How to Build Intelligent, Flexible Manufacturing with Sojo

In this episode, Chuck Templeton sits down with Barak Bar-Cohen, founder of Sojo, who built a company around solving the ​‘variety pack problem’, and in doing so, uncovered some much bigger lessons about the future of supply chains and manufacturing. 

We’ll get into how Sojo is transforming a traditionally inflexible, high-cap-ex process that requires months of planning into an agile, cost-effective experience that delivers ​“door to floor in an hour.” 

But on top of bringing flexibility to manufacturing, Sojo’s journey reveals what it really means to layer AI throughout a physical business, blending the worlds of atoms and bits so that machines can communicate, businesses can have full transparency into their supply chains, and the whole operation can gets smarter over time. 

Barak also shares how Sojo is balancing the climate story with cost savings, and why embracing discomfort might be the most important thing a company can do right now. So let’s get into it. 

Chuck Templeton: All right. So today I get the pleasure of speaking with Barak from Sojo. So Barak, could you quickly introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Sojo?

Barak Bar-Cohen: Absolutely. And again. Great to be here, Chuck. So I was early investor, chief operating officer at Bai Brands, which is a better-for-you healthy beverage that we grew and ended up selling to Dr. Pepper back in 2017. And one of the main drivers of growth at Bai was variety packs, as in those multi-flavor packs that you can buy at Costco, BJ’s, Sam’s Target, Walmart, and Amazon. And it was really a source of innovation and growth for us.

And they are actually really hard to make because unless you own your own manufacturing, your own distribution, your own warehousing, it’s really hard to figure out how to get all of the flavors in one place and make them efficiently. So we ended up doing it ourselves at Bai, and I tell people for two years in a row I was the largest employer of ex-convicts in the state of New Jersey, which on one hand I was really proud of giving people second chances. On the other hand, it was an incredibly difficult and challenging population to manage.

And in reality, the reason we needed all that manual labor is to literally put bottles into boxes. So over a 24-hour period, we might have 525 people doing that, 20 lines running at the same time. So long story short, we sold that business. I took a breath, and I kept getting call after call from brands in the CPG space asking how and where we did variety packs because of the complexity and the cost and all that.

My aha moment was like, why not take a page out of the wine industry, right? Where corking and bottling comes to the vineyard, not the other way around. Why not use mobility, automation and the ability to move these things around in order to solve this variety pack problem that is just plaguing the entire industry? If you’re able to move lines and robotics and run on-site where the product is, then you take out all the freight costs, you take out all the CO2 emissions. You take out all the double and triple touches and all the administrative costs associated with moving these things around. And you’re able to do more formats, you’re able to focus on innovation and growth, and sort of hand that back to the brand to do things.

And my dad had unfortunately passed October 2020, and he was one of the world-renowned experts in heating and cooling of electronic components. Just a brilliant mechanical engineer PhD from MIT. And I was going through a lot of his papers and books, after he passed and I noticed he worked on the Nassau Mission to Mars the first robot to land another planet was named Sojourner, named after Sojourner Truth, an African American abolitionist. So I shortened Sojourner to Sojo and filed a handful of patents, which were granted a couple of years ago to us around the anchoring, leveling, powering, and transporting of these lines.

Decided we needed to start with a brick-and-mortar environment to get really good at robotics and automation as we were building these rovers. And fast forward to today, we’ve got a national footprint of brick-and-mortar capabilities. We have 33 lines that are deployed across the country, and we’re running multiple formats and pretty much a 24 by 7 shop at this point for large CPG companies. 

One more point I’ll make. The vision really as we’re looking at the supply chain, is to execute on this mantra of atoms to bits. Atoms, as in the physical atoms that go into the variety packs, and using the mobility and automation to do that. And bits, as in the data that we collect, which I know we’re gonna spend a bunch of time talking about, but we’re really focused on those two components, the physical side of what we make with our automation and robotics, and the bits, which we’ve built our own blockchain based, geolocation, integrated software platform called Sojo Shield, which enables a lot of that. I’ll take a pause, but that’s really the vision of the business is to execute on both of those components for CPG companies in the supply chain.

