Jordan Buckner (00:00)
As CPG founders, we spend so much time reacting, reacting to orders, retailers, fires, inventory issues, and last minute decisions. But at a certain point, growth demands structure, and it's important to have that built in your business so that you can manage all of these things that come at you at the same time. So today I am talking with Brian, who grew a company called Mustard & Co. and also is a co-founder of Peasy

about what it really takes to build an operating system for your CPG business so that you can manage both inventory supply chain issues along with sales that you can get a strong grasp of your business. Brian, welcome to the show today.

Bryan Mitchiner (00:36)
Hey Jordan, great to be here.

Jordan Buckner (00:37)
So before Peasy which we'll get into, you're building Mustard & Co. Tell me a little bit about what that business was when it started and why you started it.

Bryan Mitchiner (00:46)
Yeah, absolutely. was a creative outlet for me in the early 2010s. ⁓ I was, ⁓ working at a grab and go, sandwich and salad company. And one of my coworkers came in with this honey curry mustard and, you know, passed it around the kitchen. were all trying out with this spoon. And, ⁓ as soon as I taste it, was like, man, we have to put this into a bottle and, take it around town and sell it. And I kind of just like threw it out there as a joke. And he was like, all right, let's do it.

And I always wanted to start my own business. I always wanted to do like build a brand and all that. And so we sure enough, we like came in at a night, started making mustard. we had the brilliant idea in hindsight, not brilliant at all to put it into a Boston round bottle because it was cool. And we were trying to be, ⁓ you know, fashionable, not functional. we learned that very quickly. ⁓ but, yeah, it was great. We, started with just one mustard and then grew it into a whole line of mustards and, kept it as an independent business, serving independent, ⁓ grocers and meat shops.

gift shops and all that sort of stuff.

Jordan Buckner (01:37)
That's really exciting. What did you find were the biggest challenges as you were growing that business?

Bryan Mitchiner (01:42)
Yeah, I think,

Everything, I mean, we figured it out, everything from scratch, but I'd say the biggest challenge was finding focus. There was so much to do, whether it was like designing the label or coming up with new products or finding new customers or, you know, we would place a purchase for mustard seed and the farm they were getting it from and say, sorry, we're out, you know, finding another supplier. There was an endless list of things to do. That was also what was so.

exciting and fun about it is like figuring out all those little things, but prioritizing across every little thing to make sure that we were doing the right thing at the right time.

Jordan Buckner (02:16)
Yeah, I find that just like the very core experience of what every founder is going through and things are kind of messing at the beginning. I'm curious, I'm always fascinated like what software tools that you use to start managing the business early on. We're using like spreadsheets and Excel to like track orders or inventory kind of what we're using to manage that.

Bryan Mitchiner (02:36)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like everyone else, we started with QuickBooks, use that as like our basic accounting software, started with spreadsheets, like everyone else. I'm a tool geek. I'm like very much into tools and tech and all that. So I was constantly looking for a product that would help us manage all of these moving parts, whether it was from sourcing new ingredients or receiving them and purchasing them or even

managing our manufacturing to know what was going into a finished product that we would then sell to a customer. So I was constantly on the lookout. I tested probably everything under the sun. There's a lot of products that I tested that do not exist still, or sorry, no longer exists. But never really found anything that met my needs, really understood me as a day-to-day operator of like what I was actually doing boots on the ground in the kitchen space or in the warehouse space or driving around town delivering to grocery stores.

And so I just stayed in spreadsheets, kept on refining those spreadsheets, eventually turned them into these like low code, no code tools that manage all of our day-to-day operations, soup to nuts. It worked really well, but it was a lot of work. And I particularly enjoyed it, but it was a lot of ⁓ maintenance, a lot of tinkering.

Jordan Buckner (03:41)
Yeah, you know, I'm probably similar to you with my CPG brand TeaSquare that I ran.

