The Startup CPG Podcast


In this episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, host Daniel Scharff sits down with Yoga Charya, President and COO of Mezcla, and Sebastiaan Debrouwe from Doss, the operations cloud built for fast-growing CPG brands. Together, they trace the rise of Mezcla — one of the breakout brands in the crowded protein bar category — and unpack the operational philosophy that made it possible: simplicity scales.


Yoga shares how Mezcla has grown 2–3x annually for several years running, earned a cult following in specialty retail before breaking into Target, Publix, Costco, and Whole Foods (where they've expanded from 3 SKUs in 3 regions to 11–12 SKUs nationwide), and recently closed a Series B to fuel continued growth. The secret? Relentless focus on product quality, an ultra-lean team of tier-one operators, and a deliberate effort to keep the supply chain as simple as possible at every stage.


Sebastiaan adds the systems perspective — what Doss sees across the fast-growing brands they work with, why the real danger isn't complexity itself but the failure to design against it, and what separates brands that scale cleanly from those that get buried in operational debt.


Whether you're just figuring out your ops model or wondering what breaks when you hit hypergrowth, this episode is full of hard-won insight.


Listen in as they discuss:

  • How Mezcla cracked the protein bar category with a product-led growth model and a "bar made by foodies for foodies" brand ethos
  • Why showing the actual product on front-of-pack — not flavor cues — became a competitive advantage
  • The "land and expand" playbook that took Mezcla from 3 Whole Foods regions to full national distribution
  • Why Yoga consolidated from two 3PLs to one Midwest warehouse — and why emerging brands almost always should
  • How a fully turnkey co-manufacturer relationship gives Mezcla cost visibility without operational overhead
  • The Crunch Council: how Mezcla brings structure to product quality and ingredient decisions as they scale
  • Why sample orders were eating 5–10 hours a week — and how Doss helped collapse that
  • The Google Sheets → Airtable → Doss journey, and what you actually gain at each step
  • Why traceability and a reliable system of record matter even when — especially when — things are going well
  • Sebastiaan's advice for brands implementing new systems: peel the onion, build road before you drive on it, and never lower your standards


Episode Links: 


Yoga Charya – President & COO, Mezcla 


Sebastiaan Debrouwere – Doss 


Don't forget to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you enjoyed this episode. For potential sponsorship opportunities or to join the Startup CPG community, visit http://www.startupcpg.com.


Show Links:

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  • Episode music by Super Fantastics

Creators and Guests

Host
Daniel Scharff
Founder/CEO, Startup CPG

What is The Startup CPG Podcast?

The top CPG podcast in the world, highlighting stories from founders, buyer spotlights, highly practical industry insights - all to give you a better chance at success.

Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Business grows, it's going to get more complex. It inevitably is like a network of nodes and you add more warehouses or more EDI partners like Costco, Target, whatever, more formulations and like this stuff just explodes in complexity to some degree. Can avoid, you can design around a little bit. But the enormous trick is, I think exactly what Yoga just said is like, how do you make sure that your systems, but also like the processes, the people, the way you do stuff means that you can keep it as simple as possible. Like, how do you follow up a bunch of that complexity in a way that a human can just apply a bunch of great judgment on it and like judgment and tastes in a really repeatable way. It's not about adding a bunch of complexity for the sake of it.

00:48
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Like, there's no glory in that suffering whatsoever. I think that's what a lot of brands really suffer with is it gets really complicated and then a bunch of people sort of have the feeling that's like the hallmark of success. The hallmark of success is how well do you manage that, how fast can you keep growing essentially by empowering your people.

01:06
Daniel Scharff
Hello, friends. Welcome to another Startup CPG podcast. I am super pumped about today's episode because we are going to follow along the journey of one of the breakout brands from the startup CPG community. It's Mezcla, those incredible plant based protein bars that you've seen in stores everywhere. They have been a total rocket ship over the last few years and I think they're one of the best examples out there of how to grow fast while maintaining a super lean rockstar team. Today on the podcast you're going to hear all about how they did it and a huge thank you to our sponsor for today's episode, Doss. It's an ERP platform working with high growth CPG brands and they're helping the Mezcla team to scale their simple and effective operating model.

01:46
Daniel Scharff
If you want to chat with them, you can visit Doss.com that's d o s s.com all right, here we go. All right, welcome everyone to the podcast. I am so excited that today we have Yoga from Mezcla on to tell the story of the rise of Mezcla. It's a brand that I knew about in the early days and then before I knew it, I just started seeing them everywhere, which for me is especially amazing because I feel like the category that they're in is just one of the most competitive ones out there and so hard to stand out. But they've done it we also have here today, Sebastiaan from the Doss team. What we're going to talk about a lot today is when you scale the way that they have, what starts breaking from an ops perspective.

02:33
Daniel Scharff
And I think this is going to be really cool for all the brands out there to hear who are wondering what should I be planning for if I hit that kind of curve. So, okay, Yoga, I'm going to start with you. Do you mind first just giving us the intro into yourself and Mezcla?

02:47
Yoga Charya
Good thing. Yep. Well, nice to meet you, Daniel. Thanks for having me on. Good to see you again, Sebastiaan. I'm Yoga. I serve as our president and chief operating officer at Mezcla. We're a consumer brand that plays right now in the protein bar space with our trademarked Puff Crispy bars. Think a crispy treat meets a protein bar with some level of function. What we're trying to deliver on is just an eating experience where people want to eat Protein bars, a category that generally people have eaten on autopilot before. We've been scaling about 2 to 3x annually for the last several years. And in March, just about a month ago, we've closed in our series B primes to invest more capital into specific levers to continue that pace of growth moving forward.

