How Cin7 Helped Filipino American-Founded Sanzo Fizz Its Way to Success

Nuclear engineer turned entrepreneur Sandro Roco came up with the idea of creating a sparkling water brand featuring real Asian fruit eight years ago. Fast forward to today, and he’s the founder and CEO of a booming business that leans on Cin7’s inventory management software to drive brand growth.

In 2018 Sandro was watching the rise in popularity of Asian-inspired goods, movies, and music as well as sparkling water brand LaCroix. He felt the existing sparkling water brands, with their lemon, lime, and grapefruit flavors, didn’t represent his heritage. So, he created Sanzo, a startup that concocted delicious sparkling beverages made from authentic Asian ingredients.

“Sanzo brings a lot of those Eastern Hemisphere flavors into the Western Hemisphere market,” says Sanzo’s Director of Operations, Sean Young.

Made with 100% natural sweeteners and boasting five grams (or less) of sugar, Sanzo’s line up of traditionally inspired but modern-tasting flavors includes Yuzu, Lychee, Pomelo, Mango, Mandarin, and Calamansi. Customers began cracking open cans of the deliciously unique drink in 2019, and by 2022, Sanzo had taken off, with its sparkling water filling the shelves at Whole Foods and Sprouts across the U.S. and most Panda Express restaurants across the nation.

Sanzo’s bubbly beverage success naturally led to increased production, the need to scale its trucking capacity, and an expanded employee headcount—all of which, Sean says, the team was handling using Excel spreadsheets.

“It was a mess. When you’re relying on manual inputs across multiple team members from different source data, things become a little messy and harder to keep track of.”

To fix their spreadsheet mayhem and to ensure Sanzo’s success didn’t go flat, the team decided to implement a comprehensive, centralized inventory management solution (IMS): Cin7.

Going from Dull Excel to Sparkly IMS

According to Sean, Sanzo’s reliance on spreadsheets, which included their need to manually translate PDF and EDI-sourced POs into internal Excel spreadsheets and processes, was a breeding ground for errors.

“It led to us entering in wrong quantities, SKUs, and destinations, and this led to downstream costs and customer issues stemming from mistakes.”

As a growing company, this logistical complexity was drying up the Sanzo Team’s enthusiasm, as did its:

• Lack of operational scalability
• Inability to accurately account for financial transactions
• Need to frequently reconcile finances and inventory numbers

So, they searched for a solution that could bring the sparkle back.

“We realized Cin7 would provide the most synergy and cross-functionality between our operations and finance teams. It also integrated with QuickBooks, which was very important.”

The implementation took place in December 2022, and Sean says it was a smooth process. “The implementation was mainly driven by our team with assistance from a Cin7 onboarding rep to help us steer us in the right direction. No major headaches, and we obviously learned along the way.”

And when go live time came, Sean says stress levels were low. “We had enough interaction with the Cin7 platform, including replicating past orders to get a better feel for Cin7, to make go live less daunting.”

Drinking In the Refreshing Benefits of Implementing Cin7

Just as Sanzo’s beautifully designed pastel cans are the perfect vessel from which customers can sip its Asian-inspired sparkling water, Cin7’s inventory platform is the ideal solution for Sanzo.

“Cin7 is clearly the backbone of our operations, finance, and accounting functions now,” Sean says. “Its ability to integrate with our vital applications and to act as an intermediary to help translate and pass along data to all the resources we use outside of Cin7 is key.”

Automating Logistics with Owlery

In addition to QuickBooks and an EDI integration, Sanzo relies heavily on another important application: Cin7’s partner Owlery. Travis Downs, one of Owlery’s founders, says it’s an AI logistics platform that automates and optimizes every freight and logistics decision.

“Cin7 gives brands like Sanzo total control over their inventory. What we do is make sure every freight decision coming out of that system is optimized automatically. Owlery reads orders directly from Cin7, finds the best carrier rates, releases orders, and controls costs across their full supply chain. For Sanzo, that turned logistics from a bottleneck into something they don't even have to think about. And they were up and running in days, not months. ”

With Owlery, the Sanzo team automated their manual PO management. It previously took two or three people to input the information multiple times across different platforms, but Owlery streamlined the entire process and minimized human interaction and error.

Owlery, which Sean says was integrated into Cin7 in just a couple of days, also helped Sanzo carry the load of managing multiple warehouses and freight providers. Because the two solutions connect seamlessly, Sean says their pre-order processing time has gone down from roughly two days to less than ten minutes, and they have the information they need to compare freight handler rates and choose the most cost-effective, reliable freight options.

“We are now truly operating with a single platform between Cin7 and Owlery. It’s all just centralized.”

What other effervescent benefits is Sanzo experiencing with Cin7 as their integration hub?

• Streamlined order fulfillment with Owlery’s automation, going from almost 2 days to under 10 minutes to get an order out the door
• Improved inventory visibility and control by eliminating hundreds (or thousands) of transactions in Excel
• Decreased end-of-month reconciliation timeframe from almost a full week to less than a day
• Increased cross-functional communication
• Reduced human errors to virtually zero
• Lower freight costs on every lane - with the data to prove it

Sanzo also has increased confidence in managing customer concerns (including having proof of delivery via Owlery) and in handling financial reconciliations due to relying on a single source of truth.

“Our finance manager can go in and pinpoint any discrepancy tied to a specific transaction,” Sean says. “We can go into Cin7, find the exact invoice or sales number rather than sift through hundreds if not thousands of rows of data in Excel to figure out what went wrong, and we can fix it immediately.”

Ultimately, the Sanzo team is spending less time reacting to problems and more time leveraging their now trustworthy Cin7 data to make strategic decisions that improve efficiency and drive future growth. “Cin7 is helping us get out of the weeds of day-to-day tasks so our team can focus on long-term, strategic initiatives that will enable us to scale effectively.”

Bubbling Down on Success with Cin7

Looking ahead, the Sanzo team is excited to continue scaling its Asian-inspired, fruit-infused beverage in both natural and more conventional selling channels. And Cin7’s role as they move forward? Acting as Sanzo’s operational, financial, and accounting foundation and with Owlery powering their logistics, the Sanzo team has the AI and automation capabilities that will deliver deliciously tangible results.

“I can say confidently that with Cin7 and our partners like Owlery in place, we don’t have to think about adding additional technology. Our priority is truly just growing the brand.”