Ben Wunderman

Something wild is happening in food distribution right now. A handful of distributors have decided to become AI-first companies. Not "we added a chatbot." Not "we're piloting something." All in. Rewiring how they operate, sell, buy, and serve. In a business where 2% margins are a win, AI isn't another software wave. It's a step change. Nothing before it — not ERP, not e-commerce, not BI — has offered this kind of compounding leverage on a P&L this tight. The distributors racing right now are going to be very hard to catch. And the gap is widening every quarter. If you're a distributor feeling behind, take a breath. Don't panic-sign with the first vendor in your inbox. Find a partner who actually knows distribution — the margin math, the slotting, the buyer dynamics, the broker relationships, the DSR reality — and knows AI just as deeply. Not people parachuting in from outside who see your industry as a slide in a fund deck or think they have earned the right with fancy degrees. Look for the missionaries. The ones who'd be in this industry whether AI existed or not. To the distributors already racing: we're lucky to ride alongside you. We're stewards of this moment, not the story. It's going to be a hell of a decade. 📈

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One common mistake I see with emerging CPG founders is that they often refer to their product margin as their gross margin. But remember: a product that costs $15 to manufacture in China is not the same as a product that costs $15 to manufacture in the U.S. 📦 🚢 Freight, tariffs, packaging, and shipping costs all matter. A lightweight sheet mask and a heavy glass candle might have similar product costs, but dramatically different gross margins once you factor in fully landed costs. And even then, the “gross margin is still just the tip of the iceberg.” 🧊 All CPG founders should be prepared to speak to their gross margin and understand their unit economics on a first call. 📞 👉 Pro tip for founders who are fundraising: if you move further through diligence, investors are usually digging much deeper — into contribution margins by channel/retailer and profitability by SKU. That means you should also know your velocity, how it fares relative to category benchmarks, your trade spend, and the true costs associated with co-op marketing, chargebacks, testers, returns, and fulfillment. The best operators I know also look at the business holistically. They understand how DTC, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and wholesale can work together strategically — using some channels for discovery and awareness and others for scale. 🔄 It’s about drilling down into the details, but also zooming out and understanding how the entire ecosystem works together to drive durable, profitable growth. 🔍 📈 Grateful to be part of the conversation alongside Lane Barrocas and Benjamin Lord. Thanks to Erica La Sala and Beauty Independent for a fun convo and including me in this piece on the real economics of beauty retail. And also to Andrew Ross, whose insights and perspective constantly sharpen my own thinking. Link in comments below.👇

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Cape Fear Ventures backed Ohanafy when they were serving small regional breweries. 30 months later, craft beer giant Sierra Nevada chose them for a strategic national program. 4 payoffs from dominating one underserved industry instead of chasing broad SaaS markets: #1: You build workflows competitors can't copy Ohanafy didn't build a CRM with beverage "features." They built beverage-native infrastructure: • Distributor management • Supply chain automation • Compliance tracking baked in That cannot be bolted on. Single-focus gives you pattern recognition horizontal players never develop. #2: Network effects compound faster in tight communities • Brewers talk to other brewers • Distributors compare notes at trade shows • One enterprise win creates a reference cascade When an industry leader chooses your platform, every mid-sized brewer paying attention asks: "Why aren't we using that?" Category creators own the conversation in industries where everyone knows everyone. #3: You become the category, not just another vendor Ohanafy is creating a future where "we need better software" defaults to: “We need Ohanafy." That's what happens when you own the workflows, data models, and integrations for a single vertical. Competitors explain why they're different. Category creators define what "different" means. #4: Enterprise deals validate the entire category Sierra Nevada didn't buy back office software. They chose Ohanafy for a business-critical national program. That's the difference between "we use this" and "we bet our wholesaler relationships on this." Enterprise validation at that level resets perception of what's possible and accelerates every deal in the pipeline. The boring niche isn't boring when you own it. That's what single-focus deliver: Advantages built year after year that multi-industry generalists can't replicate by adding a feature. Choose your niche. Dominate it. Everything else follows. (Cape Fear Ventures is an investor in Ohanafy and I am the board chairman)

