Doss in terms of some of the workflows and automations that you built in. Because one question I always hear is like, but my business has these really unique qualities or like these unique processes that we do, like, how do we build that in to another software?

Wiley Jones: Yeah. There's like a few, you know, kind of quotes that I always go back to, for these types of these types of conversations, which is you know, it's kind of like how humans are 70 percent water. [00:17:00] Right? We're all very unique people. Every person is so unique. We all have unique DNA.

Everyone has their own unique characteristics, their personalities, but we also are contained 70 percent water. Right? Businesses are kind of the same way. Right. Under the hood, a lot of companies they're taking orders and they're gonna go and process them in some way. They're gonna go and generate an invoice after goods and services are delivered.

They're gonna go and purchase and procure. And yes, there's lots of idiosyncrasies that emerge when you, like, deeply scrutinize and inspect. What is happening at each of those stages? And you unpack the semantics of, you know, when you say a purchase order, what does that literally mean? Oh, it means actually, in this case, you know, you're taking an order from your customer.

So it really is more kind of like a sales order. And, you know, like understanding those things. Those are, you know, I would say minor semantics. But what we've done with us is we've built a relatively abstract system. And while that can be a little bit scary during the migration implementation, we try to be kind of a Sherpa in a lot of ways where we, you know, we're like, all right, here's where you want to go.

Here's how your business works. Let's model Doss around what is unique about your company, but [00:18:00] also steer you towards best practices, because at the end of the day, Businesses are 70 percent tabular data and, you know, PDFs that get generated. And that's kind of how businesses function for the most part.

So we have a lot of good representations with every industry that we've worked in of the best practices for how to structure stuff. But there are always unique things that have to be done where it's like, Oh, we, you know, we actually store finished goods with our contract manufacturer, our co manner well, technically we have a in house warehouse and we have a, you know, third party warehouse and we want to store inventory differently in those and think about it differently.

Okay, you know, we have ways of modeling in our system to accommodate that. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's still really trying to reduce it down to its primitive form first and foremost. 

Jordan Buckner: And I used to think, cause I think this way, my mind. naturally overcomplicate things. And I kind of create these like, Oh, well, this is the way it was because of this one weird thing that we did at this time, two years ago, we have to keep doing it this way.

And whenever kind of question, especially from the outside, it makes me reflect and realize like, [00:19:00] Oh, our business would actually be better if we took a more simplified approach versus creating all these very intricate complexities. That ultimately aren't good for business anyway, and we can still be differentiated by having something that's streamlined.

And I know that goes a long way, especially as you're growing to simplify your business in terms of your processes versus making them more and more complex. 

Wiley Jones: Yeah. Corey said something that I go to a lot when I talk to customers that were, you know, even that we're pitching to and saying, Hey, you know, they're like, what is the, really the ROI on this?

Like, what's the value? You know, the best practices are great. Sure. I think the thing that I always come back to is actually more about human capital. And it's the ways that Corey was describing that when you simplify things, and at the same time provide validation and logic that prevents mistakes, what it allows is for someone who has a deep understanding of their business to offload that to someone who doesn't have as deep of an understanding of the totality of the business, but they can run an end to end process.

So that now, [00:20:00] Corey, the Corey's of the world have the ability to take it. Their focus and apply it to higher leverage activities, which is going and signing partnerships and going and actually expanding the product lines. But like you said, Jordan, it's ultimately it's about simplification and applying rigor that is reproducible, you know, like being able to actually make sure that when you type something in, it doesn't break a bunch of formulas and an Excel sheet, it's actually something that is unbreakable.

And and that is peace of mind, but it also is this ultimately this human capital problem that it unlocks. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, I love that. And that, as I mentioned earlier, it takes you for away from being like the software developer and realizing like, okay, I need to do all these intricacies to make it work into just knowing that that part's taken care of.

You can focus on on what you do best. I love this conversation. Corey, what's next for Kahawa.. 

Corey Stary: Oh, boy. What is the next? Right? I would say we're anticipating over the next year making sure that we're growing our grocery footprint. To the greatest extent possible. Every time I talk to our sales team, they're always [00:21:00] working on new opportunities and we've seen a year on year growth since we got started in that space.

Additionally, I think we've only just crack the surface of office, coffee and hospitality. So hopefully folks that are listening might eventually see us in your own office or in a hotel that you might be staying at. It will also be working on making sure that cafes restaurants boutiques are also aware of Kahawa and can serve us or put us on sale.

So all to say, if you haven't seen Kahawa near you yet, my goal is within the next year, you will. 

Jordan Buckner: I'm excited about that, that journey. If you're a coffee drinker, definitely try Kahawa, we'll put details on how you can find it in the show notes. And then if you are CPG founder and you are feeling that pain of like my operating system for my business is breaking and causing me so much pain.

So many headaches and it's time to move on. It's time to find the change. Definitely check out Doss, see if it's be a right fit for you. And then we'll also put those details in the show notes. [00:22:00] Let me know. I'm happy to introduce you to Wiley and his team to see it might be, if it might be a good fit for your business to alleviate those headaches so that you can focus on the high value opportunities for your business.

Perfect. Well, thanks so much everyone for listening today. Corey Wiley. Thanks so much for joining. 

Wiley Jones: Thanks Jordan. 

Corey Stary: It was a pleasure. Thanks Jordan.