03:28
Daniel Scharff
Okay, and let me just ask you right off the bat, how did you guys do it? What is it about your brand that caught on so well? I mean, I think, okay, we've seen some people do well in the bar space who I think are like, repeat founders, have hundreds of millions of dollars to throw at it, some crazy tech or whatever. But I think yours is a story of a good product, authentic brand that just executed well and kind of just grew consistently. Like, what was the secret to all of that?

03:55
Yoga Charya
Yeah, I would say the two primary drivers. There's many, of course, but I'd say the two primary drivers is number one, a product that delivers on an eating experience. In my view, that's just better than most other in the category. There are some emerging players now that are trying to introduce crunch not just as an aspect but as a feature of the bar. I think were probably one of the first to really make that, like, I would say, centerpiece for what the value prop was of eating a Mezcla bar. And I'd say the second thing is probably just the execution of our team. We have a very lean team who's been able to scale with us pretty rapidly. And Sebastiaan knows one of them pretty well.

04:33
Yoga Charya
Justin, who I would argue is probably the most important person on Mezcla's team is an operations manager and ensures that product gets to our warehouses from our co manufacturer and then gets out to all of our customers.

04:46
Daniel Scharff
Okay. And I know we're talking about ops today, so I really am happy that you gave those answers. But one thing I didn't hear you mention is just the branding, which, you know, if I'm thinking about. Okay, you're going into a really competitive category where so many entrants in there. How are you going to stand out? For me, actually, branding would come first. Can you tell me a little bit about, like maybe describe your branding for somebody who hasn't yet seen and what does it try to do and how does that resonate with consumers?

05:13
Yoga Charya
Yeah, I mean, it's funny. We're actually launching another brand refresh right now, Dan, so you'll see those rolling out on shelves over the coming month to two months, maybe a little bit longer depending on the retailer. As I'm sure you're aware, sometimes it can take longer for product to flow through the shelf. But I'm happy to walk you through the brand's kind of history too, on some of those, like the primary ones. We started out like most other startup brands do, leaning very heavily into specialty and natural retail. And what really sells there, candidly is a story. And as a product, because customers there are more willing to try new things, there's a propensity to trial that is higher in the premium, natural and specialty retail channels.

05:52
Yoga Charya
What's funny is like as you walk through the bar category and you look at the block, right, it's pretty intimidating when you walk in there and you see a hundred different options. What's rare is an option that's willing to stand behind what their product actually looks and tastes like without using pure play flavor cues. So if you look at our boxes and our packaging, you'll see a Mezcla bar actually featured on that front of pack in a way that doesn't really exist for many of the other brands. And I think, Dan, what that means is people know what they're buying. A bar that looks like a Rice Krispy Treat meets protein bar. It's got 11 grams of protein in there. It's pretty light, airy, crispy, only 170 calories. And people are just willing to try it.

06:34
Yoga Charya
And what's been really exciting for us is that we're investing a lot into trial. But once people try our product, our retention is actually best in the class. So we're able to keep customers after they Try our product because they know that it delivers on taste and texture in a way that most of the other bars that they're eating on autopilot generally provide.

06:54
Daniel Scharff
That's pretty interesting to hear. I was thinking about if you look at a power bar and like, if you open that wrapper up and look at it and someone's like, what do you think that is? What's in it? Like, I don't know, it's like a shiny, gooey blob of a product. Like, what's in there? I don't know. But if I look at your product, I can immediately call out a few of the things that I'm eating. So that makes sense. And why you would actually want to show that front of pack 100%.

07:20
Yoga Charya
I mean, the way we think about it is this, right? Like, I still eat other bars. I would say primarily now simply because I can't even eat my own bars. I eat so many of them on a day to day basis. I would say a healthy mix of market research in there too. I'll be the first to tell you, this is a massive category. There's a place for everyone to play at the end of the day. What Mezcla was founded on is actually what we're trying to stick true today, which is a bar made by foodies for foodies.

07:45
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, that makes sense. And the category itself is so big, you can look at the set. It's huge because it's something that people really integrate into their lives. Right. I always see at the gym, people pack in a protein bar for after their workout. Like, my sisters always have protein bars around as well for them and their kids just kind of on the go. Probably feels like a healthier snack than a bag of chips or something like that. So that makes a lot of sense. The retention thing is so interesting. Do you feel like when you're actually converting customers then off that trial that they're becoming daily users right away or just putting you in the mix of bars that they typically go to? Like, how loyal are people in this category in general, not just to your product?

08:28
Yoga Charya
Yeah, it's fascinating. What we have found is I've done quite a few customer interviews, just getting on the phone, literally talking to people and trying to unearth more about trends of how, where, when, why people even eat bars. The most interesting thing to me is different eating occasions. So I'm not trying to compete for the person who's trying to bulk up after deadlifting 350 pounds in the gym. Mesa is probably not the bar for you right after for your recovery. But Mezcla is a great bar. When it's like 3 o' clock or 4 o', clock, you're feeling a little bit of a dip after your lunch and you want a healthy snack that is light and airy is not going to weigh you down. Like that's where we play in. Right. Or after Pilates, you want a little bit of a snack.

09:08
Yoga Charya
You don't want to weigh yourself down. That's where Mexico can play in. So I think what we've really been able to crack is this texture piece. And now we're trying to build more of a community and a brand around it so that we can keep people coming back to not just the product, but to the broader brand portfolio.

09:24
Daniel Scharff
That's very beautiful. Okay, I have two quick questions and then I want to pull in Sebastiaan as well. So the first one, I live right near Citarella, and I see you guys have a huge presence at Citarella. Like when you were talking earlier about your strategy initially of penetrating specialty, those kind of places, like, do you feel like you were able to have a better shot at carving out a big set in places like that and start building out awareness? Is that kind of like what you're talking about for your initial strategy?

