At midnight on January 17, 2016, three friends sat eating dinner on the floor of their to-be-opened-the-next-day kiosk. They didn’t know then that their love of sesame-based tahini and halva was going to turn into a nationally recognized brand, nor that Cin7 was going to play such a vital role in their success.
Rachel Simons, Lisa Mendelson, and Monica Molenaar met in New York City in 2015 and discovered a common love for food, cooking, travel and culture. The three friends funneled their passion into opening a small kiosk in New York’s Chelsea Market called Seed + Mill.
The co-founders were excited to bring quality, Middle Eastern staples, including tahini (a nutrient-dense sesame condiment and paste) and halva (a flaky, sweet confection made from tahini and melted sugar), to an American audience.
“It felt like there was something missing from the market that Seed + Mill was filling,” says Ariella Sklar, Operations & Logistics Manager. “Our founders milled the tahini using a countertop mill, filling every single jar by hand. Customers really responded to it.”
But it wasn’t only customers that were responding to Seed + Mill. As a company that only uses premium sesame seeds sourced primarily from Ethiopia that are roasted and ground into preservative-and-additive-free tahini in Israel, Seed + Mill snagged the interest of Whole Foods. This was the moment that Seed + Mill started to evolve from a “shop” into a scalable business and, eventually, a national brand.
At first, Seed + Mill partnered with Whole Foods Market with a “store-in-store concept” placing halva carts that looked similar to their retail store at 5 Whole Foods locations. Founder, Rachel Simons, says “this allowed us to share a similar Chelsea Market experience with a wider audience.”
When the pandemic hit and its customers couldn’t get their tahini fix easily, Seed + Mill cut slices of their products by hand and shipped them to customers, but keeping up with the demand became overwhelming. That’s when the plan to become a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) business became more of a reality.
Seed + Mill products (which include over 30 delicious flavors of artisanal halva, and several varieties of tahini) are flying off the shelves in grocery chains and specialty shops across the U.S., while its Chelsea Market-only tahini soft-serve ice cream receives rave reviews, including being named by the New York Times as one of the city’s best ice-cream sundae experiences! Seed + Mill is also featured in local restaurant menus, found online, and sold through wholesale distributors, but according to co-founder and CEO Rachel, their business couldn’t have sprouted without Cin7.
“The introduction of Cin7 really came in parallel to us really trying to grow our business into a CPG company. We could never have been anything more than a single ‘shop’ without the transformation to our inventory management that was facilitated by Cin7.”
Prior to implementing Cin7, Rachel admits that she ran the growing business on spreadsheets.
“We had a little Excel spreadsheet that I muddled my way through. I also hired a few other people to muddle their way through, and truthfully, there’s just no way to scale a business on an Excel spreadsheet. Trying to juggle the different sales channels, products, SKU sizes and warehouse locations was honestly just an impossibility.”
Also an impossibility? Relying on unintegrated applications, including QuickBooks, Amazon, Shopify, and Square as well as managing multiple distributors and a complicated overseas supply chain. Additionally, Seed + Mill struggled to calculate its cost of goods sold (COGS) and with tracking POs from Whole Foods, which came via email.
These unsavory challenges, says Ariella, led to Seed + Mill investing in Cin7’s comprehensive inventory management software (IMS), giving Cin7 a veritable open sesame to spearhead the company’s success.
“Cin7 makes everything so much easier. I started with Cin7 here, and I feel like, why would we ever do this any other way?”
By rooting itself firmly in Cin7, Seed + Mill is able to automatically track and move all of its inventory, regardless of where the inventory is located (e.g. different warehouses, online, retail stores, wholesale warehouses, etc.). The team also easily tracks its landed costs within Cin7 and sees all orders in one place. Including what’s in each order, and when it’s scheduled to go out.
According to Russell Kohn, the founder of Pale Blue Dot and a valued Seed + Mill partner who supports the company in wholesale order processing, logistics, finances, and strategy, Cin7 is instrumental in smoothing out Seed + Mill’s supply chain challenges.
“Seed + Mill has two primary suppliers in Israel, which means we have relatively long lead time, so keeping track of which inventory has been allocated for POs is a complex process, and Cin7 substantially helps with that.”
For Ariella, Cin7’s customizable reports have transformed her job by providing trustworthy data she can use to make strategic decisions. “I pull so many numbers from Cin7 that inform decisions about the business, whether it’s placing orders or knowing how much product to order for the next few months.”
She adds: “Cin7’s reporting gives me visibility into our physical store where we test different flavors and see what’s working and what’s not. Cin7 gives me insight into what we could sell to a larger audience, and that’s been really helpful.”
Cin7’s powerful IMS has given the Seed + Mill team the advanced inventory and financial tools and accurate, real-time data they need to successfully grow their complex operation. In fact, Ariella says managing the business without Cin7 is hard to contemplate.
“I’ve never worked at Seed + Mill without Cin7, and I really can’t imagine what they did beforehand because it really does keep everything in one place,” Ariella says. “Having everything so centralized and having one platform that everything integrates into seamlessly makes my life so much easier.” Rachel adds, “you are very lucky you were not here before Cin7. You might have had a nervous breakdown trying to keep track!”
Ariella also mentions that Cin7’s ability to connect with critical third-party applications, including FAIRE, is a boon for Seed + Mill. “FAIRE is one of our biggest wholesale platforms and a lot of our small shops around the country order through FAIRE, so having such a strong integration is really great.”
As for Russell, he appreciates that Cin7 is making Seed + Mill’s growth plans much easier than removing the hull of a sesame seed to implement. “We have the confidence in the accuracy of our inventory to take on new customers and new partners and to expand into a new distributor seamlessly.”
Seed + Mill launched two new products last year with Whole Foods without worrying about whether they had the inventory to fulfill orders, and early this year, the team launched an additional SKU with Sprouts, a specialty grocery store that focuses on fresh, natural, and organic products. Looking ahead, the team is excited for their national rollout of their new, delicious chocolate tahini sesame sauce in a squeeze bottle.
As the company celebrates its first ten years in business and expansion into new markets, Rachel, who says Seed + Mill is all about working with others in the industry, is ready to double-down on their relationship with Cin7.
“Our partnership with Cin7 is really valuable. They help us broker friendships and connections with other clients in the community so that we can learn from and support each other.”