In this episode of the Spilled Salt podcast, Maureen Ballatori sat down with Matt Brown, CEO of Wherefour, Inc., to discuss the importance of traceability and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in today’s food, beverage, and agriculture industries. Entrepreneurs and founders in these sectors understand the value of modern ERP systems can be crucial to a business’s success.
Managing Traceability and the Origins of Wherefour
Wherefour, Inc. was born out of an unexpected place—the cannabis industry. Matt Brown and his team initially developed technology to streamline operations for a cannabis dispensary and cultivation project in Nevada.
The cannabis industry’s strict compliance requirements highlighted the need for robust traceability solutions, sparking the idea for Wherefour. This venture led to the creation of their ERP software, designed to manage every aspect of a product’s journey from seed to sale.
As Matt explains, traceability ensures that every step in the production and distribution process is documented and auditable. This is especially critical for companies dealing with regulated products, where compliance with legal standards is non-negotiable.
Whether you’re managing the transformation of raw ingredients into finished goods or ensuring the safety of products from farm to table, having a reliable ERP system is key. Wherefour’s software provides this, enabling companies to track every data point and maintain a clear chain of custody for all products.
The Benefits of Industry-Agnostic ERP Software
Wherefour’s ERP software is designed to be industry-agnostic, making it a versatile tool for a variety of sectors. Whether you’re producing food, managing an oil and gas facility, or manufacturing cosmetics, the principles of inventory management, production control, and compliance remain consistent. This flexibility allows businesses to streamline operations without getting bogged down by industry-specific complexities.
Matt likens Wherefour’s software to the “operating system” of a business. It handles the core functions—inventory management, production tracking, and compliance—while allowing companies to plug in specialized tools as needed.
Overcoming Challenges in the Food and Beverage Industry
Starting and scaling a food or beverage company is no small feat. Matt shares his experiences working with various brands, from small startups to large-scale operations, and how Wherefour’s technology has helped them navigate the challenges of growth. A key takeaway? The importance of resilience and adaptability in the face of setbacks.
For food and beverage companies, where margins are often tight, achieving scale is crucial for success. This is where a robust ERP and traceability system can make all the difference, ensuring that your products not only meet regulatory requirements but also reach the market efficiently.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Compliance and Traceability
As the industry continues to evolve, so too must the tools we use. Wherefour is pushing forward with new features aimed at enhancing compliance across multiple industries. Whether it’s managing raw material testing or refining control processes, the goal is to help businesses meet the ever-growing demands of regulatory compliance.
Moreover, the potential of AI in manufacturing is another area of interest. While AI can significantly improve efficiency, Matt is cautious about its implementation, especially when it comes to maintaining the security and integrity of proprietary business data.
Finding Success: The Right People with the Right Tools
In their conversation, Maureen and Matt emphasize the importance of finding early champions—customers who believe in your product and help guide its development. For Wherefour, these champions played a crucial role in shaping their software, ensuring it met the real-world needs of businesses.
If you’re a founder or entrepreneur in the food, beverage, or agriculture industries, consider how ERP and traceability software could benefit your business. In an industry where compliance and efficiency are critical, having the right people and the right tools in place can make all the difference.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries. Today’s guest is Matt Brown. He’s the CEO of Wherefour, Inc.
Wherefour streamlines operations for product making and logistics companies. They make modern and affordable ERP and traceability software for companies that manufacture and distribute products.
One of the things that I thought was fascinating about today’s conversation is where Wherefour came from. So where the idea for the business came from, it was actually born out of a cannabis project that Matt and some folks had been working on. And then it kind of took off and grew from there.
And so we talk about that journey, as well as why traceability is so important. And so anybody who’s connected to agriculture and food and beverage really knows that those industries are talking a lot about the traceability for where something came from.
And as we continue to do more, the agency as well as consumers across the board with regenerative agriculture, it is also critical for traceability to be a discussion on the table. And so you’ll learn more about that today in today’s conversation with Matt Brown. Enjoy.
Maureen: Hey, Matt, how are you? Very good. Thanks so much for joining me today. I’m glad to have you on the podcast.