09:49
Yoga Charya
Yeah, I would say that's how we wanted to gain the toehold. Right. And to begin to grow the brand, prove out product market fit. We were initially in the Citarellas, the Kings, Balducci's, Whole Foods sprouts. And those are still enormous pieces of our business. Today, though, we have started to scale more into mass and conventional, which is where we see a really significant opportunity to gain greater household penetration in the United States.

10:13
Yoga Charya
For us, I think some of the biggest launches that we had last year were Target and Publix in Q4, which have been going very well for us, continuing to gain additional distribution both in store account and in SKUs within both of those retailers, as well as in a Safeway at Albertsons, where we've continued to additionally like, tack on incremental regions or divisions, as they call them, and more SKUs within those divisions. I think the coolest story for us that really shows how we try and like pretty much land and expand within retailers is Whole foods. Back in 2022, we landed with three SKUs in three regions of Whole Foods, quickly expanded to four SKUs, five regions, and now we have about 11 or 12 SKUs across every single Whole Foods in the country.

10:58
Daniel Scharff
Well, good for you guys. That's so good. To you. That's amazing. And yeah, that is, like, where the true test comes is if you can actually perform once you get that real Whole Foods opportunity, and then if your brand also then can make the transition and perform in places like Publix. So good for you guys. That's so great.

11:17
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Isn't that a great story as well? Yoga where Whole Foods came inbound to you guys, from what I remember.

11:22
Yoga Charya
It's a funny story, actually. So Whole Foods was originally outbound, did not go anywhere, and then were in. I don't know how well you guys know Texas, but were in Juice Land, which is, like, has this cult, like, following in Austin for smoothies and juices. We were one of the very few bars. Actually, we may be the only bar, but we're one of very few at the very most bars that are available there. And the Whole Foods buyer saw us there and then reached back out to us, and that's how we initially got into Whole Foods, which is pretty crazy.

11:48
Daniel Scharff
A little fomo. I like it. You just surround them with the product and they're like, oh, geez, I guess it's getting everywhere now. I can't be so late to the party here. Okay. And then, so, oh, trial you mentioned. How are you driving that? Trial you mentioned you're investing a lot into having people try it, and then you can have good retention once they do. What are your real powerhouse tactics for that?

12:06
Yoga Charya
Yeah, I would say, I think about that. So 70% of my business, for context, is retail, and then 30% is digital, 25% of that, Amazon, 5% d. C. The way I'm building this brand, we're building Mezcla, is such that people are primarily buying our bars in store, because that's where we're primarily distributed at this point. But we have a very strong growth channel that we're continuing to invest more into, as well as more conventional opportunities on the retail side. So think shopper marketing. When we're at Target, for example, are we putting more money into Roundel so there's more digital brand awareness about us? It's popping to the top when people are shopping@target.com, all the way through to Instacart, when people are scrolling through. And we've now launched in a couple of regions in Costco in the Southeast, Northeast, in the business centers.

12:51
Yoga Charya
While we want to make sure that people have that opportunity and that option to buy Mezcla, so investing in both inorganic. Right, like paid online within those retail channels and retail media, as well as a Lot of trying to build that organic buzz and push some social to retail action for us as well.

13:08
Daniel Scharff
Okay, cool. And so you guys are a rocket ship right now. You're obviously crushing online and in all of the retail. So when it comes to the op side of the business, like I always love talking about the marketing and demos and shop marketing and all of that, but you guys are growing so fast. This is a big business to support. Any brand out there knows because even at the early stages they're sweating individual ingredient orders arriving in time and just have like an individual PO getting a couple days late somewhere. But you guys are cranking now, the pistons are firing. So can you just tell me a little bit about like what is changing now for you at this stage as you're really maturing as a company and having just really consistent processes, all that kind of stuff from an ops perspective?

13:53
Yoga Charya
Yeah, and it's a great question. I think you basically started to answer it yourself there at the end in. Right. Which is as we've scaled, we tried to do the things initially that didn't scale and now we're building the systems and processes so that we can maintain very high otifs on time infill rates when it comes to our distributors and make sure that we have like basically the right amount of product at the right place in at the right time and shipped such that it is fresh product as well. And so all of those are slight optimization equations and they're all I think decision points for a brand on what they want to focus their time on. Right. So there's some brands out there that want to have complete control over every aspect of their supply chain and they're ordering ingredients for their product.

14:37
Yoga Charya
I think that can take a very significant time commitment, for example, out of your supply chain side of the house. And so instead what we've done is we've tried to push on the co man side. Right. Starting from an end to end process. Like my product, we are on fully turnkey basis where I just pay one finished amount per bar once it rolls off the line and actually leaves their facility. But I have full visibility and transparency into the component costs. The way I think about it is this, right? I don't need to be negotiating and buying pistachios every single time I'm placing a purchase order. But can I structure contracts with key suppliers and key ingredients that are very central to my product's texture and overall flavor profile?

15:19
Yoga Charya
So for me, my puff crispy bar, like think my pea crisps, think my chocolate, right. These are things that I want to have a direct relationship with. I've set up the contract with those and I let my co man pull from them. I already know the pricing, I know what the product quality is, I know all of that. But I don't have to deal with actually placing the pos, receiving it, maintaining the storage and the warehousing and the handling. To me, the way I think about things is MESQLA is a consumer brand. We are not there vertically integrated. We don't own our own manufacturing capabilities. So I want to have as much visibility as I can, but I don't want to be the one who's actually holding pen or the needle on actually making my product, if that makes sense.

15:55
Daniel Scharff
That's interesting. I didn't understand that about turnkey. When I hear that word, I'm like, oh, they just do everything. So you're not even the one sourcing the ingredients, which honestly makes me nervous. It's like, well, what? But is it good? Who is it going to be late? Like, what's happening? But it sounds like you actually are involved in setting up the contract. But then they're just really placing the orders and they have a consistent price from them.