Like we built out these complicated Google Sheets models that had our like sales dashboard. were as like inputting orders and lines, inputting our raw ingredients and our finished products as we were self manufacturing our energy bars too. And everything was like pretty working pretty well. But like if we missed a email from a buyer that didn't get manually added to the spreadsheet, then like that could cause an issue. But yeah, when we're doing like under 500,000

of dollars in sales, it was manageable. The thing that broke us is I was building it piece by piece as we needed and had all these complicated formulas. And then once we had a new product line, the entire system broke because it was not built for variable products. We were just manually type in, but everything was hard coded. If this specific name is here, then do this. And I realized like,

I'm gonna have to reinvent and like rebuild this entire spreadsheet and like system because nothing is working anymore. And so was like, I thought it was working well until it just like completely broke for us.

Bryan Mitchiner (04:46)
I mean, that was basically my life for a decade. I really enjoyed it. I was known as the mustard guy outside of our workspace, but within the workspace, I was known as the spreadsheet guy. I was constantly tinkering with the spreadsheets. And it was effective, but I was constantly doing it, and I just really enjoyed it. And I was like...

know, a few years into it, I was like, I should probably take a vacation, right? And like a lot of like people that start businesses, like get to that point where like, I've been working nonstop for the last four or five years. A vacation sure sounds nice. And I remember like, how am going to take a vacation? Like these spreadsheets run our business. And if something breaks, which, you know, always happens to some level, to some extent, you know, a few times a week, what's like, what are we going to do? and it was always that like,

of like, I'm not sure if I can walk away because what happens if we don't know what deliveries to make, you know?

Jordan Buckner (05:34)
You know, Brian, it's

insightful because I'm a big fan of people trying to figure out what they want to do in life. And one of the best ways of doing that is by looking back and the things that you really like doing. And it's so insightful. You're like, people knew me as the mustard guy, but that was actually like the spreadsheet guy. But then now you've taken that love of building tools that actually work and it built.

your new company, Peasy, which is really built as like an operating system, inventory management system for CPG brands to better their business. And you're like, that's actually something that you found your passion in or ⁓ building as a way to help out other other founders, which is actually kind of cool.

Bryan Mitchiner (06:11)
Yeah. mean, cool is one word. Some people might say very, very boring. I love tinkering on this stuff. I mean, yeah, I doubled down on, on like what I love the most of just like building these workflows and these processes into, tools and, making them seamless and, work and then, that's what we, that's what we've done with PC. I'm kind of taking that 10 years of experience and distilling it down into a single, ⁓ one stop shop to be able to do everything from.

receiving, purchasing, sales orders, work orders, everything.

Jordan Buckner (06:38)
Yes, I mean, this is really cool. So I know there's a lot of companies out there doing some version of like inventory management or sales, but I always love products that build things from the operators perspective, right? Like the tools that you wish you had to easily run your business in the way that you think. And so tell me a little bit more about.

peasy and how you think about how you're thinking about like building it so that as operators for businesses, right, it could run really well so that you can understand your business. What are some of the philosophies behind the software that really inspire you?

Bryan Mitchiner (07:09)
Yeah, there's a number of like features that we've baked in based on what I think is an optimized workflow. And I think it's effective for other people. And that comes through when we show people and they're like, ⁓ that makes sense. A couple of examples that come to mind are like one, for instance, is what we call universal cart purchasing. If you think about how you place a purchase order, and this is like for all the, you know, all the CPG nerds out there, right? You think about how you create a purchase order.

you go in your quick books, you start with your supplier, your mustard supplier, and then you enter in the mustard and then you go to the next one, you enter in your oils and vinegar provider and you enter in your olive oil and your vinegar, all that. But you have to start with the supplier first. It's like supplier centric. And so when I would have like my team go around the warehouse and like take stock of what we had and what we need to order, they may see them the mustard seed and the olive oil and the jars. And depending on who we were getting it from at the time.