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You can have customers saying nice things and still not have product market fit. Andy Greenfield, partner at TIA Ventures, spent decades doing qualitative research for major CPG brands. He pioneered a methodology to separate polite responses from visceral pain. Getting different audiences together in panels to understand if products were solving real problems. When they'd do these panels, they'd try to get to one specific question: "If this product were taken away tomorrow, would your life be okay or couldn't you live without it?" That's a very different question than "do you like this product?" Jesse Caesar from First Round Capital explains the difference: "If you want to know what your target is doing or how much, go for quantitative research. But if you want to know why they're doing it, or why they believe what they believe, qualitative research gets you that depth of perspective." Most founders confuse customers being polite with customers who actually care. It’s much easier to do that vs facing hard truths sometimes. You ask someone about your product and they'll say "Yeah, this is super useful." But when you dig deeper with the right questions, you realize they don't actually care that much. I can’t overstate the value of qualitative user research whether investing or building a product myself. Talking to 10 customers with very specific questions to gauge how important the problem really is.  It’s also very helpful to cross reference this with quantitative metrics with tools like PostHog or Mixpanel. “Trust but verify”. The real magic is when you do both of these things in concert. For example, a client you interview may say “I really love using your feature that lets me do XYZ” and they may be very specific about the value it delivers…so it may seem like a totally credible piece of feedback, but then when you look in PostHog or any user analytics platform, you see that they’ve only used the feature once. So this begs the question “if you find feature XYZ so valuable, why have you only used it once in the past month?”  This gap is often the difference between a company that scales and one that plateaus.

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Stumbled across Dragonfruit Ventures from Toronto this week. A VC fund out of the US that calls itself the Gen Z VC. But they don't just say it. They run scripted, unhinged content on Instagram. 13K followers. For a fund- that's insane. Most VC funds post portfolio announcements and "proud to back" updates that nobody reads. Dragonfruit figured out something simpler. Founders don't read fund websites. They scroll Instagram. So that's where Dragonfruit lives. And the content brings founders in before they even start fundraising. By the time a founder reaches out- they already trust the fund. The deal flow problem is solved before it starts. But the smarter part is what they built after. Dragonfruit Labs- a business arm that helps portfolio founders build content engines. Not advice. Actual production. Filming. Editing. Distribution. They don't say distribution is a moat. They build it for you. In India- Masters' Union is experimenting. All In Capital is building in public. A few others are starting to move. But nobody has built the full stack. The content presence, the community, the production arm that actually helps founders grow after the cheque is written. The fund that builds that in India won't just win deals. They'll see deals nobody else sees. Matt Shoss Christian I. Pratham Mittal Aditya Singh

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The deeper I get into food, the more I realize how much of the picture we're missing. If you look at a Nutrition Facts Panel, there are only about a dozen or so discrete data points cherrypicked for the back of the label. In reality, food is so complex and multidimensional, that there are thousands of compounds and vitamins with no name, yet in aggregate, are incredibly important for health. One study that is particularly insightful is from Dr. Stephan Van Vliet out of Utah State. He analyzed 190 compounds in plant based patties and compared them against grass fed beef patties. Despite having similar macros, they are completely different substances to the tune of 90%. See the attached image for a scatterplot with plant-based vs. grass-fed beef. The Nutrition Facts Panel, while better than nothing, is a decades-old way to look at product composition. We're starting to see things change, with AB 899 and the baby food industry mandating test results to be publicly visible. More transparency is coming—whether through smarter labels, QR-code data layers, or public databases. I’m excited for that future. The more we can actually see what’s in our food, the better the choices we can make.

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Sequifi just closed a $6.7M seed round led by Cervin Ventures, with Frazier Group and Tokyo Black stepping in. For a startup founded in 2022 out of Roshan Kumar's pest control and solar sales days, this isn't just funding, it's proof that the mess inside #homeservices needed a system built for reality. Late #paychecks, confusing #commissions, and 45% annual turnover have been treated as "cost of doing business." Sequifi built the fix, and capital markets just co-signed. Roshan Kumar, now Co-Founder and CEO, lived the problem before solving it. As a University of Wyoming sophomore, he generated serious revenue on the doors and saw the same cycle: pay late, they leave; confuse comp, churn spikes. He teamed with Co-Founder/COO Adam Duerschmidt, another Wyoming alum with ops chops, to build the platform they wished existed. Then came CTO Gary Dalal, a 20-year software veteran with a Master’s from Wayne State University, who engineered the infrastructure. This isn't HR software, it’s the first real-time payroll and forecasting engine custom-built for trades. Sequifi doesn’t nibble at inefficiencies, it swallows them. #Samedaypayroll means workers get paid the day the job closes. #Commissionautomation untangles solar leases, pest upsells, and complex comp. #Onboarding once took days, now 60 secs. AI agents recruit and boost sales. Gamification keeps teams engaged. Dashboards surface comp and #productivity trends in real time. One pest control company cut payroll time 75%. Aveyo added same-day pay and saw retention climb 50%. Those aren’t small gains, they’re lifelines. The backdrop makes this sharper. Home services is projected to hit $156B by 2030, while trades face a shortfall of 2.1M workers. Independent contractors number 72.7M, most in roles that can’t be outsourced. Retention is survival. Sequifi’s model turns comp into trust, not tension. Investors backing the round know the terrain. Cervin led. Frazier Group, a Utah fund with IPOs and exits, reinforced local strength. Tokyo Black, a San Francisco firm with SaaS/AI focus, added weight. Together, they’re fueling Sequifi’s next phase: scaling #engineering, deepening integrations, and expanding service verticals, all while maintaining zero churn and riding word-of-mouth growth most founders dream of. This may be the first institutional round, but the foundation is laid. Sequifi proved retention, revenue, and demand before raising a dollar. Now capital accelerates a platform built with ruthless precision: sequencing finance where timing decides whether companies thrive or collapse. In home services, trust equals pay, and Sequifi just made trust real-time. #Startups #StartupFunding #EarlyStage #VentureCapital #SeedRound #AI #AIAgents #Automation #HR #HRTech #Payroll #PayrollTech #Enterprise #EnterpriseTech #EnterpriseAI #SaaS #Infrastructure #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #Hiring #TechHiring If software engineering peace of mind is what you crave, Vention is your zen.

