Working at Spoiler Alert: Helping Perishable CPG Brands Manage Excess and Slow-moving Inventory

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Ricky, thanks so much for joining us.

Ricky Ashenfelter, Spoiler Alert  

Thanks for having me, Keith.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

I'm excited to talk to you because Spoiler Alert is one of these companies, that obviously is doing something incredibly useful for the industry that you guys service, but it has a very deep mission to it too. And that's the power of the waste-free economy. So what does that mean? What does Spoiler Alert do?

Ricky Ashenfelter, Spoiler Alert  

At our simplest, we are a b2b Waste prevention software that helps major food brands better manage excess and short-dated inventory. And we do that through a sales and supply chain platform that provides major food manufacturers with the workflows, the pricing intelligence, and the networking tools that they need to effectively discount this excess inventory, that they're not able to sell through their normal everyday customer channels. So you can think of it a bit like a private b2b eBay with two key distinctions. The first is that we work exclusively with perishable CPG product that has a very real shelf life, whether that's days, weeks, or months till expiration. The second key distinction is that our suppliers are operating private marketplaces, not open ones, whereby the supplier is in full control of the prices they set and accept and who they sell or donate to. And what this has the result of is ensuring that the buyers we're working with tend to be very reputable b2b sales and donation channels. That's ensuring this product is largely being redirected towards discount channels that are focused on affordable food access in underserved communities. From a monetization standpoint, we focus today exclusively on the supply side of the market. So our customers are major food brands like Nestle, Kraft times, Campbell Soup and. But of course, we're operating in a two-sided ecosystem. So our buyers are often large, big retail discount chains, like a Grocery Outlet, or a Big Lots to emerging direct to consumer grocery companies like misfits market, to even local and nonprofit grocery stores like the daily table here in Boston.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Wow, such a cool concept. So how did the idea come to fruition?

Ricky Ashenfelter, Spoiler Alert  

My background is all centered around how the private sector can solve some of the world's biggest energy and environmental and climate problems. So whether you look at me as an eco capitalist or more of a pro-business, environmentalist, it doesn't matter. All that I care about is how do we provide the tools to make sustainability and climate stewardship easy for the private sector. I started my career with a DC-based startup that was working with large brands and retailers. From a carbon energy, water, and waste standpoint, we were ultimately acquired by Deloitte, the large professional services firm in 2010. And did my fair stand of time in management consulting. And it was through that work, and roughly back in 2011, or so that I got my first exposure to this massive, massive, massive problem in food waste. And the reality that a lot of the major businesses in the industry didn't really have a good grasp on that problem, either as part of their sustainability commitments or more fundamentally from a profitability and efficiency standpoint. Since that time, fast forward 10 years or so. And now, food waste has been identified by project drawdown as the number one solution for addressing the global climate crisis, with nearly 30 to 40% of the world's food supply, never ultimately getting consumed, which is just staggering, staggering numbers. And fast forward to 2013. I went back to business school here in Boston at MIT and met my co-founder, Emily there, and a couple of years later, we launched Spoiler Alert with the hypothesis that there is this tremendous amount of waste in global supply chains that are occurring because Businesses are not effectively leveraging readily accessible data from their ERP systems and taking action on it in a sufficiently timely fashion. So you might imagine the food supply chain, it's quite vast, and it requires a lot of different solutions depending on where it occurs in that supply chain. And when Emily and I started the company, we wanted to make sure we were focused on a niche vertical that we felt our pasts, and backgrounds, and experiences lead us well towards, but would also give us a lot of latitudes to move upstream or downstream as we expand as a business down the road. And ultimately, that's where we've landed ourselves. Today, we work exclusively in the manufacturing and distribution vertical, working with manufacturing plants and distribution centers throughout the country, all of which is post-harvest, post farm, but pre-retail and pre-consumer. And I would say that, prior to COVID, this part of the supply chain really wasn't particularly sexy, there was very little consumer and general public awareness of how the manufacturing and distribution verticals of the supply chain work. Now we fast forward 18 to 24 months, and all of a sudden, everyone knows a lot more about the food supply chain, and all that goes into getting food to grocery stores, or to restaurants. And the reality is all along the way. There are very real nodes for volatility, for friction for latency. And all of these factors create risk areas for waste. And that's ultimately the space that we play in, and why we feel the work we're doing can be so impactful in this day and age.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

When you hear that staggering number 30 to 40% of that waste is just like you said, it's staggering to hear that number. So I could see why your company is in this. You know, the timing for your company is perfect. This leads me to the next question. Spoiler Alert just announced a Series A round of funding. So talk about the current stage of the company and growth plans ahead.