They didn't necessarily know who the supplier was. They would just say, Hey, I need more jars or any more olive oil or any more vinegar. Not I need more olive oil from Napoleon oil company, et cetera, et cetera. And so like we just did universal car purchasing. have a single catalog. You add all your items to the cart, just like you would be shopping online. And then the cart organizes it into the suppliers for you has smarter learning and all that built into it, but it organizes it by supplier in one single experience. And with one click of a button, you can submit.

three, four, five, 10 purchase orders to all your suppliers in one go and not have to do that process over and over and over again. And then it's also built more for like the day-to-day operator of like, it's the user centric versus supplier centric.

Jordan Buckner (08:43)
Yeah, I think that's really exciting. It's like taking it from that product perspective. And it still gets doled out as individual purchase orders, but it's so much easier just to input. I really like that.

Bryan Mitchiner (08:53)
It's a bunch of little things like that. Like that's not groundbreaking on its own, but like there's a number of like little things that we baked in and that we're going to continue to build into the product as we develop it more.

Jordan Buckner (09:03)
I mean, think one very important thing that always started out as well as you decided to build the software as free for people who are starting out, talk with me about that decision and then of course, like how you do plan to make money. Cause right. want you to stay in business.

Bryan Mitchiner (09:20)
Yeah.

I think our investors want to sustain business too. I mean, I do too. Yeah. I mean, we actually struggled with this decision quite a bit. Like when we first started, we were like, Hey, we'll just charge people like 50 bucks a month or something, something reasonable where if we build it to scale and we get a bunch of brands on the platform, we'll make enough money to sustain it, but not like hundreds or thousands of dollars, like many of these legacy RPs. And we eventually landed on this model of free because we were inspired by

Jordan Buckner (09:23)
Hehehehe

Bryan Mitchiner (09:45)
Toast is this like POS software in restaurants. And they now charge a very, very nominal amount, but they originally gave away the product for free because they realized that they have all the transaction volume running through their platform. There's tiny, tiny, tiny bits of money to be made off of every transaction that when you have lots of transactions running through it, you can make enough money to obviously have a very successful business. We want to do the exact same thing. you,

invoice to your customers on QuickBooks and you send them that invoice and they pay that invoice on QuickBooks, you're charged 2.99%. I think QuickBooks charges, it's a standard like credit card processing fee. We're gonna do the exact same thing, no more, no less, just the standard. And in that 2.99%, it's like a very small percent of that actually goes to the platform that facilitates that transaction. In that case, QuickBooks, in this case, us.

And we believe that if we can give away the products, the core products for free, and it's really a really great product, a really great experience, we'll get a ton of brands on that platform and then a ton of transaction volume. And then the last thing I'll say is we're competing with spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are free. Like people are using spreadsheets. They're not signing up for these legacy players because they're hundreds and thousands of dollars a month. They're very complex. They're too much to implement. we have to compete with spreadsheets and spreadsheets are free.

Jordan Buckner (10:58)
Yeah, I love that. I think that's a real reason for everyone to give it a shot, check it out and see if it's gonna work for your business because I think that it's very transparent like how you're doing things. I think with the right mindset of, you want to be successful the more business grows, not just by setting up some arbitrary kind of fee to get in. So I think that's really cool. Going back a little bit and thinking about some of your mustering co-days.

I'm always curious too, like for you that business, how did setting up systems help you make better business decisions in terms of like having the information that you needed to run the business?

Bryan Mitchiner (11:32)
Yeah, I mean, I think it took a lot of decisions off my plate. Like the systems kind of made the decision for me. And I think an example that I can give is, we've worked primarily with independent grocers and butcher shops and these like independent shops versus like larger, grocery chains and through, through larger distributors. And one of the biggest challenges with working with all those, ⁓ independent shops is

they're small businesses. They have a million things going on. And so it's very hard for them to manage their own inventory on their shelf. And worst thing for a brand selling into those stores is to have an empty shelf or not, no product on the shelf. And so like just building the system in which we would actually track the cadence in which all these stores would place orders and then emails would automatically go out to them if they surpass that cadence, if it like went past that threshold and they hadn't yet placed an order. And they actually found that like quite helpful.