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“No Bees, No Breakfast” Do you know that pollinators power 1 in 3 bites we eat and up to US $577 B in annual crop value, making their survival mission critical for the whole food supply chain? Since I first jumped into the tech-meets-sustainability space three years ago, I’ve been obsessed with one idea: connect the dots between value creation, value protection, and climate action. Yesterday, I saw another great real example in a chat with a C-suite leader from a global enterprise. “...Scope 3 is the most reliable and fastest way to run a full body scan of our business,” he told me. “In this economy it built us a cost-saving business case—far beyond the usual green chatter.” Why Scope 3 is a CFO’s secret weapon? 1) It’s massive: Supply-chain emissions average 11–26× bigger than a firm’s own fuel and power, adding up to roughly 75 % of the total footprint—yet only 15 % of companies have set a Scope 3 target. (US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and CDP) 2) It’s money: Suppliers already captured US $13.6 billion in hard savings and cut 43 Mt CO₂e last year, with another US $165 billion in benefits still on the table. (CDP) It’s opportunity. Corporates now size US $5 trillion in new low-carbon revenue streams. 3) It’s protection: Ignoring climate risks could add US $120 billion in extra supply-chain costs by 2026 and slice 7 % off earnings by 2035. Turning tonnes into dollars A) Value creation: Scope 3 data flags where B2B and B2C crave lower carbon products. Teams that read those signals first are launching offerings that win share and open new markets. B) Cost savings: Emission hotspots often are cost hotspots—think energy hungry processes, last minute air-freight “fire drills,” and waste loops. Fix them and you’re greener and leaner. C) Value protection: Deep visibility into Tier-2 (and beyond) suppliers exposes climate-driven choke points before they explode into stock-outs and price spikes. That’s resilience in action. If trade and inflation is a concern stop viewing Scope 3 as a reporting chore; treat it like a decision grade financial and operational dataset that reveals where money leaks, where margins hide, and where tomorrow’s growth is born. I would love to hear more stories about connecting the dots of scope 3 with efficiency and value.

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Is this the year that you join a CPG / DTC start-up? Here's my best advice to landing the right role: 1. Get yourself to a city where it’s happening if you can. Early hires are often referrals. If you’re not already in the industry you want to be in, proximity matters. Be where people from your dream companies already are. 2. Find the Slack groups. Early-stage roles are rarely posted on job boards. Slack groups are the new job boards. That’s where the real conversations (and opportunities) appear first. 3. Talk to your friends in VC. Once a start-up has received some funding, they'll utilize their investor network to hire great people. Let them know you are looking and they can keep an eye out. 4. Reach out before there’s an open role. Some of the best startup hires happen because someone proactive showed interest at the right time. A thoughtful note at an early-stage company beats a cold application every time. 5. Show, don’t tell. Bring ideas. Mock up a slide, rewrite a product page, write out a partnership plan. Show how you think and what you'd bring to the role, not just what you’ve done. Early-stage roles rarely come from applying on LI. They come from being in the right rooms, with the right people, at the right moment. If you've been at an early-stage company, what would you add? #startups #cpg

