We had our first ever Costco, what's called an MVM.

It means multi-vender mailer.

All that is is it means that like you're on very steep discount in every club in the country

and you're talking about massive volume.

And we realized that we were not going to be able to supply this.

And we've been working on this for years.

Welcome to the Startup CPG podcast.

I'm your host, Jesse Freytag.

I'm so excited to share a conversation with you about kombucha and operations, two of my favorite topics.

I was recently the moderator for a session that was held at UCLA Anderson

by the Food and Agriculture Business Association for a group of MBA candidates where I had a

fireside chat with Justin Trout, co-founder and former C.O. of Health Aid kombucha. In this conversation,

Justin dives into the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes stories from growing a

kombucha business from a single farmer's market to almost 50,000 retail doors during his tenure as

C-O-O.

And you get some snippets from me about growing lib bar.

Listen in to learn the stages of health aides growth, the decision to self-manufacture, the

process of transitioning

from doing operations work to managing a team of operations personnel, first operations

hires, overcoming a year with over 2,000 employees turning over, implementing an ERP system,

discerning which experts to listen to, where Justin draws inspiration and why he

loves operations, and more.

...