This was before like so much email was landing in everyone's inbox and they would actually find those reminders quite helpful and be like, I should go check the shelf and I will place an order for this. And so was like taking that decision off my plate of like, who are all the customers that I need to contact this week and just building that into a system, building that into a Yeah, alleviated just one of many decisions that we had to do.

Jordan Buckner (12:44)
Yeah, I mean, that's so important. I mean, can tell you that from my own experience, I'll just speak. One thing that I...

was really bad at the beginning and always sought to improve was retaining existing customers. So much of my focus is always on getting new customers, which is great, because that's when you think of where growth comes from. But then you start realizing how many other customers that you are working with you don't give enough attention to, kind of fall by the wayside, and not having a system to really track the relationships and the order cadence and volume with these customers so that you can send out either an automated or manual reminder

or do check-ins with your retail buyers of the small stores too. They'd be like, hey, how are things going? How can I help? How can I kind of support you? Are really powerful. And I think then seeing the system and being able to track, this customer hasn't ordered in two months when they normally order in one. Let's check in, make sure everything's going well. They're not having any issues. Because a lot of times I found that people who are buying your product,

they won't necessarily tell you what's wrong or if there is something wrong, they'll just stop buying. But if there's a problem and they're like, the last batch, one of them showed up broken. I didn't say anything, but I decided not to buy it anymore. Those kind of things happen all the time, but you reach out to them and they tell you and you're like, let me send you an extra case for free for your issues. They'll be like, this is really great and continue to stock you. so having that data to support you and bring some of those things front of mind, I think is so important.

Bryan Mitchiner (14:08)
Yeah, think as one lesson I remember learning early on is getting on the shelf at all these places, it's just like a quarter of the battle, right? Like staying on the shelf is the actual challenge. In many ways that could be like maintaining a relationship that could be doing the demos and the marketing to like draw audiences to those stores to buy your product. yeah.

Jordan Buckner (14:25)
One thing that cares about how you approach it with Peasy is a couple things.

When you're buying ingredients, oftentimes, and especially in today's market, like prices are changing over time, right? In terms of like, you might buy an ingredient that's a dollar last week and it's $2 the next week because of some shift. Are you able to then like track how your product cost is changing over time based on like the inputs they're going into? Or they're like, what's your thinking around kind of like product costs and margin?

Bryan Mitchiner (14:53)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, we capture all that data, right? So we have all that data. It's actually something that we added just like a couple of weeks ago as COGS. Obviously that's a very important aspect of running a business and understanding your margins. So you can now see the COGS directly in Peasy. But yeah, the nice thing is we have all that data. We'll be able to help you like report on that data and do analysis on that data. And I think

Taking it like one step further, think one of the things, and again, this kind of goes back to like having systems in place to eliminate some of this work or decisions off your plate is like, one of the things I love doing was I was constantly looking for new suppliers or like asking people like, hey, where do you get your spices or where do you get your oil? And I always found the simplest thing for me to do is just pull a report of like, hey, I found this new olive oil provider, pull a report of how much olive oil I bought over the last year.

what our current price range is and just say, can you match this or beat this? And then it diversifies your supply chain a little bit more. And having all that data in one place just to be like, pull it real quick and send it was a huge time savings, I suppose.

Jordan Buckner (15:55)
Yeah, I think that's really helpful. One thing that I always advocate brands do now is to have two or three suppliers per ingredient. Yeah, sure. you never know how prices are changed or someone might be out of stock and it delays the whole process. So you want to build up that reserve optionality to order from multiple suppliers if possible. The other thing that I've also seen as a problem is this conflict between

the sales part of an organization and operations. And as you grow those kind of become like two competing factors. I'm curious with any of your existing customers, like how people are using, like if

well where the sales people can come in and put orders, make sure everything's right within there. And also people running operations can work off of the same data to be able to manage that together.