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"We went from one farmer climbing coconut trees to 21,000 certified organic producers." I met Benjamin Ripple at #ExpoWest in LA last week, and that line caught me. Ben is the founder of Big Tree Farms Inc., a company he started in Indonesia in 2003, after years of development work in the region. The original idea was a conviction: that farmers should be able to choose regenerative, organic practices and earn better livelihoods for it, not worse. Two decades later, Big Tree Farms works with 21,000+ producers. All certified organic. All fair trade. About half now carry regenerative organic certification: one of the most rigorous standards in agriculture. But what really stuck with me was where Ben's head is at now. Every one of their farmers works in agroforestry: permanent food forests that are active carbon sinks. And Ben is quietly working on how to unlock the carbon market for these small-scale producers as a genuine livelihood multiplier for farming communities that have already done the hard work. The challenge is doing it at scale, with complexity that would humble most operators. This is the kind of supply chain story that rarely gets told, because it happens three layers deep, far from the shelf where the coconut sugar sits. Heizen is building AI systems for exactly this kind of operational complexity: multi-node supplier networks, certification tracking, carbon data, distribution coordination. The brands getting this right deserve infrastructure that keeps up with their ambition. Find Big Tree Farms at Whole Foods, Sprouts, HEB, or Publix. And watch for their Bali Barbecue Elevated Street Food Sauce, just won the Nextie Award for Best New Condiment. 🏆 Thanks for the conversation, Benjamin Ripple. Rooting for you and the 21,000 farmers behind the brand. --- Expo West 2026 had 3,000+ brands on the floor. Aman Arora, Om Unadkat and I spent three days pulling aside the founders worth knowing, on camera, unscripted. This is the first one, watch out for more. #ExpoWest2026 #CPG #RegenerativeAgriculture #SupplyChain #FounderStory #BigTreeFarms #Heizen

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Founder Relationships Key to Business Success, Not Capital. Lots of inbound messages on the The New York Times quote this morning, and I want to address in one shot here. I've been waiting for this to come up in the media, we will see more of this, and I appreciate the thoughtful reporting by Ashley Southall on a complicated issue facing founders in New York’s emerging cannabis industry. Stories like this are hard to capture in a single article, but the piece does a good job highlighting a reality most founders face. After rapidly scaling a legacy operation, as well as companies across both tech startups and brick-and-mortar businesses, one lesson keeps repeating: people think the hardest part of starting a company is capital. It’s not. The hardest part is long-term relationships. This has been the most challenging part throughout my career. Early in a company’s life, someone will help you get started — introductions, rare skills, advice, capital, credibility. Sometimes it’s true: you couldn’t have done it without them. Naturally, they expect to be compensated. But time changes perspectives and leverage. The business grows. Roles evolve. And what is considered “fair” becomes incredibly difficult to define. My heart goes out to Leeann Mata, Housing Works — and really to all founders navigating situations like this. At Redemptive Studios, where we help founders build and scale companies, we often end up helping teams navigate what we jokingly call *“cofounder therapy.”* Difficult conversations about equity, expectations, and control that many founders avoid until it’s too late. Avoiding the conversation is the worst thing you can do. If you’re about to sign an agreement and aren’t sure it’s right — or you’re struggling with cofounder dynamics — feel free to reach out before doing something irreversible that could damage your company. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a company isn’t writing more code or raising more money — it’s properly managing the relationship between the people building it. https://lnkd.in/eUngSF8W

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McDonald’s didn’t scale by hiring better cashiers. Toyota didn’t scale by finding better mechanics. Starbucks didn’t scale by chasing better baristas. Curaleaf didn’t scale by relying on one superstar grower. They scaled by building systems. Cannabis still has a hero problem. If your best harvest depends on your best grower being in the room, you don’t have scale. You have fragility. Let me be clear: Systemizing cultivation does not replace great growers. It captures them. It turns their instincts into playbooks. Their experience into data. Their decisions into repeatable outcomes. The goal is simple: - Capture genius - Reduce variance - Protect margins - Scale quality Your best grower should be designing the blueprint. Not firefighting the same issues every cycle. The operators who win the next five years won’t eliminate craft. They’ll institutionalize it. What part of your operation still depends on heroics?

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Everyone’s chasing the next unicorn exit in CPG. Think rhode skin. Medik8. poppi. Billion-dollar outcomes and massive multiples. But let’s be real: It wasn’t just the product. It wasn't the celebrity alone. It was the operators they had in the seat. According to McKinsey & Company, 70% of value creation post-acquisition comes down to leadership execution. ⚒️ 💸 Korn Ferry reports that the average cost of a bad executive hire exceeds $1.5M. And Deloitte found that companies with high-performing leadership teams are 2.4x more likely to hit their long-term growth targets. 🔥 Translation? The biggest exits aren’t led by safe hires. They’re led by transformational ones. We don’t chase resumes. We chase the people who: – Scale topline and EBITDA – Architect a differentiated brand and org – Build and foster cultures of inclusivity + innovation – Make the exit look inevitable If you’re building something real in consumer and aiming for velocity, not vanity, then make sure you’ve got someone in the seat who’s done more than “grow.” Get the one who delivers. #executivesearch #cpg #consumerbrands #privateequity #venturecapital #beauty #wellness #scaling #exitstrategy #nextunicorn #leadershipmatters

