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The Startup CPG Podcast

#101 Celebrating 10 Years of Growth: Family, Foodservice, and Forging your Own Path with Soom's Amy Zitelman

The Startup CPG Podcast

Startup CPG

Startup, Food, Business, Beverage, Cpg, Entrepreneurship

4.9 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Making it to the 10 year mark as a food business is no small feat, and our friends at Soom Foods just passed their 10 year anniversary. Today we are joined by Soom’s CEO and co-founder, Amy Zitelman. Amy had just graduated from college when she and her sisters started Soom, and since then, her and her sister Jackie were on the Forbes 30 under 30 list, Soom has been featured by Forbes, Bon Appetit, and The New York Times, and they have grown into the trusted brand for tahini and tahini products. I met Amy at a Mental Health for Founders event that I hosted last year and was so impressed with her calm, steady wisdom, so I was so excited to share her insights with all of you in today’s conversation! Make sure to grab Soom products at your local Whole Foods and Sprouts and I’ve linked a great blog post in the show notes where Amy reflects further on 10 years at Soom.

Listen in today as Amy shares about:

  • Starting Soom with her three sisters
  • Why Soom focused on the foodservice channel for the first eight years and what it was like to get started and grow the restaurant channel within foodservice
  • Launching nationally in Sprouts and Whole Foods in the past two years and how they prepared as a business
  • The process of rebranding to prep for retail
  • How Amy navigated having 3 children while growing Soom and her tips for growing a family and a startup at the same time
  • What it’s look liked to grow Soom from a financial standpoint from a story that almost bankrupted the business to what it was like to raise outside funds for the first time in 2021
  • How Soom has used EOS, or the Entrepreneurial Operating System to scale their team and build an accountability chart
  • Amy’s tips for staying grounded amidst everything
  • And more!

This episode was sponsored by Graphite Financial. Go to graphitefinancial.com/cpg
This episode was sponsored by Kickfurther. Go to https://www.kickfurther.com/startupcpg

Episode Links:

Graphite Financial Links

  • Graphite Financial website
  • Download a free financial model template, chart of accounts template, and more here
  • Listen to our episode with Graphite founder, Paul Bianco, episode #96 here.

Kickfurther Links:

  • Kickfurther website
  • See how much inventory funding you qualify here

Show Links:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Are you a founder or critical operator spending too much time on bookkeeping, expense classification, and tweaking your financial model?

0:07.1

When you should be spending your time on customers and growth, Q Graphite.

0:11.1

They are a full finance department as a service for early stage and growing CPG startups.

0:16.8

Think of having a CFO, controller, and bookkeeper, but for the fraction of the cost of hiring

0:21.7

even one internal team member, that's Graphite.

0:24.9

The truth is that most CPG founders fail due to a lack of understanding of their unit economics,

0:30.6

a.k.a. a lack of proper accounting and finance.

0:33.3

To download their free financial model template, free chart of accounts template, and other resources,

0:38.8

go to graphitefinancial.com slash CPG.

0:44.4

Graphite is also offering a special discount just for our listeners of 8% off their accounting

0:49.7

and forecasting services.

0:51.6

Head to graphitefinancial.com slash CPG to claim your discount.

0:57.0

That's graphite, G-R-A-P-H-I-T-E Financial.com slash CPG.

1:07.8

And that really was the culmination of my belief that when things happen at the right time, they happen a lot easier.

1:15.2

And so, of course, you can make your little pushes or request to grow into a retailer before they might say yes.

1:21.6

And hopefully by the time they say yes, not because you're forcing yourself onto the shelf, but because you've been able to build up

1:27.9

a little bit of demand before reaching the shelf. Welcome to the Startup CPG podcast. I'm your host,

1:33.9

Jesse Freytag. Making it to the 10-year mark as a food business is no small feat, and our friends

1:39.3

at Zoom Foods just passed their 10-year anniversary. Today we're joined by Zoom CEO and co-founder Amy Zidleman.

1:47.8

Amy had just graduated from college when she and her sisters started Zoom, and since then,

1:52.8

her and her sister Jackie were on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Sum has been featured by Forbes,

1:58.1

Bonapit, and The New York Times, and they have grown into

...

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