Chuck: Yeah. Amazing. I love these sorts of stories. One of the things that I really like about how you guys have done it is you really tried to simplify it for the customer, right? I think you have a saying, ​‘door to floor in an hour.’ And so we’d love to hear more about how you thought about this need to really polish the friction off the process and make things happen.

Because a lot of times people put out technology and yeah, it’s functional, but it doesn’t work for the customer. And so how did you come through that thinking and that mindset?

Barak: Oh, that’s a great question. We insisted early on on a couple of things. First, being an inch wide and a mile deep. Let’s get really good at one thing, and we can do other things later, but let’s just become the brand, the company, the business that knows how to solve the variety pack problem for beverage, food, and CPG companies.

And that meant I got to get in touch with a bunch of the folks that I work with at Bai and we put the band back together. And the folks that I knew had dealt with this issue, knew how to put a brand and a customer first, knew what the pain points were, could communicate very crisply on what the issues were.

I tell people we were having 20 to 30-minute calls that were going from introduction to send us a quote, which I had never experienced before. And I recognized that because we were so focused and we were speaking the same language, we were able to get there.

So that was one thing that we did early on. And the second thing is, we figured out exactly who we were talking to, who we needed to reach within the organization. Our business is built by operators for operators. We are very much a painkiller, not a vitamin. We knew that we landed in the head of the supply chain’s COGS line.

We knew that freight out was an issue as it related to the overall cost that sometimes even bled into the contribution margin for the COO or the CSO. And so we knew exactly who we needed to get to, exactly who we needed to talk to. And we even simplified our pricing to dollars per case because we knew that’s how the commercial teams were working.

Chuck: And so you have two models that you do, right? One is a fixed location where organizations can maybe plan bringing product to you. And then you’ve also got where you will actually move your systems into the end of a line that’s already producing or already has product.

So you can do it onsite, so people don’t have to move it around. Those are your two main models right?

Barak: So one of them is called Sojo Hub. We have four locations around the country. We have an East Region, West Region, a North Region, and a South Region. We’ve got Langhorn, Indianapolis, Redlands, California, and Temple, Texas. In total, about 900,000 square feet across that entire footprint.

There was just so much production within an hour or 90 minutes of those locations, and so many brands that not only need high-speed capabilities and multiple formats on multiple lines, they also need the ability to store it and then ship it on from us to the final retail destination.

And so we solve that issue for them. So that’s the Sojo Hub product. And the Sojo Flight product is also managed by the regional plant director in each one of those four regions. But there we’re going on site into either a 1PL or a 3PL or onto the manufacturing floor.

And for example, we have a social alert system that we built, and there’s a text that comes out every morning at 5:32 AM with a summary of where we produced, our daily operating plan, our monthly operating plan, and we can see how we’re doing and how we’re tracking. And on this morning, SaaS we’re running at 10 locations. Four of them are our locations and six locations are spread out across the country.

We’re in Oklahoma, we’re in Denver, we’re up in Washington State. We’re in North Carolina. So we’re constantly managing and tracking and moving these lines around, which, there’s some interesting financial and capacity utilization metrics that come out of it as well, which I’m happy to share if that’s of interest.

Chuck: Yeah, I’d love to get it, like how you think about the economics, because these are two very different models. You work with some of the largest brands in the world and some of the smaller up-and-comers that are trying to figure this out.

And then, some of this product is by design, and some of it’s actually unsold product that you’re repackaging, putting with other options to be able to then be able to find sales that these companies might have lost otherwise had they not had this opportunity to mix in slower-moving extra inventory with the higher moving extra inventory.

It changes it up a little bit for the consumer. They get more variety, but at the same time now you’re actually helping the profitability of your customers.

Barak: You nailed it. I’m preaching to the converted. So yes.

Chuck: So tell us about some of these other metrics that really help?

Barak: Yeah so for us, just speaking for Sojo for a moment, the great thing about Sojo Flight as compared to the Sojo Hub product is in Sojo Flight’s gross margin and contribution margin look very, very, very similar because all of those costs of warehousing and the lease costs and all the forklifts and all the utilities associated with charging that and the insurance costs, they all go away when you come into someone else’s facility and you’re just setting up lines and running shifts, and you can purely just focus on throughput and utilization and output. So that’s a real advantage, and we’re starting to see the operating leverage kick in. We’re getting better and smarter, and we’re setting higher, more sophisticated MOQs.