16:14
Yoga Charya
Like you said, right? As you scale, different business processes will emerge. In the earlier innings, we had semblance and understanding of like, who these suppliers were and what the specific specs on them were. As we've grown, we've built like an internal tasting council, for example, that we call the Crunch Council, and that helps us inform the product development life cycle. And we're actually hiring ahead of R and D right now too, right. To help oversee this Crunch Council, help oversee product development. I had a lot of other names.

16:42
Daniel Scharff
Will they be called Captain Crunch?

16:44
Yoga Charya
Captain Crunch. I mean, I had some other names that are perhaps not as PG that we had as potential names for it, but I think the Crunch Council has been pretty awesome to run it. We just ran with a different facility of our co manufacturer and we had like an OG World Crunch Council meeting where we all take it pretty seriously. We're all sitting down, we have someone like unsheathe the bar, chop it up into specific pieces. We're all taking a bite. We're like swishing it around in our mouths like wine, figuring out like, oh, how's the crunch factor on this? Or like, how long is this taste in my mouth? What does the aftertaste like? Is the crisp ending pretty quickly? Like, things like that we did not do earlier on. We would take a bite, be like, oh, this is Good.

17:21
Yoga Charya
This is not good. And now we're trying to add structure around it. Right. And so in the beginning, did I know who my chocolate supplier was like for my first few runs? Actually, I don't think I did. I did learn who it was after that because chocolate is so central, right. It's the bottom coating of my bar. I have a custom spec on that chocolate that I pull from. Right. And because my pea crisps are so central to the crunch of my bar, I have a custom spec and a custom crisp that I've built in conjunction with both my co manufacturer. So what will run best on their line as well as the P crisp manufacturer, what will run best on their line and what makes the best possible product? Right.

17:52
Yoga Charya
So I'm trying to control as much as I can the product quality, which in my view when you're talking about food is anything you make is only as good as the ingredients you're making it with.

18:01
Daniel Scharff
It's going to be hard for me to stop thinking about the crunch council if you guys end up hiring somebody named Mark. Maybe it could be called Marky Mark and the Crunchy Bunch.

18:10
Yoga Charya
I like that.

18:11
Daniel Scharff
Thank you. Just throwing that out there. Okay, Sebastiaan, let me come over to you now. So Sebastiaan, I know this is like music to your ears to be hearing all of this talk about OPS and the focus and I love this story that Yoga is telling us because it seems to me like a brand that has really focused on what they do best and simplifying their business. So focusing on their brand and the crunch and delivering the promise to consumers while really simplifying their operations and just trying to really make things be very consistent, executable, scalable, all of that stuff. Is that what you see from the best of the brands that you guys work with? And also, please hit us with the overall intro. Who is Sebastiaan? Who is Doss?

18:53
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Yeah, sure, I'm Sebastiaan. I lead everything business development and marketing at Doss. At Doss, we're building an operations cloud, which is essentially a next gen ERP for fast growing businesses like Mezcla, where we bring together the best of AI and sort of super flexible systems that adjust to every other business process that you're running. I think in terms of seeing, I think you put this really well at Yoga, right? As a brand that you create a promise to your customer, whatever that is, you're kind of a challenger brand coming up. Initially you find unique angle and that has to be something that your customers love and rave about and enjoy. It gets really hard to take that from the first Couple of repetitions where you're maniacal about the details of discovering it to extending that experience across.

19:37
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Anyone who buys a bar online in Target discovers it somewhere in a shop. And part of that is trying to take the madness and the magic of early days and putting it into a method where you can kind of do it over and over again. And that is incredibly hard. It's hard because you gotta find great people. It's hard because you have to figure out new partners that you work with, because suddenly you get a crunch count now that you have to figure out what specific crunch LMSVAR is. But it's also hard because you go from one kind of source of truth that you might get your hands around really easily. And typically, that source of truth has a name and is a person, to suddenly replicating that across a ton of different order systems, right?

20:15
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Because you're selling on Shopify, on Amazon, you're selling in Target, you're selling wholesale. And so you've kind of gone from, like, creating the magic and getting that great experience going the first time around to then try to replicate that magic and just keep your head screwed on as there's someone there with two monitors and, like, a bunch of Excel sheets and copying data between them. And so that's typically what we see. We see that there's an amazing love for the product and a really passionate team and this, like, very urgent need to try and make sure that can scale scales with a system that adjusts to the magic formula you found for your business. And typically the answer is adjust your formula to this old system that we've built.

20:53
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
And I think any good operator refuses to do that because they have crafted with love and passion and precision the thing that works for them. So that's typically what we see. And the great thing about that is we get to work with phenomenal operators who've built things with real love and passion and try to help them grow.

21:08
Daniel Scharff
That if there even is a system to love at that point, you know, that's. I mean, I hope they're at least that far. Right? I mean, I'm sure you're dealing with plenty of brands who end up realizing they need to get Doss into their systems. And you're like, what are you using now? Like, what? No, you guys have a system.

21:25
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
It's typically a name. The answer is typically a person.

21:31
Daniel Scharff
That's a tough situation to be in, especially if that person ever takes vacation. Okay, so yoga in the early days, what wasn't working from an ops perspective? Because it sounds like now you guys are on a pretty good path. I mean, we'll talk more about how you guys use Dawson a bit also. But what are the kind of things that you feel like you did in the early days where you really learned a lot of lessons about that? Of like, okay, we did it because it grew that way and because we had to. And don't fix something until it's really broken. But what are some of the things that you did that just really weren't scaling?