Ricky Ashenfelter, Spoiler Alert  

Yes, we're super excited about this latest round of funding. Prior to it, we had spent, call it the last 18 months or so really focus on product-market fit, figuring out exactly what we're building and selling how we're positioning its value, and to which types of customers and personas We're all ultimately selling into. Now with a portfolio of global CPG brands to show for it. The Series A has really enabled us to redirect our focus on two key themes. The first theme that we're tackling in this next chapter is continuous product innovation. On the product side, about half of our team is engineers, product managers, and designers. And we've got an increasingly exciting product roadmap that allows us to go broader and deeper in the excess inventory space. So we've got a lot of focus in this chapter ahead on advanced analytics for suppliers. We've got a lot of focus on augmenting the platform experience for buyers, as well as additional sales, donation, and networking tools that allow us to move much larger tranches of inventory and then we've been able to do in the past. So that's the first area of focus. The second area of focus in this chapter ahead is all about building our go-to-market engine. To date, we've invested very little resources on the sales and marketing front and building our brand, which in some ways is a shame because what we think we're doing is pretty cool. And ultimately, as a business, we want to power the CPG industry's efforts to go waste-free. And the only way that we're going to be able to fulfill that vision is to work with global brands across more product categories and support their operations and footprints outside of purely the US. So long way of saying series A is super exciting. For us, because it's rooted in the reality that the only way we're going to be successful on those two fronts is by growing our team and bringing more incredibly talented and passionate people into the business. And as part of that, we're hoping to double or triple our headcount over the next 12 to 18 months. And we'd expect a big portion of that headcount growth to come from employees outside of the greater Boston area.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Now, as far as hiring, what types of functional areas are going to be focused on.

Ricky Ashenfelter, Spoiler Alert  

We're hiring across all three core parts of the business, which are product and engineering, customer success, and sales and marketing. On the product side of the business, we've got open roles for software and data engineers, designers, product managers. On the customer success side of the business, we're hiring our next wave of customer success managers and analysts that get to work directly with our suppliers and buyers. And last but not least, is on the sales and marketing side of the business. This is by far the smallest team we have in the business today, which I think is particularly exciting for those evaluating certain career changes. Because it means you can come in and be truly foundational in shaping how and where we grow in this chapter ahead.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Now, once someone joins the team, what's the culture like? What's it like working there?

Ricky Ashenfelter, Spoiler Alert  

I like to joke that we are a team of on the one hand data junkies and supply chain nerds. But combine that with tree huggers and impact seekers. At Spoiler lert, we're really trying to craft our culture around what we consider our four core values. And that first one ties into that which is champion the greater good. What motivates so much of the work we do is the environmental and social impact of keeping good food from going to waste, boosting consumer access to affordable nutrition, and ultimately advocating for wherever we can for greater diversity, equity, inclusion within tech and the food system. So as a team, we do food waste challenges as part of new employee onboarding initiatives, were debating food policy and environmental topics internally on Slack. And we're actively working through our own application to be B Corp certified. The next two values that are important to us our own the outcomes, and rise to the challenge. And this is all about creating space for individual empowerment, ownership, and iteration. We still have quite a lean team as a business and a fairly flat organization. And I'd say some of our longest-tenured employees of three, four or five years are all now key members of our leadership team. The last value that we're proud of is embracing the learner's mindset. This is all about learning and growth. It's safe to say that over the last 1824 months, we've learned so so much about the supply chain, by listening to our customers, and there's so much to act on. But there's still so much additional discovery to do. And in this next chapter, we're increasingly focused on carving out more and more employee time to really lean into that discovery, which will ultimately drive the future iterations of our platform and impact. Beyond these areas, I can say that we're a remote-first company that cares deeply about the AI, we maintain a small office footprint in Boston, but we did otherwise expect to see most of our growth to come from a team that's distributed across the country.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Got it, Okay. So the markets are very active, there are lots of job opportunities for people, which is a good thing. We want people to have options. Now. So why is now the ideal time to join Spoiler Alert?

Ricky Ashenfelter, Spoiler Alert  

If we've learned anything over the last 18 months, and through this global pandemic, it's that food insecurity and supply chain volatility, our forces that continue to impact the American people and the business community at unprecedented levels. And addressing these types of themes is at the heart of what we do as a business day in and day out. And this latest round of funding allows us to take these efforts to higher levels than we've ever been able to before. Over the last 12 months, we've helped the industry keep more than 200 million pounds of product from going to waste. And we'd expect significant growth on this front in the year ahead. So that's all on the do good, feel good aspects. But if that's not enough, I'd say purely from a technology standpoint, we're playing a pretty interesting and exciting role in digitizing an important vertical of b2b commerce, and layering into that pricing, intelligence, advanced analytics, customer engagement, workflow automation, all of these things are driving on the one hand supply chain efficiency, on the other hand sales and revenue growth, and we're at the intersection of major brands and major retailers. And for us, that's, that's pretty exciting. So undoubtedly, as we think about our next chapter, and how much fun we're gonna be having, we look at it as an opportunity to bring in some great new folks that are really passionate about the work we do excited about the technology innovation, but are also really interested in joining us in a high paced, fast learning and extremely impactful chapter ahead.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Spoiler Alert, I mean, this is a company that Ricky has said over and over again, and it's just such an incredible mission behind what they are doing. I mean, the opportunity to build a company that's powering the waste-free economy. It's just a tremendous opportunity. So you need to go check out their company page on VentureFizz to see all their job listings, go to venturefizz.com/spoileralert, and you'll see all their job listings there. Ricky, thanks so much for bringing us up to speed on all the amazing work you and your team are up to.

Ricky Ashenfelter, Spoiler Alert  

It's been a pleasure, Keith. Thanks for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai