Ops Spotlight: Laura Romano of Graza

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1:30Something I feel like I've definitely learned at my time in Graza is a decision that was made six months ago does not mean it's like a decision forever. And it doesn't mean you have to keep on evaluating every decision you've made. But I think a lot of times we make a great decision in the moment, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't re-look at it again because your business is changing so much at all times. You know, you picked up a new customer or you have changed the location of your co-man, so now you should look at Freed again. So definitely always, always optimizing. I feel like every supply chain is that way.

2:29and how to make changes to your product and how to anticipate and correct logistics hiccups before they snowball. Laura also shares lessons learned from scaling at speed, including why strong systems and clear communication mattered more than any single tool and how the right op strategy can set the foundation for long-term growth. Stick around to hear her insights on everything from building scalable processes to navigating supplier relationships and avoiding the most common operations pitfalls. Enjoy!

3:00Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG Podcast. I'm Hannah, and today I am here with Laura Romano, Director of Operations at Graza. Laura, welcome to the show. Hi, Hannah. Thanks so much for having me. Of course, we're so pumped to have you here today. If you could share your title and a brief background of your experience prior to Graza and what led you there, I think that'd be a great way to get started. Awesome. So I'm the Director of Operations at Graza, and I started in the CPG world over 14 years ago. When I was still doing my undergrad, I started working with a company called Blue Marble Ice Cream that's based in Brooklyn, New York.

3:36It's New York City's only certified organic ice cream. They hired me on as their first wholesale employee. They had been ice cream stores and they wanted to develop their wholesale side of the business. I did everything from bookkeeping to growing the wholesale business. And I loved it. I dove in. I was like, wow, CBG is something I could really learn and grow in. So after wearing so many hats and learning so much there, I grew all the way to the COO of the company. It was a really exciting place to grow and learn because Blue Marble did so many different things. We had retail stores, we had a CBG business, we did food service, we had a co-man outside of the company, we had our own manufacturing inside the company.

4:18I just really feel like it was a great place for me to learn all the operations of a small food business. So I left Blue Marvel during the pandemic and went to another small food business called Seed and Milk. It's a tahini and halva business that's also based in New York City. And it was a great place to learn about e-commerce. So being an ice cream, I hadn't learned about the basics of shipping things nationwide, and that was a great place to learn it. And when I was at an event for FAIR, which is a B2B dropship retailer, I met the co-founders of Graza, Andrew and Alan. And we had a great chat.

4:54And a few months later, they were looking for someone to join the operations side of the business. And I made the very difficult decision to leave Sina Mila and come to Graza. And it's been a very exciting rise to see the company grow so much in such a short period of time. That's so exciting. You know, I'd love to kind of pivot to a brief overview of Graza as well for context for anyone listening that's living under a rock and hasn't been able to try or at see your awesome products, but would love to know through an intro of the company, what compelled you in that first meeting to be excited about the opportunity?

5:28What was kind of the overview that made you feel like it could really be an interesting opportunity for you to work there? Sure. So Graza is an olive oil company that makes olive oil to use every day in every way. So we have three main olive oils. Two are extra virgin. Our sizzle is like a cooking oil that you can just use for anything you're cooking. Our drizzle is more of a finishing oil so it has more of a bold punchy flavor. You want to use that on like your solids or like after you're finished cooking your pasta you add it. And now we have a new oil that's frizzle which is a mix of pumice oil and extra virgin.

6:03So it can be used anywhere using kind of like an avocado or vegetable oil as a higher smoke point. I use it in when I'm baking or like when I'm making popcorn at home things where I don't really need a strong flavor. We were known in the beginning for our squeeze bottle, but Grazant's now in almost any format. Glass, spray cans, bulk, and of course the squeeze bottle. I was really excited about the opportunity because I could just see the early growth. It was not just the like squeeze bottle getting attention, it was like quality of the oil. And as someone who did use extra virgin olive oil every day, tasting the oil immediately, I could taste the difference.

6:41I also, finishing oil was something that I used every day in salads and it was kind of more of an expensive product that you were using very sparingly and I was kind of like I have to save this up and I felt like Grazza was bringing it to the table in a way that I had seen in Europe and in my travels in Italy where people just used it more frequently and it was like a better price point so it was a really exciting place and I saw that you know I really like thought this was going to grow and I just wanted to see what it would be like to be at a company that was going to grow really fast. That's really exciting and I love your guys's positioning and branding and Frizzle is such a cute name I can like picture that sound in my head of when you're using oil as you're mentioning you're in a high growth situation now but would love to know kind of what the early days were like for you coming in there was already an established product So what kind of got put on your plate?

7:37What did operations encompass for you back then? And what has it grown to now? Great question. So I was working with both of the co-founders to start. One thing I was taking off one of their plates was really the warehousing side of the business. So being that first point of contact to the warehouse for everything and trying to streamline our freight operations and grow how we were using our software. So getting set up with EDI, we were pretty actively onboarding new customers. I remember one of my first projects was getting Target set up and I had never set up Target. I'd never worked with a company that big yet.

8:14So taking it step by step, working with the resources around me, using our brokers really strongly and just working through all the steps to get that going. And the other big projects were getting integrated into the supply chain in Spain, understanding what was happening so far there and how we were going to be growing with that relationship. So learning what was going to happen and how to integrate that into our ERP system in a better way. So they had an ERP right from the beginning, which I think is pretty unique. A lot of young companies don't have that going right away. But I remember some of my first projects was just making sure we were utilizing it in a way that I felt was going to be successful for also the growth, not just where we were on that first two months.

8:58I imagine there was a lot of kind of auditing and getting things streamlined, getting things running as smoothly as possible and then taking and building upon that. In your mind, you know, what at the steady state of a business, what are all the things an ops leader should own? And what do you think the optimal relationship between either a CEO or founders and an ops leader is like and what has really empowered you? Yeah, I feel like I've been super lucky in my career that the CEO and the founders have been true mentors to me. They've been really strong operators and have been able to teach me a lot.

9:39And I feel like from an ops point of view, you have to both support and push back or make sure be a sounding board, but also just make sure you're presenting. If someone is bringing you an idea, which oftentimes the founders are coming up with the great ideas, and I feel like it's ops job to say not no. I feel like ops gets that reputation. But to say sometimes you have to be the bad cop. I try to say more if we're going to do that this is what it's going to mean either this is the timeline that's going to be on this is the cost it's going to be so with the founders early on I think that's ops role and you also have to be the one to someone once described ops to me as like marketing and sales and all these people are like throwing a football on you if you want to catch it so you it's a great analogy so I always try to think about like you like don't let people throw the football you're no one's going to catch it but like we're the ones have to make things kind of go on and happen so I feel like I've always been in great relationships with CEOs and founders who really really understand ops in a detailed way but if they don't and you're not in that situation I think even more you have to be like the voice of pushing back and making sure it's clear what the mostly time and effort and costs are going to be that's really helpful perspective.

11:04In the little time I've gotten to know you, I can tell you're an incredibly diligent and detail-oriented person. So I'm sure you are like an ops superstar on all of that. Thank you. That's so sweet. What's your favorite part of your job? You know, what about operations really gets you going and has made you really excited to work in that sector? That's a great question. I mean, I think like the stereotypical thing is like the problem-solving aspect. But to be more specific, I think it's having an idea and executing on it. So seeing something finally come to light. And I think mostly done ops and accounting.

11:42And I always used to say I like the accounting work because you would check box it off and it would be done. And that felt really good to check your list off and just like close the month and feel done with it. And I felt like ops, you're pushing projects forward that so many times don't end. There's continuous improvement. There's efficiency to be done. There's like QA that you want to continue to improve on. But it is my favorite part of even moving it along and you're not like finishing it, but you just are trying to see something like happen and put a product into the world or e-com sale goes successfully done.

12:16And yeah, those are my favorite parts, I guess. You sleep peacefully when the to-do list is crossed off. I do, definitely. Kind of pivoting onto some best practices and your kind of mentality around operations. What do you think are, you know, Ops pillars that in your mind are critical to scale early if you had to prioritize things? You know, what needs to be tight from day one? Where should you focus most of your time at the beginning to make sure that you're going to be stood up for success down the road? So I always tell brands that are first starting out and what I really truly believe on is you really have to know what your costs are.

12:54You can't work off of just forecasts of what the costs are going to be. It's so important to go back and analyze what actually happened last month or last production run or whatever your time period is, knowing your full costs. I think the other thing to think about very early on if someone is really just getting started out is if you're going into like the natural food worlds, for example, and you want to be in grocery in the natural food world to think about what are general retailer requirements that you should be thinking about from the beginning. So when you're setting up your case packs for the first time, what size makes sense if you're going to be having to do free fills, if that's something that's like normally happening in this industry?

13:39Or did you print barcodes on those case packs because that's something that is going to help with the warehousing? What are some like very common like BUL and pack list requirements so that you're not getting fines from people down the line? So I think if you're new to this industry or just really starting out, the logistic side of common grocery things would be something that I would definitely look into and start with. Yeah, you want to make sure before you commit whatever limited capital you have, essentially, that you're going to be able to make the most out of the sales for those products, it sounds like.

14:14And I think that is sage advice. When you're choosing manufacturing partners or you're setting these parameters, what's some of the diligence or criteria that you're looking at to help get you to where you need to go on some of the things you just mentioned? When you're choosing a manufacturing partner and you're getting started out, I would really be looking at MOQs that they're going to require the flexibility they're going to have for startup brands and what kind of companies are they working with that if you're going to require kind of special ingredients, like are they going to be able to work with that?