We know that below a certain threshold, it’s tough for us to make the numbers on contribution and gross margin. We know that, for example, if we’re in for more than 50,000 cases over a couple of weeks with multiple shifts, you get that operating leverage and that cadence, and we do well.

So we’re getting smarter and smarter about that. But that gross margin equals contribution margin is a big deal. And really, you get to see the benefits of that. The complexity is around planning. And we can start talking about the benefits of AI, a little bit later on around that.

But the complexity around planning is that you’re playing nine-dimensional chess if every piece can be moved anywhere, at any time, to support a customer. So typically, large CPG operators and co-packers, they take 12, 18, 20 months to scope, install, factory acceptance testing, and then there’s a burning factor where you gotta get good at it, and then it takes a while to train everybody and that could take 18 to 24 months.

And in order to integrate everything. It might cost you 10, 15, 20 million bucks to just do all that. And then it can really only do a certain amount of things. It might only be able to do tray and shrink, or that equipment may only be able to do top-loaded RSC or a carton. If the commercial team needs something else, you gotta go invest in it, or you gotta sub it out.

So those are long, complicated CapEx-heavy investments and decisions that a lot of them end up getting canceled as things change on you. So the advantage of mobility and modularity where you can swap pieces, and as you mentioned, door to floor in one hour from the time the truck hits, the 10-foot, warehouse door to the time the first case comes off the line.

The goal is one hour. That’s a game-changer for people’s ability to innovate and utilize us and bring us in for a month or three months, or six months or two weeks, and facilitate sort of those needs. But it requires a tremendous amount of coordination and capacity utilization metrics that don’t really exist. And so you’re minimizing CapEx because I don’t need to buy as much equipment if I can move everything around. But you really gotta get good at that. And we are starting to get good at that, but those are some of the things that we look at and metrics.

Chuck: And so I was talking to a beverage CEO the other day about you guys, and they were like, yeah, that’s cool what they’re doing. And they were into it for sure. But then when I mentioned Sojo Shield and that there’s traceability now, and you could follow something, if there was ever a recall, quality issue, or something like that, and their eyes lit up and they were like super excited. Tell us about Sojo Shield and how did you think about it? What was the beginning of it?

Barak: Great question and thank you for teeing that up. When I was running the operations at Bai, the thing that kept me up at night was, I’ll characterize the use case as Find the Coconut. So Molokai Coconut was our top-selling SKU, and it was in every single one of our 14 variety packs that were sold throughout the country.

The problem is they’re produced as a 12-pack, but then you take three of ​‘em and put them into a variety pack. When you do that, you lose the 12-pack skew. And you’re putting him into a new SKU, which is the variety pack. There’s an allergen in coconut, and coconut is an allergen.

God forbid there’s a recall, and you need to figure out where everything is. And 20, 30, 40% of your volume in some months, or some quarters, might be in variety packs. Forget the fact that you’re not gonna be able to comply with the need to recall everything and talk to the FDA about everything.

You could really hurt some people out there, right? And so that was really the thing that kept me up at night. So when we launched Sojo, the thought was, we’re gonna solve the issue that is being able to track individual SKUs that go into the variety pack.

And in the pharmaceutical industry, they’ve got stuff like serialization, and there’s license plating. But what I wanted to do was not only solve that, but I also wanted to be able to collect all the data associated with that. So we built a platform called Sojo Shield, and we decided to build it using blockchain because one of the issues that happens whenever there’s a quality issue and a recall is everyone disappears and gets quiet for a little bit, and then they share their own excel, basically showing what the output from their systems and confirming that they’ve done everything that they were supposed to do. And then you gotta spend a lot of time figuring out where things are and trying to piece things together.

And you’re up against the clock. If, God forbid, you gotta get ​‘em off the shelf, you gotta do that really quickly and people are defensive and all that kind of stuff.

With blockchain, if every single transaction, every single ping of a QR code, which is what we’ve built, is a handshake, and it shows up in a blockchain, public registry, with its own code, it’s immutable. It is the single source of truth, and you can quickly call it up, and you don’t have to worry about the fact that it’s been manipulated in any way, shape, or form.

