A brand built from scratch.
The company started where most food brands start — a farmers' market, a recipe, and a belief that the product was good enough to earn shelf space. Over the next ten years, it grew into something real: millions in revenue, thousands of retail doors, and relationships with some of the most demanding retailers in the country — Costco, Whole Foods, Ingles, Harris Teeter, Food Lion.
Every one of those accounts was earned. Every distribution win came with its own complexity — routing guides, OTIF windows, slotting fees, promotional requirements, deduction codes. The kind of operational weight that doesn't show up in a pitch deck.
The brand didn't survive. That's not the whole story.
CPG margins are unforgiving. And when you're running the brand on a patchwork of spreadsheets, disconnected tools, and manual processes, the operational overhead compounds quietly until it doesn't. The product was good. The distribution was real. The problem was the infrastructure underneath.
Not a failure of execution. A failure of tooling. The systems that existed were built for enterprise companies with dedicated finance teams, trade analysts, and operations staff. For a founder wearing every hat — none of them fit.
Six years. Hundreds of businesses. The same problems, over and over.
After the brand, the work shifted to advisory — a PhD and six years of direct consulting, business advisory, and leadership work with hundreds of companies across CPG and adjacent industries. The same operational gaps kept surfacing: deductions going uncontested, trade spend with no visibility into ROI, production costs that nobody had totaled, and founders making major account decisions without the full financial picture.
The tools existed for the top of the market. The middle — brands between $500K and $20M doing real volume but without enterprise infrastructure — was largely left to improvise. That gap was the opportunity.
The solution I wish I had.
Arithmis is built on a simple premise: the problem was never the product. It was the inability to see the full picture — production costs, trade spend, deductions, account P&L — in one place, in real time, without a team of analysts to pull it together.
Every module in Arithmis reflects a specific pain point from that decade. The NIF builder exists because filling out retailer forms manually is a time sink that shouldn't exist. The deductions module exists because chargebacks that go uncontested are margin you hand back for free. The category strategy tool exists because no founder should pitch a major retailer without knowing what that account will actually do to their P&L.
This isn't software built by people who studied CPG. It's software built by someone who ran it.