Jordan Buckner (00:00)
Imagine building a premium beverage brand from scratch, one truckload at a time. In today's episode of Start to Scale, I sit down with Chie Addington who's the Chief Administrative Officer at TÖST which is sophisticated, non-alcoholic, sparkling beverage that's redefining how we celebrate. It's now available over 9,000 locations across the globe. And so for today's conversation, I really wanted to explore how TÖST really scale from a small operation to a national brand.

and how they had to overcome challenges of running their business on spreadsheets to really transform their operations to be able to manage that growth. Chie thanks so much for joining and welcome to the podcast.

Chie Addington (00:40)
Thank you Jordan, thank you for having me.

Jordan Buckner (00:43)
So

I want to start at the beginning for those who don't really know much about the TÖST story. I'd love to hear kind of what inspired the original creation of TÖST. I understand you weren't one of the original founders, but later you and Brooks came in to run the company. So I'd love to hear about TÖST and kind of that early journey.

Chie Addington (01:04)
Yes, so 2014, a group of friends got together for dinner and they were talking about why don't we create a sophisticated beverage without alcohol to give a sensation of the alcohol, without alcohol.

Jordan Buckner (01:23)
Yeah, without like the effects of having to drink everything.

Chie Addington (01:25)
Yeah. ⁓

Effective that and then you know to elevate the moment and then to be inclusive with everyone and this friends group Happened to have a Michelin star chef and He and the other friends just went back and forth You know, what do we want for the taste and then we created the original TÖST that was 2014 and then 2017 Brooks has been advising for this company and he took a position as CEO

and expanded the business from there to current situation which is like 9,000 plus stores nationally and nine other countries over the course of seven years. Yes.

Jordan Buckner (02:06)
That's really exciting.

know, I remember growing up and having the sparkling apple juice for like the non-alcoholic New Year's TÖST options and love that there's more sophisticated beverages out there now that don't include alcohol. I don't drink much myself and so options like TÖST are really great. I love to hear what it was like when you and Brooks came in to the business in those early days.

Chie Addington (02:16)
Yes.

Jordan Buckner (02:33)
describe kind of like what the system were kind of all the systems in place to grow or was everything still kind of ran on like spreadsheets and different software kind of cobbled together?

Chie Addington (02:43)
Yes, I think, you know, starting from the operations, you know, the first of all, the non-alcoholic space wasn't well known as now. And so that movement, we wanted to educate a lot of people. And also the it came from the younger generation that the non-alcoholic mindful drinking or sober curiosity became a big thing. And yes, having that one skill, it was easier with the spreadsheet to manage the

managing source the products ingredients for the productions and look at the data for the margins and all that but then like we soon after we launched the TÖST rosé which is our second flavor and still managing with the spreadsheet and when we have like three four team members it was okay you know we all knew where the spreadsheets are where

the data and we all can contribute to edit it. But it started becoming a little complicated as we wanted to expand our lines with the small bottles, single bottles and other flavors which we just launched this year. Yeah.

Jordan Buckner (03:54)
Yeah, I think that's always something that's how I started out with my business TeaSquares managing everything in Google Sheets. And I remember at one point feeling almost like a software engineer just in the complexity of the spreadsheets and different like calculus formulas and ratios and comparing different, you know, worksheets within one larger workbook. I think they were probably like.

Chie Addington (04:16)
Right.

Jordan Buckner (04:17)
20 different tabs from orders to inventory, ingredients, forecasting, like all these things going on. And at least for us, the time when it broke was actually when we added a new product because it was designed for one product at, you know, with three different flavors. And then once we added a new product with different pricing and different options, it completely broke everything. And so I'm wondering kind of where...

Chie Addington (04:38)
Yes.

Yeah.

Jordan Buckner (04:44)
things started to became too complex to handle in your own operations.

Chie Addington (04:49)
I think it's when we added the other SKUs and then also having the warehouses and then also added our team members. That's when it hits that, we need efficiency. Where is this data? Who has it? Where is it? And who's updating the new price for the ever-changing geopolitical issues of factor ingredients? And who's keeping our track of those?

Jordan Buckner (05:11)
Yes.

Chie Addington (05:16)
how

long does it take to order this? It's a complicated drink. We have a variety of ingredients. It's all natural. But the glass bottles, takes three months' time. And then we value the data to run the company. That's our priority. So having accurate data within a minute, that became very important to us.