14:48Are they going to help you if you need someone to help build a recipe? Are they going to be able to help do that? The co-man relationship is so important. And you really want a partner that's going to be transparent with you, provide the information you need. I think if the communication isn't there right from the beginning, you're probably not going to get it down the line. And I think when you are going to be managing this relationship down the line, this transparency and flow of data is going to become so important. I mean, I would say you should be asking what data they're going to share with you, too.

15:20who's going to be responsible for inventory counts and when are they giving that information. There's so many key pieces you can go into, but I think just right from the beginning, just seeing if they're giving you information you're asking for, if they're transparent about it, are they giving you full price breakdowns? Those kind of things might be able to help you tell if that's going to be the right partner for you. Very helpful. What KPIs do you track religiously in your department? What signals health or risk for you and what's kind of the daily or weekly things that you're really looking at?

15:51Yes, great question. The KPIs we're looking at every single week are often around inventory. So both on our supply chain side and on our fulfillment and logistics side, inventory is just something we feel like we have to know forwards and backwards. So my demand planner helps us create a weekly roll forward of what orders we have in our system, what inventory we have, what inventory we have coming in, and then we're looking out multiple weeks to see where our inventory position will be. And if we can say yes to every order that's in our system, if we could say yes to the rest of the orders that are coming in, and we're doing this across all of our warehouses, and then we're doing almost the same thing on our supply chain side, but for raw materials.

16:38So do we have all the raw materials we need to do the production that's upcoming for the next few months? What cadence are we ordering the raw materials in? And what position are we going to be in for as production comes in? So I would say inventory is just the most important because all the other KPIs we're going to be tracking, especially around fulfillment that I'm thinking about, are we on time? Did the orders go out? They can't be done without the inventory in the first place. So when we're really thinking about our Monday morning checks, it's definitely inventory, where are we? And it's just make or break for our ops team.

17:15Yeah. And that makes sense because you guys are so fast growing and you're servicing a lot of accounts right now. So I imagine the sellout risk is very high for you all. And you want to make sure you're not leaving money on the table and really maximizing your sales. What about if you're in the opposite situation? Have you ever been in a situation in your career where you've had too much inventory? I know that's frequently something that a lot of founders or operators run into. And what advice would you have for people that are maybe a little over-inventoried? Yeah, great question. It definitely both happens, I feel like, for everyone, right?

17:50There's just swings and stages, and you're trying to optimize buying, doing production runs of certain sizes, and there's just so much unpredictability. forecasting is such a hard thing to do. My other businesses I worked at for my ice cream company, what we were able to do is when we had an over inventory position is kind of sell it to ourselves into our retail stores. It's a great way to run through inventory. Not everyone has retail stores where they're scooping ice cream of that they're also selling. But sometimes D to C can be an also another way where you can pull a lever of changing price or promoting in a more aggressive way.

18:25in the grocery world it's so much harder to do some kind of quick sale or you know grocery stores plan these things a year in advance but thinking about what other channels you might have where you can pull levers so fare is another one if we're we were overstocked in something we can put it on there blast the message anywhere where you're more directly selling to a customer you might be able to move inventory more quickly that's really helpful and kind of you know if you had to break down I know you're working with a demand planner and I'm sure you guys are a little further along in the sophistication here but if you had to break down you know for someone who doesn't have as many resources or is kind of working towards it what the like key facts you need to know to be able to forecast your business the most accurately or any tips and tricks you can share on on how to go about doing that I think that'd be really helpful yes I definitely shout out to Graza's a demand planning team.

19:24They're amazing. So I'm not the expert on demand planning for sure, but something we definitely follow is like an 80-20 rule. So think about 80 % of your customers and don't worry about like the 20 % that are kind of smaller customers that you might not be able to track as closely. So if you are a smaller business, really thinking about your bigger anchor customers and helping, like they might be easier to plug into a forecast and seeing if other retailers are going to follow that demand or not. I think that's like one place to start. Yeah, that's really helpful. Hot take. Is it better for you all to be under?

20:03I know obviously the right answer is to be exactly out of forecast, but is it preferred, do you think, to be slightly over inventoried and a surplus of your forecast or slightly under inventoried under your forecast? I feel like from an ops perspective, I always want to have a little bit more because I don't want to go into inventory allocation, which is a lot of work. And it's difficult to then have to try to define exactly who gets what product. That being said, something that we do at Graza is we only want to sell the freshest oil. So we're always trying to really bring it down to zero at a specific time of year.

20:43So right before the new harvest is when we would say, you know, right now we would rather be under inventory because we don't want to overbottle last harvest. But at other times of year, we might be overstocked and like, that's okay because we'll sell through it. So I think there is nuance in that. So depending on someone's business in the cycle of maybe one year or a quarter, there might be times when it makes sense to have more or less. Going into Q4 and more people probably want to have a little bit more for the upside opportunity, but other times of year it might be like, absolutely not. Let's have less.