I’m going to start with you. I feel like you’re a bit of a man of mystery because as I go into these interviews, I always do my pre-research and I like to find a little nugget of the individual, like the person at the heart of the business and there’s not a lot of information out there about you. So tell me something interesting about you as a person. Maybe that’s a hobby or an interest or something like that.
Matt Brown: Thank you, I’m pleased to be here. That’s a great question.
You probably didn’t find a lot because I’m not a big social media person, so I’ll be part of it. let’s see, one little factoid is I’ve been to all 50 US states. That’s my claim to fame.
Maureen: Really? What brought you to Alaska?
Matt: A camping trip with my father. We camped outside of Juneau for about three, four days. Experienced that part of Alaska. Highly recommend Alaska. If people have not been there, is everything they say and more. Really enjoyable.
Maureen: I love that. Is that what brought you to most of the rest of the 50 states is like camping adventures or just sort of miscellaneous things?
Matt: I had kind of an interesting childhood. We didn’t do car trips. We did plane trips. My dad and my mother were both private pilots. And so we got to see a lot of the world that was off the beaten path that way. To this day, I’m not a big car trip person. It seems like they take too long.
Maureen: Cool.
Well, comparatively, when you can just hop in the plane, yes.
Matt: Yes, there’s a downside to plane travel. And as a kid, sometimes it wasn’t as fun as it sounds. But I definitely got to see more of the country that way.
Maureen: Yes, that’s incredible. I love it. Great. All right.
Well, now let’s hop over to career-wise. You have been the Founder of a number of companies. And so as you know, from listening to the podcast, we always love to talk about the background that led up to what you’re doing now with Wherefour.
So start me way, way back to the ProMotif days. You know, how’d that start?
Matt: I probably started as a child as a little entrepreneur and definitely have been driven to do businesses my entire career. I think I technically had one job for a couple months. It was a W -2 job and everything else has been kind of my company.
So, ProMotif was a digital design agency that dealt with a lot of food and beverage companies. These were kind of early internet days, so early website, you know, brand strategy days when companies were still trying to figure out their digital media approach and presence and how they even, you know, built websites and what they did with them. We had a lot of fun with that company. It had a nice run.
And yes, so did a number of design agencies after that one as well.
Maureen: Gotcha. That thread was typically about different types of design agencies that you were doing. It wasn’t that you were founding different types of companies.
Matt: No, they were all pretty much design technology driven consulting agencies. A lot of CPG companies, a lot of technology companies, really those developed and I developed over the course of the internet developing and learned a lot about kind of design and approach to implementing and bending the wheel of technology to what you needed to do, which of course, as we all know, doesn’t always happen that way. It doesn’t always want to do what you want it to do. And that kind of fascinated and frustrated me at equal amounts throughout my career.
Maureen: Right. Well, and I would imagine that doing that work leading up to what you’re doing now with Wherefour, especially on the brand strategy side, must be immensely useful to have that knowledge and understanding.
Matt: It definitely helps. I would say it helps maybe me and our team have empathy for what the typical food and beverage brand goes through in their life cycle from startup to trying to get to scale, you know, national level kind of scale. A lot of it is marketing and branding and positioning and figuring out a product spot that, you know, there isn’t a lot of, there is competition and you have a better, different product or there’s no competition and you’re creating a brand and a position in the market.
Both are different challenges. Both we see our customers go through and it is a roller coaster ride for a lot of these companies.
Maureen: Yes, absolutely. We see that too. And so talk a little bit more about Wherefour and the business as well as who you’re working with and some of the challenges that they’re facing.
Matt: Yes, so Wherefour actually started out of the cannabis space, which is kind of an interesting angle.
I had a client at the time that was setting up a brand new dispensary and cultivation operation in Nevada. Nevada was one of the early states that legalized cannabis. And they wanted to really use technology hard and do self-pay kiosks. If you think about an ATM where you get money out, they wanted to reverse that process and have people put money in so their staff was not handling cash.
Cash is a big deal in that industry. Kind of a challenge. High security issue. So they wanted people to feed money in, get a ticket. I’ve paid. Now I go to the window and I get my product. Yes, it was a very cool product.
Maureen: So smart. Fascinating. Well, yes, and I would imagine too that that is a whole other challenge because cannabis brands can’t use FDIC-backed institutions, banking institutions, and so it would be a whole other question of how the money is managed.