22:00
Yoga Charya
It's a great question. I hesitate to say anything was really broken, to be perfectly honest with you, Daniel, on the operations side, I think there's just growing pains as you begin to expand and you do more of the same thing. You're like, this is like, just taking up a lot of my time. Less of a scaling issue. It's just like, I don't think I should really spending as much time as I am doing this. Right. And the number one thing that, like, Doss loves to talk about from esla, for example, is our sample orders, which was just an unbelievably manual process that we had a member of our team just like basically spending like, near five to ten hours a week on. And that was just not something that needed five to ten hours a week. Sounds like a lot.

22:38
Yoga Charya
It also doesn't sound like a lot until you realize, like, that's basically one full working day that's dedicated a week to just putting in sample orders when that's not a central piece of why this brand exists or why operations exists. Right. So I think that's like a very prime example as well as what I gained a little bit of hesitancy was I think were pretty organized. Our graduation schema was we moved from Google Sheets, to be perfectly honest with you, kind of worked. It has everything that you need. People will sit out there and bash things like, honestly, I think Google Sheets should have pretty fine job for us. We graduated from Google Sheets to Airtable, which is, in my view, like a fancier table to Doss today, which is upgraded.

23:16
Yoga Charya
Table is how I like to think about it, with more bells and whistles attached to it. And each step of that way to, in my view, is the progression towards a system of record. And to me, like, that's the most important thing is, yes, you can have a Google Sheet, yes, you can have an Airtable, yes, you can have a Doss. At the end of the day, what I think you get as you start to graduate towards these slightly more sophisticated systems of record is something that's a little bit More reliable, it's trustworthy. There's no questions about like, breaks in a process because it's much more automated as well as in my view. Right. Like when you're talking about food, there's really serious traceability concerns that come into play. And knock on wood, we have had a pretty good track record on that today.

23:59
Yoga Charya
And we run drills on that usually about like once every about six months with the Quality Advisor. If we have to do a recall, can we find the product where it went, et cetera, very quickly. And we pass those with our Quality Advisor consultant, you know, with flying colors. But that it helps to have Doss. Right. Like if we had to do that off of Airtable, I think we could do it. But there may be some question marks associated with that source of truth and it might take us a bit longer to do it. So to me, like, I just get enormous value and peace of mind out of having something like Doss in our tech stack as well as when you're uploading all these various sources of data and information. Like I have assigned bol. Right that I have to have stored somewhere.

24:38
Yoga Charya
Where is that stored? Where's my tracking info stored? Right. Like, I could do it and have them stored in like 10 different places or I could just all have it in one centralized place and that makes it easier on my entire team.

24:48
Daniel Scharff
Yoga. You sound like somebody who's been doing this for a very long time. But I guess I'm wondering, like, is it as easy as it sounds for you in the early days? Or like, did you have a background doing ops for CPG before Daniel and your team? Or are you just smart people who figured out how to do this along the way and put together systems that made sense?

25:07
Yoga Charya
Yeah. I actually describe my career path with this very unhealthy dose of naivety. So I was formerly investment banking and management consulting where I was in our private equity group, so primarily working on transactions and then spent a good amount of my time as well. Like 70,030 working post deal. Okay, now you own the asset. What do you do with it? Gross strategy. You go to market some operation stuff. Like my exposure to CPG was substantially larger. Companies doing things like demand planning, supply planning, not too much on like the nuts and bolts of actually how do you get product from point A to point B? I can tell you with confidence I was not ever on the phone with FedEx Freight trying to get a truck delivery driver into a warehouse.

25:50
Yoga Charya
I didn't really know what I was signing up for when I joined Griffin to help build Mezcla as the first person to join the team. And I'm not really sure, looking back on it, how large my risk appetite was in retrospect. You know, things have worked out, but thinking back on it, I'm like, damn, that was a pretty crazy decision to join Grif when we only had like a run rate of a couple. I think it was like 2 or 300k in sales.

26:12
Daniel Scharff
There must have been something about the business, though, that made you feel like this was a good bet to take, given the high opportunity cost for somebody like you.

26:21
Yoga Charya
Yeah, I mean, I think for me it was just, I want to get my hands dirty. I want to build something real. And in cpg, I'm a firm believer that there's like two bell ends of the spectrum. Right. There's people who can really lean with brand, and product is not really that important. It's like just a signal of what's in your hand. And I think the other bell end of that is just you lead with product quality, which beats everybody else out. And that's like, to me, I don't want to say it's easier, but it's an easier nut to crack. Right. If you can have true product LED growth. And from the moment I had my first masculine bar in New York, I was like, okay, like, I think there's something here.

26:54
Yoga Charya
I'm going to help build this with Grif into the next, you know, 100, $200 million brand.

26:58
Daniel Scharff
That's a really cool thing to hear. And honestly, I think not so common that you hear people really leaning into that. Of all the people you've had in this podcast, all the brands that I've talked to, not so many really will just hone in on how product quality is the central growth driver for their brands. That is pretty special to hear. You know, it's funny because people talk a lot about making the switch from some job like that into CVG in the early stage. I'm like, yeah, you will learn to adapt your skill set. You will learn how to actually do things.

27:26
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I mean, it's a different sort of thing that we're talking about, whether you're on the phone with hundreds of millions or billion dollar companies talking about slight shifts in strategy that actually the ramifications of which could be $50 million swings either way, you know, versus spending your day trying to figure out how to get an order delivered, like talking to a truck driver somewhere. So they're like, they're. They're very different things. But I guess what was that overall Learning curve like for you as you started to figure out how to really execute things from an ops perspective and just problem solve? Probably constantly, Yeah.

28:01
Yoga Charya
I mean I think the two biggest pieces of transition for me were like when you're coming from consulting or investment banking, it's very project oriented.

28:09
Daniel Scharff
Right.