So we decided that was a really good sort of trust factor and use of technology to solve that issue. So it’s based on blockchain. We integrated geolocation into that. So if, god forbid, there’s a recall of a product and the inventory manager at the Bethesda, Maryland, Costco, if we’ve enabled her on Sojo Shield, she takes a look at her Zebra 9,300 scanner, and she sees that when she tries to scan a pallet and put it on the floor, she sees, Oh wow. There’s a yellow message that says, ​‘Recall, do not put on the floor.’ And she puts yellow tape around it, and she knows not to put that on the floor. At the same time that she’s scanned that QR code, if we’ve enabled her on the platform and we’ve unmasked all the data on the blockchain, we get a digital ping that’s captured.

There’s a lot more that’s sort is going into that.

Chuck: Let’s jump into that then. ​‘Cause atoms to bits is a little bit of the language you use internally to talk about that. As I’ve gotten to know more about sort of your physical AI, right? You’ve got AI working with machinery, working with physical goods, and things like that.

And so, really walk us through. What physical AI is, just ​’cause some people might be familiar with AI, but maybe not physical AI. And then I’d love you to actually start with your vision that we talked about, and then how does that sprinkle down from there across the organization?

Barak: No, that’s great. So today at Sojo, we are using AI in sort of three primary buckets. The first is productivity tools. We’re using Firefly, we’re using Cloud Co-Worker. We’re using IP Co-pilot, which is pretty cool. Like every conversation that the engineers have gets captured. And then this product bangs it against the patent registry and provides us a summary as to whether there are any conversations or ideas that are patentable or that we should pursue.

The teams using, I think we’re on Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus, and Claude Code 4.6 that just came out. So we’ve got these productivity tools that are out there that we’re using. That’s one bucket. The second bucket, and the second initiative is really around, we’re calling it just our overall Sojo data initiative, which is we’re using Snowflake for all of our structured systems.

So we’ve got all of our NetSuite, all of our Manhattan, all of our Salesforce data flowing through and populating into that sort of structured data lake. We’ve got our unstructured data lake, which is getting captured. We’re using Pinecone for that. So there you’re seeing all the Firefly conversations, you’re seeing all the teams chats, all the videos, all that information that we’re…

Chuck: And when you say all, what do you mean by all?

Barak: All. I know. We’re going for it. 

Chuck: I love that. ​‘Cause that’s one of the things that are gonna be interesting in organizations is that sort of change management on, being comfortable that this is all being captured. And when we say all, you mean all, because that’s all proprietary information, and that business that any little bit of that could make the business more efficient, which just builds on itself.

It’s just an advantage built on an advantage, built on an advantage. And it just takes off when it is that inclusive in that. 

Barak: We’re going for it. And we can talk about the cultural undertones and implications, but we’re starting off with, if we’re doing this, we’re doing it. And again, we’re building the business on the backs of 26 to 37-year-olds who are digital natives. We’ve got a lot of ex-Amazon, a lot of ex-Tesla folks, and they’ve got their own AI bots that they use. It is getting a little bit easier to sell into the organization. But we’re very much about going for it on that front. And then the last bucket is really under that data initiative. The machine and robotics data that we’re capturing.

So our machines and our robots have PLCs. You know, Allen-Bradley, Raven, information that we collect, and this is all of the information related to downtime and error codes and jams, and quality-related issues. And if the machinery isn’t working the way it’s supposed to spec or there’s electrical problems and issues that result from bad SOPs up front, and all that kind of stuff just all gets captured n the equipment and in the machinery

And we’re extracting all that, and we’re putting that in as part of our data initiative. All that leads to this MCP, which is Victoria, and that really falls into two categories. The first is really the physical AI and the second is the intelligence that you can getm knowledge base that you can get out of it. Under the physical AI, we’re literally using all the data from the data initiatives that we’re pulling out to enhance our planning capabilities. So we’ve got a lot of information about downtime. We have a lot of information about availability, a lot of information about margin, a lot of information about pricing, a lot of information about things that ran better than we thought, or things that ran worse than we thought.

And so we get all this data and information. We haven’t gotten there yet, but the goal is to feed it into Victoria, and then she tells us what we’re running when and where we’re moving our machines. And we have a few levers we can optimize on case output volume, we can optimize on gross margin, and we can actually optimize and minimize changeovers.