Matt: That was a big part of it. Even to this day, they struggle to keep and maintain a bank account because it’s not federally legal.
And this is one of their approaches to kind of deal with that challenge. Part of it was security, part of it was just workflow. I think another part of it was brand and marketing. They wanted to be known as a very high tech dispensary, that makes sense.
Maureen: Most cannabis brands do.
Matt: So our project was building, designing this kiosk and having it talk to their point-of-sale system, which are cannabis-specific products, and make all that work.
And flashback to my statement just a few minutes ago, technology does not always do what you want it to do. This is a perfect example of that. We spent weeks and months trying to get things to work. Sometimes the point-of-sale wouldn’t work. Sometimes the kiosk hardware wouldn’t work.
We were dealing with a state compliance system. Sometimes that wouldn’t work because it was new. It was one of those, we got done, got the project delivered, it was working, and we all kind of went, wow, that was a ride. Do we want to do that more or not?
My two partners at the time decided they did not want to do that. And I decided, well, I don’t necessarily want to do more of that.
But there is definitely something interesting here with this idea of being able to track and trace from the very beginning of a sale of a product all the way through production and to the delivery of it to the consumer at the other end. The compliance side of this was very unique.
Food and beverage, of course, has a lot of legal compliance issues, but maybe not quite to the level yet of something like cannabis or maybe pharmaceuticals. And I just had that kind of thought in my head of this is pretty interesting and this feels like stuff we’re going to need to do more of in the future across all industries.
And that was really the start of the journey of Wherefour, which is, how do we, you what’s out there? Who’s doing it? How good are the products? What’s the competition like? That kind thing. And when I went out and looked around, I realized, I think, you know, we could do this pretty well.
Maureen: And so what do you think your main differentiator is compared to other folks that are doing something similar in this space?
Matt: Yes, probably the main differentiator is really solid traceability. And when I say traceability, every data point that goes into our system is pretty much locked down.
I think about a technology called Blockchain–our technology is not blockchain, but very similar. Once you create data, it relates to the next set of data and so on and so on. And it forms this chain of auditable trade. From one change to the next, we have a record of what happened.
There are other systems that do that. That’s not completely unique. But if you don’t design a system to do that for start, it can be a little bit harder to come along later and say, yes, we want to do that now, and we’re just going to make it work in a way that it wasn’t necessarily originally designed to do.
Maureen: Interesting. So I am often hearing about a desire for traceability in food, certainly in cannabis, hands down, without a doubt, you know, it really has to be measured all along the way.
And anybody who’s in that industry knows that and the importance of, you know, from seed to sale. But the same is true for many agricultural products as well, right? Whether it’s the straight sale of an eating apple from the tree to cold storage and then the store shelves or an ingredient that’s going into a product and then the company having to be responsible for understanding where that came from, as well as regenerative sourcing, right?
Being a new important category where there needs to be a clear understanding of what went into the ground, how it was farmed, and then where it ended up.
Talk to me a little bit more about how your technology works with those various scenarios, right? And I’m also curious, just, I’m apologizing, asking you like 10 questions in one, but I have confidence in you. I’m also curious about how you develop a software-like tech solution that also takes in the needs of those various industries in a way that doesn’t convolute the software.
Matt: Yes, that’s a really good question. So we don’t just work with food and beverage. We have companies across all kinds of industries.
And when you think about the need to track material as it goes through some sort of transformation and do some other form, chemical and oil and gas manufacturing, concrete, paint, cosmetics, personal care, textiles, electronics… There are a lot of industries that are similar.
They’re all going to be slightly different and have nuances here and there, but they’re pretty consistently similar in that they have various legal regulations and state and governmental compliance issues that they have to deal with.
So our approach has been fundamentally, it’s just data. doesn’t, you know, it might be a candy bar or a tank of oil, it’s a unit, right? And there’s maybe, know, a candy bar has, I don’t know, let’s say 10 ingredients and maybe a tank of oil has three and maybe a car has, you know, 10,000. But really does the quantity matter? No, it’s about how that data got transformed and what happens to it and what user did something to it along the way.
Maureen:
Right. It’s a unit.
Matt: So if you think about it in the abstract, the software has to be complex enough to manage that.