28:09
Yoga Charya
Like everything you're doing is on specific work streams and it flows into like the bigger project. Whereas what I found was code switching. When you're at a very early stage, startup is the name of the game. Like one call I could be like talking to investors about why they should be backing Mezcla for a pre seed. That's what it was back four years ago, four and a half years ago I was helping builders with Griffin and then the next call after that it would be with my3PL to make sure that they received the truck. And then the call after that is to place in order for my like blueberry flavoring to get that to my co manufacturer. Right. So all of that I think requires like a healthy dose of meat of being able to adapt very quickly to different contexts.

28:51
Yoga Charya
And that code switching is not something that I had a ton of experience with to be perfectly transparent with you before entering the startup CPG space. And then once I enter that space, it's actually one of my favorite things about it because you know, no two days are really ever the same and there's a certain electricity I think to a building, but B, just like getting things done, which really fires me up. Right. It's not a deck. That's my finished product. My finished product is literally a Mezcla bar. And my goal is to get that into as many bellies as I can across the United States and as many that I can get it outside of the US as I can without having to change my packaging, which I'll have to inevitably do for Canada.

29:30
Yoga Charya
But if I can delay that as much as possible, that I'll consider that a win.

29:34
Daniel Scharff
I love how you talk about it because I come from kind of a corporate background too. I used to be a management consultant and I love what I do now and I loved it when I was running a brand and I love being at Star CPG also I think because of what you're talking about, although I don't know if I could ever have framed it that way of just like, yeah, I mean I get to run this fun podcast with you gentlemen and then after this I'm going to go and talk to my managing director about some other thing that we're launching and then I'm going to spend time with the social media team and figure out what cool stuff we're gonna like. Just all of these really different aspects of the business that you just are like immersed into.

30:09
Daniel Scharff
Like you're changing the channel on a TV and you're like, all right, I'm all in it for this one. Okay, now I'm all in it on something else. And it's so much fun and you're like, just doing so much and. Yeah. So, Sebastiaan, for you guys, like, do you feel like that is still true at the stage where brands come to you and are properly implementing kind of growth systems, Are you really trying to get them to the point where they actually are just like, things are really consistent, or do you feel like they are still code switching and like firefighting and problem solving and doing a lot of creative stuff along the way?

30:41
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
It depends a lot. I spend too much time in warehouses. I think there's very few folks like team at Mask. I think that came to us reasonably early, before introducing a lot of complexity in the business, before kind of moving into, I think it was Target and Costco and sort of seeing how the patchwork of airtables is just going to multiply massively and get really complicated. I think a lot of the folks we still speak to who are getting their first system record in place have essentially stretched the elastic as far as they could and have realized that the operational pain is just costing them way more than a solution would.

31:15
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
And they have spent a lot of time coming to terms with that decision and with the implication of, hey, I'm going to have to spend such a long time implementing something and obviously it's up to us to kind of make it clear that it doesn't have to take a long time and that it can adjust to how you work. And a lot of fast growing brands, they reach a pain point, they need to go and fix it. It's been an expensive mistake, right? A major retailer turns around and says, hey, there's a consistent otif issue here and you guys got to address it or you lose a large amount of inventory.

31:45
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
What we're also seeing is larger brands coming in are starting to realize that the speed at which folks like Mezcla can move on developing product scaling, how you quickly get into a lot of bellies, frequently building out that brand like they're looking at that and they realize that they need to start moving at a higher speed as well. I think that's what we're also starting to see come in is larger folks who want to move off legacy systems they're on because they need to increase their operational clock speed materially in order to keep competing and win. And I think that's probably what you're going to see more and more of in the next couple of years and what we're expecting to see more of because the world's become a little bit less of a predictable place than it used to be.

32:24
Daniel Scharff
That makes sense. I think it's tough for a lot of people, including myself, to really just change how we do things and adapt to all of the new systems and capabilities that are out there. By the way, I'm totally happy to admit that, like I don't love AI and please AI don't come after me for saying that because now you know that I've said it. So I welcome the AI overlords for the record. But like I like the old way of doing things. I felt like I was really good at that. Like I type fast, you know, now I'm just switching to voice to text and all that is out the window. And like I spent time learning other languages. Now it doesn't matter because you have live translation through your AirPods and everything.

32:59
Daniel Scharff
So I like the old world where I felt like I had put an effort and had gotten good at things, but now you just have to adapt to the new. So yoga, speaking of adapting to the new, can you just talk a little bit more about like from a systems perspective? And you guys, as you scaled your ops, what are the things that were really key for you to systematize that ended up helping you be who you want to be, which is just have that really high product quality and consistency and simplicity of your overall supply chain.

33:29
Yoga Charya
Yeah, and it's a great question. I will say all the things that you're talking about on the AI front will work when you have connectivity. And when I do some of these co main visits they are oftentimes in pretty remote and rural areas where the connectivity leads something to be desired. I'll leave it there. I've been very much on the road the last couple of weeks evaluating comands across North America really not just even in the United States, but I think when it comes to like how and why we are adding these systems and processes. Dan, which I guess is like really your question like what am I trying to solve for here? Is like what is the zone of genius for where Mezcla can really be the best? Right. That's how I think about things.

34:08
Yoga Charya
And if I'm spending so much of my team's Time on pure play operations or logistics. Right. In my view, I don't think we're really doing a great job because if I have too many resources tied up into operations, what that tells me is I'm a very operationally intensive business and I can't focus as much on building a brand and building the best possible product that I can. And I got some of the best advice ever, actually when I was interviewing a candidate about three and a half years ago, operations role, he was much more senior, but his perspective was. And he had spent time at Cliff, scaled them up until about 3,400 million in sales. And then he moved to Sieta. And his advice was simplicity scales. And I thought it was one of the most pithy lines in operations that I've ever heard.

