Running a fresh food operation is already one of the hardest businesses to manage. Perishable inventory, tight margins, location logistics — the operational complexity never stops. So when the financial side of the business runs on spreadsheets, gut feel, and a bookkeeper who closes the month five days late, the cost isn’t just an inconvenience—it compounds.
I sat down with Yury Zabella, our CFO with a founder-to-exit track record and verified 8-figure revenue outcomes, to talk about what manual financial processes actually cost food founders — and what a more intentional setup looks like.
Jess: Many fresh-food operators we talk to are managing their finances the same way they did when they had one or two locations. At what point does that become a real problem?
Yury Zabella: It usually becomes a problem before the owner realizes it. The clearest sign is when growth stops translating into profit. Revenue goes up, you add locations, you’re moving more product — but the margin stays flat or actually shrinks. That’s almost always a systems problem, not a sales problem.
The manual approach works when the business is simple. But once you have multiple locations, variable product costs, and a team, you’re generating more financial complexity than a spreadsheet or a once-a-month bookkeeper review can meaningfully capture. The lag alone is dangerous. By the time you find out last month’s numbers were off, you’ve already made three weeks of decisions based on nothing.
Jess: What does that lag actually cost? Can you put a number on it?
Yury Zabella: It’s hard to put a universal number on it because it shows up differently for every business, but I’d say the most common places I see money disappear are shrinkage that nobody’s tracking in real time, pricing that hasn’t been updated to reflect actual input costs, and labor or vendor expenses that have quietly crept up without anyone noticing. Any one of those, left unexamined for 60 or 90 days, can quietly erase what appears to be a solid month of sales.
Beyond the direct cost, there’s the opportunity cost. When an owner spends hours reconciling accounts, chasing numbers, or waiting on reports, they’re not thinking about the next location, the next product, or the next relationship. That’s the cost that doesn’t show up on a P&L but absolutely shows up in the business over time.
Jess: What does a more functional setup actually look like for a fresh food operator – not a Fortune 500 company, but someone running a real, growing microstore or food distribution business?
Yury Zabella: It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. The fundamentals are: know your numbers weekly, not monthly. Have a clear picture of your cost per unit, your margin per location, and your cash position at any given time. And make sure whoever is touching your finances, whether that’s you, a bookkeeper, or a fractional CFO, is set up to surface problems quickly, not document them slowly.
For a fresh food operator specifically, the biggest unlock is usually getting real visibility into where margin is actually being lost. Is it a product category? A specific location? A supplier relationship that made sense six months ago but doesn’t anymore? You can’t answer those questions from a monthly summary. You need the data to be moving with the business.
Jess: For an operator who’s reading this and recognizing some of these patterns in their own business — what’s the first step?
Yury Zabella: Honestly, start with one question: can you tell me, right now, what your margin was last week? If the answer is “I’d have to check” or “I’m not sure”: that’s your starting point. Not a software purchase, not a new hire. Just get clear on what you don’t know, because that gap is exactly where the money goes.
From there, it’s usually a short conversation to determine whether the fix is a process change, a better tool, or someone to help you build the financial infrastructure the business actually needs at its current stage.