So show us a schedule that minimizes changeovers. Okay, we wanna run these two products next to each other. You wanna run these four products and actually run that next month. We’re also using it for preventative maintenance. There are some machines that need more maintenance, and they don’t adhere to the two week schedule.

They need to be managed on a weekly schedule. And we have all that information and data to allow us to do that. We’re starting to use it for quality control with vision systems. And we’re figuring out ways to daisy chain the machinery and the equipment across our national footprint so that we’re able to tweak, for example, the size of the bullseye.

If the size of the bullseye on a product that we’re running in California and in Texas needs to be modified, and the machinery needs to be changed to a certain setting in order to pass the quality control test well, there’s no reason why the Texas machinery can’t tell the California machinery how to optimize that and save us a bunch of running around.

Chuck: And when you say bullseye, what do you mean by that?

Barak: When you do a tray and shrink product, let’s say you’re doing three flavors in four of each, in a 12 pack, you put shrink on it, and you put it through a heat tunnel, and there’s an area that doesn’t have any plastic by default on each side because it melts a certain way.

And the size of that area is called the Bullseye. And every brand out there that’s tenacious about the look and feel on shelf will tell you exactly what that spec should look like, and what is acceptable and what isn’t. And it gets rejected if you’re outta spec. So that’s an important point. 

Under intelligence and insights, the ability we have actually, I’ll grab, do I have it actually here? So we actually patented this truck seal called Sojo Seal, and this is an IOT device. You put it on the trailer on the outside of a 53-foot trailer, and you lock it in just like a traditional..so this is a traditional one where you simply, you put it in the loop on the trailer, and it closes.

And if you have a truck back up to your warehouse and it’s been broken like this, you’re supposed to reject the trailer because it could have been tampered with, it could have made a stop a few miles back and maybe a couple pallets fell off. So you don’t want to be responsible for that.

So we’ve created an IoT device that captures that same functionality, but it also sends a geolocation ping via satellite and via cellular network every hour or every three hours. It has a battery life of nine days. And so you now have information about where that trailer is. And so for a logistics manager who’s chasing trucks and trying to figure out why things haven’t arrived and where they are.

Being able to get fresh digital pings that are captured in these data lakes that have Victoria as the MCP overlaid on top of it, and can provide information on dwell time and how long has the truck been sitting there, and why was it late, and one percentage of a certain carriers trucks are arriving late and where everything is and all that stuff that sort of drives the supply chain operators a little batty. If you can do that’s incredibly valuable. 

So that sort of falls under that bucket of the MCP and the intelligence of it. We also have a sophisticated knowledge database and a sophisticated integration module that we’ve built just to make it really easy to integrate NetSuite, Oracle, Manhattan, Blue Yonder, SAP, all these ERP systems that need to be talking to each other. Most of the brands and the manufacturers that we talk to as customers already have these systems, but the reporting, the advanced sort of inventory management reporting that comes out, is daily or weekly. I want it to be real-time time and I want our customers to have full transparency.

I want themem to be able to go into their version of NetSuite and see how many cases I produced last hour. And if we can integrate that and we have a few products that we developed to do that, then it saves them time and energy and increases all the accuracy of their forecasting, all that stuff. So that’s really the vision is to continue to drive the AI tools internally to Sojo to continue to develop the data initiative and capture everything we can. And then ultimately to have our Victoria MCP really drive these insights and create something special for our customers.

Chuck: Yeah. That’s amazing. I hadn’t written code in a long time frankly, and, back in the holidays spent a little time playing around with some of the new models and just overblown by what’s possible now.

That’s some of the biggest lessons. ​‘Cause I, it’s gonna sound maybe obnoxious, but I’m here in Silicon Valley or in San Francisco, one of the epicenters of AI and to describe to other people what’s happening here is really hard, right? It sounds like a crying wolf all the time.

And, oh, you should see it. And we are seeing big differences in people who are leaning in and people who are not. And it’s not a technical barrier. At least in my opinion, the barrier is just curiosity and trying. You’re gonna make lots of mistakes, right?