Bryan Mitchiner (16:36)
Yeah, it's all under one roof, multiple users in one entity. And all of it is informing everything else, right? So you put in sales orders and it will tell you how much inventory you have. It will flag if you need to order more inventory to fulfill those orders or make those orders in our manufacturing workflow.

So yeah, I think that's one nice thing about having it all under one roof versus stitching together six or seven spreadsheets that like the connection may break or like you're copying and pasting from here and it's a different format from there. It's all structured in such a way that everything is informing every other workflow.

Jordan Buckner (17:09)
Yeah, I think that's so important. I just remember this

conflict, but like a tension between when I was running my self running a lot of the sales and then my co-founder running operations, right? It's like thinking about like, all right, we have all these sales that we're planning on coming in. And then he's looking at like, whether our actual sales numbers from the past and how much inventory that we need to have almost based on like a...

both like that conservative number and how will we manage if our inventory grew because we were self manufacturing as well. And so there was always that kind of tension of how to manage the business to grow. And so I'd always think like, that's a really good point. If you can bring sales and operations together in one place, so they're working off the same data and the same set of information, then you can more easily make decisions together. I know, we'll see how it always happens. And then,

Bryan Mitchiner (17:54)
Yeah, that's the idea.

Jordan Buckner (17:58)
As you're kind of building out the software, always curious, like, what has been the initial, like, response from the companies who have been working with you in terms of, what features they love the most?

Bryan Mitchiner (18:09)
Yeah, good question. I think a big piece, not just doubled on in the last answer, but is having all the data under one roof. Having one place that they can log into anywhere basically in the world, so to speak, and being able to see what's going on with their business.

a few of these like time-saving workflows, right? Like the universal cart purchasing like saves them a few minutes here and there, but also just kind of simplifies how they go about it. I would say like the one, like probably the thing that we see people use the most is the receiving functionality. So like you have, can do your purchasing within Peasy, but it also allows you to then receive those items actually in inventory and capture a bunch of. ⁓

discrepancies that might come up in that process, right? Like you might order a thousand jars and they show up and a case it's broken back to your original point of like, it's important to catch that data when it happens so that you're not paying for damaged goods or short shelf life items that don't have the shelf life that you'd expect. So yeah, I think like those are the things that people appreciate the most where it's...

it's adding value to the workflow. Like these are things that they were doing already or they wanted to do or knew they should do. But because they're doing it in Peasy and we built in ways to capture some of this value add information, it's actually like helping their business like grow profit, but also like, you know, expenses where they don't need to be paying.

Jordan Buckner (19:28)
Nice. Brian, does Peasy work well both for businesses who are self manufacturing and those who work with a contract manufacturer?

Bryan Mitchiner (19:35)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we started with, with self manufacturing and then more and more people we talked to there, more and more of them are doing co-manufacturing. so yeah, we, we built it out so that you can send work orders to your co-manufacturers and manage all that through Peasy that the co-manufacturer will, will make the product. They'll inform you how much they made you, you fill it in and the Peasy as, as finished goods, all that just

Jordan Buckner (19:56)
Nice, I think that's so exciting. So as we're wrapping up here, one thing I always love to know is for a founder who's listening, who feels maybe overwhelmed today by how they're managing their business, what do you think is the very first step they should take to start making better decisions for their business? How should they start thinking about collecting data, moving everything in one place?

Bryan Mitchiner (20:16)
That's a good question.

Yeah, I think the thing that comes to mind is I remember being overwhelmed a lot. I mean, I'm also overwhelmed with this business as well as just an entrepreneur. That's just the way of the world. And I've always found, it's not about like collecting data, but I've always found that making a list is actually super helpful, right? It's like, I will get in bed and there'll be like what seems like 30 things running through my head.