Jordan Buckner (05:38)
You know,

I think that's one of the biggest things is as running any company, a lot of jobs are like this, but there's a lot of questions that you actually have because the business is so complicated. And sometimes you can get that answer in, you know, five seconds, right? If I'm looking at my Shopify sales, I can go into the dashboard and look and see what those are. But maybe if I'm looking for my sales across the five different channels that we're selling it or my profitability, then those questions can take.

Chie Addington (05:48)
Yes.

Right. Yeah.

Jordan Buckner (06:06)
days of planning and time to actually sit down and go through the data and decipher and then filter it. And then that data is not even relevant. And so it's so important to be able to have systems to have that at your fingertips so you can make better decisions, right?

Chie Addington (06:11)
Thanks for your

Yes, I agree.

Jordan Buckner (06:19)
So tell me about when you were starting to look for another kind of software, you probably were moving into like a, maybe, I know a lot of times people use ERPs, enterprise resource management kind of platforms, but those are really complicated kind of larger companies, and then there's kind of ERP lights or inventory management systems, and so what were you looking for when you were trying to implement a new system?

Chie Addington (06:45)
I think accuracy of the inventory and the bill of materials, up-to-date bill of materials, and also the build. When we do the production every time, we are going to the spreadsheet and do we have the up-to-date price on this or not? more and more production happening. We needed that data as quickly as possible. So that's when I think

we came across, think we looked at, we were using QuickBooks online for inventory management as well, and it became a little bit challenging for the coast tracking and the bill of materials. And that's we came across the CIN7 that we just tried out, like, okay, we wanna hear what they offer and what the system is like.

Jordan Buckner (07:25)
Yeah.

Okay.

Chie Addington (07:37)
Yeah, that's one. This was probably 2023.

Jordan Buckner (07:42)
Okay, yeah, so

just a couple years ago, were you thinking that that transition would be easy to a new system or were you really nervous about making the transition?

Chie Addington (07:50)
I think it's a little bit of both. We were scared to, are we going to lose the data we have in the QuickBooks? How is it going to transfer? How can we back it up? And also, are we intelligent enough to catch up with the Cin7 can offer? We learned later, shortly after we implemented the Cin7, when Cin7 gives us an error,

always have a reason, good enough reason to have an error. So it's our end that, okay, we forgot to move the transfer the products from this location to that location. That's why, you know, since seven's given us error. So it all made sense for us. But I think we were scared of those things that, you know, we have to catch up with the smart system and we have to have our team to be ready to use the system. So yeah.

those were the two fears.

Jordan Buckner (08:46)
Yeah, I think that's

so important. do remember having my own fears of like, a system's not going to be able to understand the complexity of my business. And I've later matured to realize that if my business was that complicated, it's probably not being run efficiently. And there's probably a better way of doing it with all the cost without all the customizations. And so instead of that being a hindrance, I actually took that as a.

Chie Addington (08:55)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Jordan Buckner (09:12)
as a sign to simplify things so that it can run more smoothly.

Chie Addington (09:16)
Yes. ⁓

Yes, I absolutely agree with that. The system actually is well thought out. It gives us this simplicity of the process. yet, we think our business is complicated, but it actually is well thought out if we can use it right.

Jordan Buckner (09:36)
Yeah, I absolutely love

that. you know, I think since seven is a really great software, a lot of companies using, you know, this episode we brought you on because we've partnered with since seven as a sponsor for this episode to really talk through how their system is used. And I just love hearing directly from founders who are actually like using and business owners who are using the software to see like, all right, where's the positives, where the challenges so that, you know, other founders can learn from your experience.

in terms of how how making it work and so I'm kind of curious what made since seven the right fit for for your team

Chie Addington (10:11)
So I think we use Team 7 for purchases, order process, sales, and production. And all those four categories, have different team members go in. And then they are in charge of, let's say, the purchase. Our COO is going there every day to make sure that we have enough.

inventory for the next production and then order process or logistic head of logistics going in every day to make sure that you know checking the status of the order and then me running accounting you know I go in and then make sure that it's invoiced right and and then we can see the status everywhere and then inventory management our CFO and I manages the

build and assemblies and inventory stocks and all the transfers. So all of us combined, we all can go to any reports that we want and our CEO just goes in and then check the, you know, what's the inventory and where.

within a minute, once he logs in, he can find where the, you know, where is disorder status, where is the, you know, how many product do we have anywhere. All that at one glance is benefiting us all, the team.