The first time anyone picked up a tuba or a surfboard or whatever, they probably weren’t very good, and they probably didn’t know how to do it. And maybe you talk to a couple of your friends, maybe you watch a couple of YouTube videos, try a couple of different things, and just like that curiosity.

And you can see it. It is starting to separate people who are comfortable with what they’re doing, from people who are curious and wanna push the limit on what’s there.

Barak: To your point, look, you read a lot about the Microsofts and the Amazons and the Metas of the world shedding headcount as a result of all the productivity enhancements that they’re getting from AI. I’m looking at Sojo, and I’m saying to myself, I think we can double or even triple the business and keep our headcount flat. To your point about the vibing and the pace and the rate at which people are moving, right now we are doing twice as many features, we’re deploying twice as fast. I’m watching our Jira just get consumed, just go down to zero, twice as fast as it used to, and it’s moving. And we haven’t added any headcount, and they’re just getting better and better at that. So number one, I’m seeing tremendous operating leverage going forward in being able to grow without adding costs as a result of using all these tools.

The flip side is, boy is the cultural divide getting wider and wider between the people who really get it and the folks that are struggling to keep up and even fighting it a little bit. And that cultural divide and that gap is something that I need to either lean into or ensure that we have proper swim lanes and everybody’s just doing their job, and it’s okay that they’re not interacting and that’s hard. That’s something I haven’t seen before. And the folks who are using all these tools are at the cutting and bleeding edge of what’s happening.

They’re accelerating, just like the ability of all these tools to learn, and the Gemini and Anthropics and everyone’s just getting better and faster. The same is happening with the employees and the people who get it. They are just getting faster and better, and smarter.

And their signal-to-noise ratio is at all-time highs.

Chuck: And so are you seeing the need to officially change roles and responsibilities, and how is it laddering up? Or is it a pretty entrepreneurial, scrappy, and not unprofessional, I’m not suggesting that at all, but like how are you seeing  people adopt these new responsibilities or maybe step into things that they hadn’t been doing before? Are they asking permission, or are they just doing it?

Barak: Look, we were zero to 50. That was the mode that we were in. Very different mode zero to 50 and 50 to 200. And we recognize that. So we’re professionalizing the business. We brought on a new chief commercial officer Chad, who’s amazing. We brought on Ben, who’s our chief operating officer, ex-Amazon ex ex-manufacturing guru.

We need those folks driving that business, and providing structure and organization and accountability and driving margin. My job has now pivoted to beating the culture drum. ​‘Cause we will not lose what I call our Sojo Mojo. So that’s what I do half our day. We recruit smart Solutionaries. The biggest differentiator for people who add value at Sojo, who’ve been here for a long period of time and continue to succeed and evolve, people whose impact I feel all the time across the business, is how smart you are, how much of a solutionary you are. 

And so I’ve now implemented about five months ago, every single employee that we interview has to take a technical assessment exam that has been tailored for that person’s role. Not necessarily looking for everyone to get everything a hundred percent, but boy do you learn a lot about how somebody thinks.

By the way, you’re weeding people out front who are just ​‘Hey I was told there’d be no math in this one.’ So I’m spending a lot of time on that. You know exactly what you just said. We have a saying on the Sojo Mojo. We have a list of sort of cultural ethos points. You gotta be comfortable living in the uncomfortable.If you’re not, you’re gonna have a tough time here.

Chuck: I once gave a talk and had one word on the slide, it was called discomfort. And so I was just like, embrace discomfort, ​’cause I totally agree. Like that’s how you get better is by pushing the edge a little bit and getting outta your comfort zone. 

Barak: I’ve got a strict rule. You are welcome to make mistakes, but never the same mistake twice. Make a new one.

You just feel like you’re not smart, and you’re not a learning organization if you keep making the same mistake over and over again.

We will never play scared. We’re always gonna play to win, and so we’re gonna make mistakes. Just don’t make the same one again. So you find that balance. A lot of times, if you’re on site in a manufacturing facility and it’s 2:05 in the morning and the line went down and the person you typically call is not available, you’re a smart solutionary. You’ve been there before, so you better feel comfortable in the uncomfortable. So yes, it’s a big cultural point, and I’m very focused on it.

Chuck: Awesome. Two questions left, just want to talk to you about. One is we’re an impact fund, right? And one of the things that really attracted us to you guys, outside of the operating and a lot of the stuff we talked about, is the climate story here.