34:56
Yoga Charya
And I have taken that to heart and tried to simplify every aspect of our operations value chain from end to end. So think about it. From when I first joined Griffin, we had two different warehouses. Like somebody would tell you, in a theoretical sense, it makes sense. Have one on the east coast, one on the west coast. You probably don't have a ton of business in the middle and you can service that from one or the other. But this helps you, like maintain lower freight costs on the east coast and the west coast. Now if you're an emerging brand, that is without question, maybe some questions 98% of the time, I'm willing to bet the worst choice that you can make because you end up having, if you have the right product, you have it in the wrong place.

35:32
Yoga Charya
And now you're shipping product to California from Georgia and you're like, what am I doing here? Right. So like that was one of the first things that we did within a year was we consolidated into one 3 PL that's based in the Midwest, in Chicagoland. And sure, do I take a little bit of a hit. Yeah. But I know that I have the right product in the right place. I don't have to add a second layer into my demand planning. Right. And my supply planning. And when I think about my operations, do I have a sea of analysts now on my team? One person whose only job it is basically maintaining my ERP. No, I have one person where the ERP is really designed for nothing else but to make them 10x better at their job. Right.

36:10
Yoga Charya
Like that is what I'm looking for in every aspect of my value chain is I want to assemble a team of tier one operators and then how do I give those operators the best tools for them to do their job? So Justin, for example, Is a tier one operator absolutely lethal on our team. How can I make Justin as good as he can possibly be on our team? Let's give him a source of truth. Let's give him a Doss. Let's automate some of the sample process that was. He was spending five to ten hours a week and overseeing a member of our team, Jang, who's spending about 10 hours a week on it. How do we make that two hours a week? Right. How do we make it three hours a week?

36:45
Yoga Charya
How do we collapse that window of time that we're spending on things that are not fundamentally driving the business forward? I want our team to be focused on making the best possible product and getting that product out to as many people as we can and getting as many people as we can to buy that product. And if I'm not kind of focusing my people to spend their time on those three things, I think that is just not good ROI of my team's time and their investment dollars.

37:12
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
And Daniel, like, I also just want to echo this. I can't stress this enough across all of our customers. When your business grows, it's going to get more complex. It inevitably is. It's like a network of nodes and you add more warehouses or more EDI partners like Costco, Target, whatever, more formulations and like, this stuff just explodes in complexity to some degree. Can avoid. You can design around a little bit. But the enormous trick is, I think exactly what Yoga just said is, like, how do you make sure that your systems, but also like the processes, the people, the way you do stuff means that you can keep it as simple as possible.

37:46
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Like, how do you follow up a bunch of that complexity in a way that a human can just apply a bunch of great judgment on it and like judgment and tastes in a really repeatable way. It's not about adding a bunch of complexity for the sake of it. Like, there's no glory in that suffering whatsoever. I think that's what a lot of brands really suffer with this. It gets really complicated. And then a bunch of people sort of have the feeling that's like a mark, like, hallmark of success. The hallmark of success is how well do you manage that? How fast can you keep growing, essentially by empowering your people? We see this over and over again.

38:17
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Like, some of the best teams we work with, including Mezcla, have just have like this innate skill to go and see that complexity and go, like, how do we actually make that simpler? How do we go and automate some of these things? How do we, like Reduce the complex area to a place where it's like taste and judgment and experience and like really important calls that people make. Not trying to get a view across three warehouses of how much inventory you actually have.

38:37
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, it's pretty interesting to think about because it's like that we're talking about simplicity in a few different senses. One is in the actual ops model, like okay, we have one warehouse that's simpler. We have a turnkey comand that's simpler, but then also like simplicity and focus when it comes to a system of record. Then also that just kind of empowers the one person. So you're not having like five different people. I mean I've worked at CPG companies that were doing a lot less revenue that Mezcla is doing and had probably five times as many people touching sales ops and finance around this. Just everyone having their hand on the wall at the same time. So it seems like a pretty clean way to grow that way.

39:20
Daniel Scharff
So that when you do invariably still end up firefighting and solving problems, it's like the actual problems that come up, not like information based problems.

39:30
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
And like at least what we've seen, and I think this is the experience you guys also have at MassCloud with us and also with other systems, is a way to make sure that complexity is simplified is to go and adjust the software around what you're doing and not the other way around. As soon as you're in a setup where you need to do things in a certain way because a tool that you brought on board to help you do it simpler requires you to do like this enormous workaround when there's like a spreadsheet around the thing to go and do some work that somebody needs to go and put work in. Like that's not a good sign. That is not a good sign.

40:00
Yoga Charya
You are not nimble. I mean I won't name the brand, but Mazers was telling us about a brand that all of us like would definitely recognize and know post acquisition they had to run their entire E commerce business through a reseller because their accounting service, the ERP of the requirer was not structured to collect sales tax on E Commerce. So if they had to change an entire distribution channel strategy for a brand because the ERP was not capable of doing sales tax like that to me is 101 setup for failure.

40:33
Daniel Scharff
So Yoga, because you guys, I think when you move to Doss, what is it actually like to implement something like that? Because you guys are such a lean team, how did you decide like, okay, now is the time that we want to do it. What was the actual implementation like? I've been also part of like privy to one of those implementations for a different ERP that ended up being a fricking nightmare. And I don't believe that actually happens with Doss. So what was the actual like process and timeline like for you guys to then go from the airtable, I think over to using Doss a hundred percent.

41:09
Yoga Charya
I would classify that like within a couple of dimensions. Right. So first and foremost Justin, 100% quarterback to everything within the Mezcla side of the actual like implementation end to end. Sebastiaan, you may disagree, but I would say like Dawson is probably earlier in its journey as well when were first implementing, I would say a lot of what were doing was a touch more bespoke around what our needs and requirements were because like a lot of the functionality was also being co built as like with maskla partially as a design partner. And that I think made the implementation process easier because I didn't have to pay $150,000 for like a NetSuite consultant to do that with me. And I would say the last piece of that too is while Doss sells an erp. It's funny that you introduced it as an erp, Sebastiaan.