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One of the main reasons a lot of my startups end-up hiring the wrong executives is that they have all the *relevant experience* but that they can't do the *one thing* actually required to be a high-performing exec in a team of under 100 people: Context switch. Many executives can perform very well when they are essentially processing a "gant chart" working largely in focus on a single work area. But moving at the speed required for success is now being able to advance multiple work streams in the same day or week. That's where a lot of executives quickly get overwhelmed and then, just like LLMs, their task-specific performance starts degrading in efficacy really quickly. Testing for context shifting capabilities is EVERYTHING in an exec under 100 employees.

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It's always great to see more retailers go live on Vroom Delivery's USDA-Certified Online SNAP/EBT program! Cliff's Local Market and Ayers Oil Co are now both offering essential items to their customers online for purchase utilizing their SNAP benefits. While many c-stores offer these benefits in-store, very few are able to offer it online. We're proud to be able to help these retailers better serve their local communities!

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Welcome to the Knowledge Age We are entering a new economic era. The industrial age was built around physical assets and centralized systems. The emerging knowledge age is increasingly driven by AI, decentralized coordination, autonomous systems, and programmable trust. In this environment, intellectual property can no longer remain a static legal construct managed through fragmented processes. As AI accelerates the creation and exchange of knowledge, the ability to verify provenance, authenticate contribution, and manage intangible assets at scale becomes critical infrastructure. This is especially relevant in agrifood, one of the world’s most fragmented and globally interconnected industries. The Food Chainers, part of Eatable Adventures Raíces Acceleration Program and Accelera Ventures portfolio company, is tackling this challenge by building systems designed for trusted management of intellectual property and intangible value across decentralized ecosystems. A highly relevant perspective on where the future of the knowledge economy is heading. #foodtech #agritech #innovation

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Sluggers Hit x Seed Talent training just landed on the platform & Arizona budtenders are going wild! In late February, Sluggers Hit sent products to market exclusively in Curaleaf locations across the Valley. 🌄 The California-based company is focused on expanding their Arizona product line with support from single-source, local producer Flow Arizona, and Curaleaf, the company’s exclusive retail debut partner! The brand hosted their AZ launch last month, welcoming budtenders, staff & friends to celebrate. ---> Collabs like this sustain the industry by fostering creativity, inclusion & interconnected growth systems. "Josh Schmidt, Sluggers Hit Vice President, notes the solventless ice hash for Sluggers’ distinction from the saturated pre-roll market. While other pre-rolls consist of flower or trim, mixed with terpenes and THC diamonds, the hash in Sluggers pre-rolls creates an incense-like smoothness." - via Phoenix New Times - Read On Here: https://lnkd.in/gKC6-qQx < Pick Up Sluggers Today! > Curaleaf Nirvana Center Dispensaries Zen Leaf Dispensaries The Flower Shop Ponderosa Dispensary Sol Flower Health 4 Life Lunchbox ℍ𝕒𝕧𝕖 𝕪𝕠𝕦 𝕥𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕕 𝕊𝕝𝕦𝕘𝕘𝕖𝕣𝕤? . . . #cannabisindustry #sluggershit #flowarizona #collaborationscommunity #brandtraining #seedtalent

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The biggest mistake pet stores make when scaling beyond two locations is cloning the founder instead of building systems. I've seen three local pet stores reach their third location, only to collapse within 18 months. Here's what happened: Store 1: The owner tried to "be everywhere" - Burned out in six months - Inventory chaos across locations - Staff making different promises to the same customers Store 2: Hired a "mini-me" manager - Worked until that person quit - Took all the tribal knowledge with them - Back to square one Store 3: Built playbooks before breaking ground - Standard intake for new pets - Unified POS and inventory system - Weekly sync calls, not daily fire drills - Still operating four locations today The pattern? Stores 1 and 2 scaled people, while Store 3 scaled process. Your expertise needs to live in documents, not just in your head. Before signing that third lease, consider: - Can a new hire onboard a customer without calling you? - Do you have written protocols for your top 10 support questions? - Can any location see real-time stock levels across all stores? If the answer is no, you're not ready to scale—you're ready to suffer. The good news is that you can build these systems in 30 days with a Google Doc and a camera phone. I did it for my D2C brand, and you can do it for your retail chain. What's one process you wish you'd documented before scaling? Drop it below—I'll share my template.

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