So talk a little bit about the climate story and what’s happening. 

Barak: Oh, absolutely. I love it. So the advantage of Sojo Flight is that you eliminate double and triple touches and freight and trucks moving things all over the place, right? So unless you’re one of the large manufacturers out there, if you’re just an emerging brand or an established brand, you don’t own your own manufacturing, you don’t own your own warehousing, you don’t own your own trucks that are distributing. You probably don’t even own the people inside a Walmart that are merchandising your products on the shelves. So you’re always beholden to trying to figure out where everything is and moving it around to match demand, which is pretty hard. 

Not only is that expensive, it requires a lot of truck miles, a ton of CO2 emissions. So I’ve always believed that we should be making the most climate responsible decision possible out there, A, for it’s the right thing to do, B, I think customers appreciate that, and C, for future generations. They should have the ability to  inherit the same sort of environment that we’ve inherited, although it has been challenging.

So that story we tell over and over again.

Chuck: But it’s not what you lead with, but it is one of the big values that come out. 

Barak: I, full disclosure, I used to lead with it.

Chuck: Yeah.

Barak: I was  not more passionate than you, Chuck or your amazing folks at S2G, but I was definitely more passionate than a lot of the people that I was pitching to. And I realized that I needed to change my pitch a little bit to all the other things around cost savings and reduce complexity, and the ability to innovate, and then end with, and by the way, I know this is also important to you.

Making that climate-responsible decision sure feels good, especially when it saves money and drives growth. And so we’ve been telling that story, and it’s working. And actually I’ve been leveraging some of the awesome people at S2G to help me tell that story, so it’s been great. We’re gonna continue to do that. But it’s very much at the forefront. We’ve got statistics and data that we’ve collected and try to quantify the impact, but it’s time to package that up and sell it in a smart, intelligent way and share that.

Chuck: Yeah, I love it. And let us know how we can support you in that. As you think about, you fast forward 5, 10 years, physical AI, mobility, real-time traceability…In your vision snd Sojo’s vision, what does the supply chain look like?

What does it entail?

Barak: It’s great question. I’m really seeing two sort of driving forces. The one is making decisions that are around the customer and closer to the customer and profitable and smarter. So the customer, the ability to listen to the customer, hear the customer, customize, and adapt. Especially with mobile manufacturing, especially with some of these sophisticated data tracking and information, and innovation and growth that is happening.

So I’m definitely seeing more and more aggressiveness around innovation, growth, and customer-centric thinking, which you haven’t always seen in some of these industries, as the companies have been coming up with those ideas and innovating as opposed to just really being able to react in real time and sort of supply customers with what you need and what they want.

And we very much are gonna be a part of that. And the second thing is exactly what we’ve been talking about is smarter, better, more profitable decisions based on better information and data. That is definitely happening. You’re seeing integrated systems, you’re seeing everybody try to get their arms around using these MCPs, and using this information and implementing these strategies.

And I think it’s gonna happen. I see it happening a lot. I am blown away by the quality of the individuals that I talk to at all of the large CPG companies. They are very aware of this. They are in lean forward mode. They are charging and collecting smart people and intellectual folks and IP, and I very much see the implementation and the use of all this data in marketing and supply chain optimization and all that.

So I very much believe in the Adams to bits story, if you will, and I see it happening and coming to fruition.

Chuck: Yeah, I was talking to a large beverage CPG company this morning, and they were talking about speed at scale, and that was just like, the slow-moving CPG company’s a thing of the past, and here we are, speed at scale. I wanna see it. But it was interesting that they brought up that language to me. Very cool. Good. Thank you for your time today. Really appreciate it. We’re super excited about what you’re doing, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to know deeper the story that you’ve come through to get to this particular point.

I love how you’re thinking about technology and culture and all that melding together. So really had a great time.

Barak: Same here. And thank you so much, Chuck, for the time and for the opportunity and for the continued support from you and for the entire S2G family. It’s really been a pleasure, and we’re excited about the future, so thank you. 

Tonya: Thank you for tuning into the S2G podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave us a review, or share it with a friend. For more information or to connect with us, check out s2gin​vest​ments​.com.