41:49
Yoga Charya
I thought you guys were all in the ARP positioning. But we have the entire suite of options that they offer. But we initially just implemented the order management system, their oms, and then added their tms, their transportation management system. And now we'll probably within the next few months start implementing their IMs, their inventory management system. So to me, like you can go ahead and try and do it all at once. I think that my perspective is you typically learn things after implementing one thing. Best practices that you can then apply moving forward.

42:23
Yoga Charya
And we've taken best practices that we've learned from our LMS implementation and things that are working with Doss, things that we want to enhance with Doss that will carry forward to our IMS implementation and then beyond IMs as Doss starts to expand, they just raise their most recent round and I'm sure they're going to add more functionality, more bells whistles like we'll start to add those on incrementally over time.

42:43
Daniel Scharff
Okay. And just for everyone who is wondering about that inside joke, erp, which is enterprise resource planning software and then arp, which is adaptive resource planning, which is what Doss is all about, is adaptive. But also now that they just really play very strongly against the big boys. I think also sometimes use terminology just to make sure everyone knows what we're all talking about. So, Sebastiaan, as we kind of wrap things up here, I wonder, can you just give some general advice for brands then? Like, yeah, kind of Yoga was just talking about for them. Sometimes it made sense to stage some of the stuff that they were doing, but they were also at a pretty good clip when they were doing the implementation as well.

43:22
Daniel Scharff
What do you typically recommend for brands about when to do it, how to do it, staging it, all of that.

43:28
Yoga Charya
Yeah.

43:28
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
And I think there's probably. There's a handful of dimensions to this. Right. And the first one is one Yoga just talked about. Now, is anything you're going to go and implement in your business, it's actually helpful if you don't have to think about this as a big bang, but you can actually think about this as like peeling away layers of the onion and sometimes keeping some of your tooling in place so you don't have to go and like, change your accounting system and your inventory system and your procurement system and the whole nine yards in one go. It's actually quite helpful if you can take out an area of the business or a couple that are really closely linked and go and adjust them specifically to how you work today.

44:00
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Because otherwise you end up in a situation where you have to take the whole thing and then go and adjust yourself the whole thing. Or like spend a ton of money trying to adjust the whole thing entirely around. That's probably the first thing. I think the second thing that we really see, and I've worked in a space for a very long time, disciplined operators are going to think about building some of the road before they drive on it. Not all of it, not all the way to the destination, but it's. You don't want to go into wholesale and then be told you need to adjust to these systems and then scramble to manufacture the inventory and get it over and then build systems to track it and not run out on your core products.

44:33
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
You kind of want to think ahead a little bit of some of these things because very often for like, the most exciting opportunities, you really only get one or two shots on goal. And you want those shots on goal that matter and you want your team to be able to repeat the stuff that they do. I think a third thing here probably, and this is mostly from the angle of building dolls, I think the standard to which you hold any partner with which you build out a business and a brand needs to be as high as you hold yourself to, like, you can speak to anyone that's built a brand and they'll tell you how they went and picked, the folks they manufacture with, the designs, the intricate little details about how it's positioned. You should not go and sacrifice on those standards.

45:09
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
As you're growing, you should be enforcing and amplifying those standards. And I think part of that is your choice of tech. Part of that is who you hire. But I kind of mean what I said earlier. I think when you build something successful in the consumer space, you've created a little bit of magic, and you're trying to find ways to kind of put that further out. And lowering your standards is a very clear way to break that, especially if you've built a great product. That's how people buy what you have, and you build a great brand. You don't want to go out and dilute that. So I think that's the biggest red thread beyond anything that we do is we'll tell you about implementing early, we'll tell you about adjusting things to your business, we'll tell you about finding the right partners.

45:43
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
But I think like any other major business decision you invest in, it's about finding where your standard is and like, enforcing that rigorously.

45:50
Daniel Scharff
Words to live by. Okay, I love it. Yoga. Just to wrap up here, can you remind everybody where we can all find Mezcla and how to support you?

45:57
Yoga Charya
Thanks, Dan. Yep. You can find us online at Amazon or in stores at Target, Whole Foods Sprouts, and then a number of Albertsons and Sacred Weight divisions across the nation and recently launched in a couple of Costco regions. So if you're in the Southeast, in the Northeast, or in business centers, you should be able to find Mespa there.

46:16
Daniel Scharff
All right, you guys are busy. Okay, Sebastiaan, best way for people to follow along with you guys.

46:21
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Doss.com you can see phenomenal demos and details on what we do, and then we're quite active on socials.

46:27
Daniel Scharff
All right, thank you, Doss, so much for your support of the community. We love getting to do this kind of fun stuff with you, and I just really enjoyed this because Mezcla is. We're just such fans of you guys and all the incredible success that you have had. And what a fun time to actually just get to sit and talk about it a little bit and I guess peel back the onion on this success that is Mezcla and how you guys actually achieved it and where you guys are going. And it just, wow, what an incredible story and brand to get to follow along with. So congrats to you guys and looking forward to getting some more Mezcla at Cinderella down the street from me. Oh, yeah. Thanks, everybody.

47:01
Sebastiaan Debrouwe
Thank you.

47:04
Daniel Scharff
Well, my friends, we've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, the top globally ranked podcast in cpg. As you may know, we're not just a podcast. We're a community of brands and experts. And you should join. You can sign up @startupcpg.com you'll then get an invite to our online Slack community. You're going to hear about amazing events near you, all of our special opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands and more. It's a free community. So what are you waiting for? I will see you there. Or on our next episode. Bye. Bye.