The specific nuances of each industry, a good example is food has labeling requirements. We don’t necessarily do the breakdown, as in here’s the calories on the food product and the amount of zinc that goes into it. We don’t do labeling to that level in our product.
There are great products out there that specialize in that kind of function for food products. We could go crazy with those kinds of very industry-specific functions.
So we don’t. We try to keep kind of sticking to our knitting, which is managing inventory, dealing with the production of product, managing the data around that, and all the other business aspects of purchasing and invoicing and customer orders and things like that.
Maureen: So rather than developing everything that a particular industry needs that you could, right?
I think the point about the labeling function for food is an excellent example. You’re really doing everything that could be needed related to traceability, inventory, production, the way things move through a system, regardless of the industry. you’re industry agnostic and you’re an expert on the tool.
Matt: Yes, exactly. If you think about a system like ours, I view it as kind of the operating system of a business. The operating system gets you 80, 90% of what you need your business to do, but every once in a while you need to hire a consultant or use an outsourced tool or what have you. And that’s that other 15, 10, 15, 20% of your business.
Maureen: Well put. you have been CEO of Wherefour for just over nine years now and clearly know your stuff, right? According to your LinkedIn, it’s nine years.
Tell me about a high point and a low point in that time as you have gone through growing the business.
Matt: Has it really been that long? Please.
Well, that’s a great question. High points. There are a lot of high points actually. I really enjoy what we do. And I think the part of what I enjoy the most is seeing some of our customers and how they’ve grown, especially through things like a global pandemic, how they’ve managed to survive and thrive through that.
Some of our customers were very small when they started with us and we were small with them. And it has been neat to see how they’ve expanded and I’ll be traveling or be in a random grocery store somewhere and say, wow, that’s our customer. I’m going to buy it and think how cool that I know them and know what they’ve been going through and how they’ve struggled in their business.
That’s the part that gets me out of bed every morning, to get to work.
Low points, I would say, I haven’t had any low points recently. They were all in the early days. Low points were a lot in the early days.
And anybody who has started a business from scratch can probably relate. There are days when you think, I’m working on something and putting life energy into something that I’m not 100% sure anybody is ever going to buy.
And there were all those days early on when we were building our platform because it didn’t do much in the very early days. It was hard to convince people to even use it, let alone part of the money to use it. And that is, I’m glad to see this. When I hear nine years and I think, wow, I’m glad to hear those days are well in the rearview mirror.
Maureen: I think also when you’re building every small success and failure or setback or low point is another like just a drop in the bucket of I’m going to keep going. And it’s just a little bit more resilience and it’s a little bit more confidence every time you go through something.
Every success that you hear from a client that you picked up that you saw on a shelf, you know, when you were in some random grocery store in Alaska perhaps, you know, but to be able to watch that happen, you kind of get reassured at every point along the way, right? And then before you know it, you’re nine years later.
Matt: I was really lucky to get introduced early on to a new food brand. It was a goat cheese company. And they were making marinated goat cheese, which is not so common in the US.
It’s apparently very common in Australia. And that’s where the founder was from. And one of his key employees, early employees, was a real champion saying this is absolutely needed in the market. We have not found a good tool to do this. Keep going. You know, build this, build that, you know, and really listen to her heavily to inform what we were doing and where we were going with it.
And so you probably have listeners out there that are thinking about starting a company or maybe in the middle of starting one and they probably have moments where they have those thoughts like, yes, somebody bought it, but am I ever going to be big enough to have a team or have my own facility or be national or even international?
If you can find those early champions, treat them well. They will treat you well. And it is amazing what a difference it makes in the journey of your company and your experience.
Maureen: I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more, especially for food and beverage, because the margins in many cases are so, so slim that you really have to get to scale at quite a degree in order for it to make sense. But, you know, high risk, high reward, right?
Matt: It takes time and money as well. So there’s always the, you know, if somebody is putting their own money into the project, that’s a whole nother level of stress. Am I ever going to see this back? Ever?
Maureen: And like I said, it’s that when you’re going through those sort of self-questions of, I do this? Do I take this next step? Do I take this risk?
It goes back to the reassurances of building that resilience from before that we were just talking about, Which is exactly why I always like to ask anybody who comes on the podcast about their back, because it’s not just about what you’re doing now.