Jordan Buckner (11:23)
Yeah, that sounds really

helpful just in having that data at your fingertips. And how has that transformed your business in terms of having that single source of truth to make those decisions? One issue I've known when I ran mine is that operations and sales kind of get siloed differently where sales are like, all right, we're gonna forecast growth of this much and then operations like, well, historically it's actually been this much so we don't wanna overbuy inventory because they have kind of

competing priorities in a way. And so how has kind of using one software kind of help bring all the team members together to talk about, you know, one source of data.

Chie Addington (12:00)
Yes, I think we are checking our inventory and we are constantly talking among the team about the sales focus, what we're going to sell, what we're going to produce, and that's really, really important for us for the success. And having the as accurate data we can get from the CIN7 is helping us, all of us to be confident that telling

other team members like here's what we sold, here's what we spent for this production and that production and then be prepared for the upcoming you know challenges or the positives. So we want to be ready to have enough inventory, we want to be ready but we don't want to have over inventory. No, all that is helping all of us you know to move forward as a brand.

Jordan Buckner (12:47)
Yeah,

that definitely makes sense. And I know earlier you were talking about being able to understand what's happening with your product costs, especially as there's tariffs and price changes happening constantly. And so how is using since seven impacted the way that you make decisions around things like pricing, promotions, or product costs?

Chie Addington (13:08)
I think we're constantly looking at saving production costs down. That's obviously our goal to have a good margins, to be successful. And circumstances of this world just changes every day. The one ingredient, it's hard to source it, or this country is not importing us anymore.

Production is so important for us. We want to create, produce this many cases in this month because we think about, okay, Christmas is coming up, the holiday season coming up. We want to have these cases ready and to actually make that happen. There's so many little effort has to happen and

That's in all instance seven. So we can be ready for crisis or any changes that we are thinking ahead because of that we have this data in one place.

Jordan Buckner (14:00)
That's really helpful then. so, you know, what's been the biggest benefit of being able to actually accurately track product costs per production run, because I've often found that, you know, when I was running TeaSquares we calculate our product costs like once a year, probably, and that needs to be much quicker. And so, has it been beneficial to see that kind of per production run to see how your input costs are fluctuating?

Chie Addington (14:25)
Yes, definitely. And then we can always look at other options by having the current little cost to the cents. And OK, this company is offering this much, including shipping. We can compare the others. We can always be proactive looking for the others.

Jordan Buckner (14:45)
Okay, that's definitely helpful. So I'm kinda curious though, it sounds like since Evan's been a big change for your business, what would you tell founders who feel stuck managing things manually, but are maybe too scared to change to another software?

Chie Addington (14:59)
I think for us, we are very glad that we implemented Cin7 at 2022 when we had a few SKUs. And we knew going in, it will take a while to implement and integrate the system. the more we use it,

I think the more we benefit from it and the reason why is that we learn from Cin7. Our book is tighter and tighter because of Cin7. So the more we use it, that's the benefit that we're getting. A lot of benefits, saving a lot of time for all of us. So that allows us to be proactive and innovative and be efficient.

you

Jordan Buckner (15:47)
I love that shit. mean, it sounds like it's definitely made a big impact. And I've only found that like businesses getting more complicated now. And so the much as you can simplify your business early on to have a steady view and to make better decisions, the better. I've often talked to founders and made this mistake myself. We're really like, let's actually look at the profitability of our product selling on Amazon, for instance. And we finally took the time to like look at all the numbers. We realized that during a long time period, like, we actually were

Chie Addington (15:54)
Yes.

Jordan Buckner (16:15)
losing money when we thought we were making a little bit of money because of all the fees and product costs and pricing changes. And especially now when you need to really understand your costs on an ongoing and sometimes daily if not weekly basis, it really matters. So thanks so much for sharing your experience and building out a solution to better manage your business.

Chie Addington (16:28)
Yes.

Thank you, yes. mean, definitely, you know, to add that, you know, organizing the business is so important for us. that's one of the huge help from Cin7 that we got to organize a big part of our business. Yeah.

Jordan Buckner (16:51)
I love that. Shia, thanks for being on the podcast today. So I did want to just mention at the end here that this episode is sponsored by Cin7 but it's a software that I actually recommend for brands and I've talked to founders to really understand the benefits. And so if you're looking for a operating system for your food and beverage brand, I have a special offer for you. So food bevy listeners can actually get 50 % off for three months when you sign up.

Chie Addington (16:54)
Thank you, Jordan.

Jordan Buckner (17:18)
And so it's a great way to test out the software and see if it's going to be a fit for your business and how it can transform things. Just go to Cin7.com/foodbevy We'll put the link in the show notes as well for you to get that discount. Thanks everyone.