21:20That's really interesting and some interesting color specifically on your business. You know, it's very much like wine where you're got a specific harvest and you want to make the most of it. So fascinating. I love learning little details about other industries and other people's businesses. I feel like that's what makes consumers so fun a lot of the times. Kind of pivoting to scaling a little bit. I know you guys are in a hyper growth situation. I'm sure coming into a pre-existing business, there was a lot of optimization to be done as well. In your perspective, is supply chain optimization kind of like a one and done initiative that you really work through or a forever pain point where you're kind of circling back to things on a more regular basis?

22:03Definitely always circling back. Something I feel like I've definitely learned at my time in Graza is a decision that was made six months ago does not mean it's like a decision forever. And it doesn't mean you have to keep on evaluating every decision you've made. But I think a lot of times we make a great decision in the moment, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't re-look at it again because your business is changing so much at all times. Even if it's not hyper growth, it's still there's, you know, you picked up a new customer or you have changed the location of your co-man. So now you should look at Freed again.

22:37So definitely always, always optimizing. I feel like every supply chain is that way. When you're in a fast growth situation, what do you think are some of the big watchouts that someone should be looking for or lessons learned where you're like, oh yeah, that kind of bit us a little bit. I wish we had been anticipating that a little bit more or any kind of hot areas that you feel like is really important to focus on. I think something we've learned is all of our forecasting, we have spent so much time giving it to our production partners and thinking about like maybe that being our biggest partner and maybe a few of the raw material suppliers.

23:11It's so important getting them our forecasts. But something I've learned is how so many of our partners need to know about the growth and forecasting of up and coming and thinking really systematically about how often each partner needs to get updated in different ways. So for example, we have launched a bunch more SKUs. I talked about like the sprays and the glass coming out And we notified our warehouse partner, you know, new SKUs are coming and this is the timeline. We're expecting more outgoing orders. That's also a metric we're giving them. But we really didn't take into account how much more storage we would need because we're storing so many more pallets.

23:54And they're an awesome partner and amazing for our growth. But you just physically run out of space sometimes. You don't have enough pallet space. so it was an oversight on my side and it taught me that throughout these stages of growth like that is something that you're trying to share information and you're trying to make sure it's getting into the hands of the right people but there's sometimes it's always more so what we're doing to correct that is just when going through all of our partners in different ways and thinking like what information and on exactly what cadence so getting that more systemized and not just oh on my weekly calls let me mention this but like how are we going to have this external communication be like really systematic that's a great call out yeah i feel like in operations it's kind of like you're trying to think through the journey of the product at every step and what would be niche and from every different angle it's a million balls you're juggling and especially as you make more skews it just gets that much more complex talking about your your new skew launch when you're developing and launching new products, what is the process like for you all at Graza?

25:02Any best practices that you can share or words of wisdom that you have? Launching new SKU has been super fun. And something as simple as putting just the same oil in a different bottle, we've learned is more complicated than you think. And I think so many people in startup CPG world, what you're doing is new, right? So you're making this product, but there is a twist on it. Like that's why we're bringing it to market. So you have to go through these processes where you learn that it's these little changes that are gonna actually create bigger ripple effects down the line for your product development.

25:38Things we've learned is working super closely with the sales team to know dates for what they need. So they know when the retailer resets are gonna be, they know when the retailer meetings are going to be. So we're working super closely with them to make sure we're aligning with those dates and being probably over-optimistic about that we can make those dates, really trying to always make those dates and sometimes falling short. Product development timelines are very optimistic sometimes, but as long as we keep our sales team in communication at all times about any delays, we're very happy to get the new products on the shelf.

26:18Yeah, I feel like it's such a handholding dance. You know, you want to say yes to everything kind of earlier to your point where you somehow have to catch the football, you know, you want to say yes to everything, you don't want to let anyone down, but you also can only run as fast as you can. And I think especially with retailers, it's like you want to capitalize on the opportunities and make sure you're making the most of it. So that a lot of sense is a tight wire to walk, I'm sure. Earlier, you know, we were talking about, you know, a core pillar being really having a good concept of your pricing and what your product costs and really understanding that.

26:54Kind of talking about that a little bit more. What are your thoughts on negotiating price with your commands and setting what your COGS will be? How do you typically like to go about that? What do you think the important levers are and any best practices or words of advice you have on going through that process? when thinking about pricing overall especially for services or like a copac fee or things like that i think it's super important to know why a price is where it is so before you're trying to negotiate down on a price just understanding everything that's going to be included in it and that might give some insight into like why it might be higher than a competitor's or lower than a competitor's The other piece that is huge and that I've learned time and time again at Graza is you need to build redundancy into your supply chain.