And then you go to actually write them down on a list and it's like eight. And you're like, all right, that's manageable. I can organize that list. I can sort it by priority and just like kind of chip away at it from like top down to the bottom. And so, yeah, I don't know. That's one thing that I try to do a lot. That's mostly a reminder for myself, just to continue to do that. Like it's super helpful to take a step back and not try to make all the decisions in here, but getting down on paper and like work through them step by step.

Jordan Buckner (21:03)
That's fine. I do very similar thing. My mind thinks in the same way as well. Like it just feels like everything's circulating. I write it down. Same thing as like eight, five, eight things. It's like, okay. Like that's more manageable. So I love that. you know, I think for all of our listeners too, right? I always say like, don't try to be a software company. If you're building a CPG product yourself, right? Like if you like coding and building things in Excel or Google sheets, like, you know, that's fine. But ultimately if you're.

job is to be growing your business, like focus on that part and use a system that's already going to just make your life lot easier so you don't have to build it yourself. And there's a lot of different software out there. There's some that costs $3,000 a month and there's some like Peasy free, but like find something that's going to work for your business so that you can try to manage all as much as your data as you can in one place so that you can clearly have a place that you go to make decisions on your sales, your inventory.

the cost of goods that you have so that you can clearly get insights into your business. so find that system. Peasy is a great place to start because it's free. You can get in and it just works for your business. And so I definitely recommend you simplify your life and your business life by doing that.

Bryan Mitchiner (22:15)
Yeah, yeah, I definitely appreciate that. think, I think I'll add onto what you said is like, I love working in spreadsheets and I did. so like, spent, like I said, like most of my time tinkering on them. spoke with someone just the other day and I showed them Peasy and it was this young guy in college and he started a nut company and showed him Peasy and it's like, that's cool. And then like, I checked in with them a week later. was like,

How's it going? And I'm like, what's, what's up? And he goes, Oh, I just pointed Claude at some, a spreadsheet and Claude, like Claude code or something built me something that works really well. And I'm going to keep going on that. And I'm like, great. that's awesome. Like if you want to like, seem like the person that can do that, you should definitely do that. I think looking back at my mustard and code is I don't regret it, but, reflecting on it. I think we probably could have grown a lot more if I invested more in the brand. Like I was.

tinkering on the supply chain, which was fun for me. But the companies that I see or the brands that see that like grow the most, whether it's like Graza or Poppy or like some of these like big, like big brands that really have blown up, they pour so much soul and energy and love into their brand. And a lot of people start these brands to do that. so yeah, supply chain stuff is important. Definitely. And I think finding the right tool to do that.

is an important thing to do. And then focus on the brand if that's where your heart is.

Jordan Buckner (23:37)
I'll tell you, Brian, too, that made me reflect back on my journey. I personally don't like doing cold sales calls or cold outreach. And so I would often do things to procrastinate, like go build and work on things in the dashboard because I didn't want to do those other hard things because I didn't have a clear direction for it. And reflecting back, was very much that,

Like those are the things though that I needed to actually do to build the business is go out and sell more product, build better relationships with customers and continue that to run a successful business. And so I even take it as like a challenge for anyone listening, right? Like if you're letting administrative things hold you back from growing your business, like.

Take that off your plate so that you can really focus on the things that are going to grow and scale and make your business money. So that's my.

Bryan Mitchiner (24:25)
And

I want to see people's spreadsheets. Yeah. love, I love getting on calls with people and seeing their spreadsheets and then we can, usually that's what we do. Like we get on calls, we take a look at your spreadsheets and we'll figure out if we can transition over to Peasy or not.

Jordan Buckner (24:37)
Nice, I love that. Brian, thanks so much for being on. If you are interested in learning, checking out go to Peasyos.com Let me know if you, Foodbevy sent you or Jordan, and let me know what you think. I always wanna hear. Brian, thanks for being on today.

Bryan Mitchiner (24:51)
Yeah, thanks Jordan.