What you’re doing now is fascinating, it’s important work, you’re contributing to the industry, but there’s all the things that came before Wherefour that led you here, right? And that made you the perfect person to do this work.
Matt: It is definitely not a straight line. If you had asked me 10, 20, 30 years ago, would I be doing this today? I never would have guessed I would be doing manufacturing software.
I’ve always been fascinated by manufacturing, probably even as a kid, it was one of those serendipitous, just like you said, series of life experiences that gave me the aha moment that there might be something here and also the set of skills required to even attempt to try to solve something. I think that’s also part of it.
If I was thinking about a food business, there are so many skills required to make it successful. And some people have more of one or two than the other. And some people are very generalist and have 10 skills and maybe don’t go really deep in one or two that they might need. It is interesting.
I think it’s very key to ask people how they got to where they got because it’s probably never a straight line.
Maureen: I totally agree. It’s one of my favorite parts of the show, understanding the background for people.
So I want to shift this conversation a little bit to more forward thinking. We were just talking about having specialized software for a particular need that is really industry agnostic. So when you think about rolling out new features or new integrations or things like that, how do you approach research and development for your new updates to the software?
Matt: Well, the good news is we have some pretty good customers that have very strong opinions about what they want to see. And that probably drives about, I don’t know, 70 to 90% of what we actually even know we want to build. The other part of that is we look at various industries and think about things that they need.
We definitely look at the landscape of the market and see how we fit against all the other companies who are trying to solve the same thing. And also try to keep a very two to three year window out about these might be the problems and challenges now, but what are people going to be dealing with three years from now?
AI is one of those things that probably has great potential to add a lot of value to a lot of companies and their workflow processes, and also has great potential to be very disruptive and game changing, not necessarily in good ways sometimes for companies as well. So that’s in there too.
Maureen: Yes, absolutely. The fascinating thing to me about AI as I continue to play around with it and explore different ways that it can be applicable to my business and anything that I’m doing too is when it kind of invents an error and really runs with it. I’ve seen that happen.
And also the newest thing that I saw on TikTok yesterday… If you ask any of the large language models, how many Rs are in the word strawberry? There are three. It says two. Have you seen that?
It’s so, well, actually I saw a TikTok that explained it and I would just have every, the listeners go look it up because I’m not going to try and paraphrase how the LLMs work. yes.
Matt: That is fascinating, isn’t it? Yes, what is up with that? I need to go right there because I’m curious.
Maureen: It is an incredible opportunity to be able to incorporate AI into our workflows. And it’s great that you have the open mind, that is, what is the way that we can work this in with caution, right? Because it’s all about, and for you as a brand guy, you know that you can’t roll something like that out with your software until you’re sure, right? That it’s going to maintain accuracy and everything like that.
Matt: And the other aspect for me that I mentioned before, I’m not a big social media user. AI to me is kind of the next version of social media and that to make it work and to make it work well, everybody is putting all of their data into one place. And for us and our customers who have proprietary recipes and business processes that they don’t want exposed.
I get very cautious about things like AI. Because yes, you could put guardrails on it, and there are apparently privacy restrictions and stuff. And we know how that goes in the technology world as well.
There will probably be decades of legal ramifications and case law that needs to be developed before some of that is actually something I say, yes, it’s solid, right? It’s a new technology and it’s always got issues.
Maureen: Yes, I totally agree. Yes, definitely some, some resilience to be built to continue that, that thread of the conversation and also legality in terms of usage, right? Anytime I’m talking to somebody who says, I just use AI to write all my blog posts. It’s like, well, how are you sure that that’s not, you know, somebody’s going to come after you for plagiarism because of the way that that was developed.
Matt: I think what’s interesting about AI is if you explain to the average person, AI sounds amazing, and it is at many levels. But if you explain how it actually works, then I think people kind of have that light bulb of, yes, I could see some problems there.
Maureen: Anytime I’m talking to somebody about it, it’s exactly in the context that we’re using it as AI is an incredible tool to incorporate with a human, right? For a human to, you know, kind of with ethics and integrity, apply it to a tool or to a business. Yes.
So last question for you, tell me a little bit about what’s next. What’s next for the company? What’s next for you? What’s on the horizon?
Matt: Well, let’s see, what’s next for us as we’re tackling, we said a lot of industries have compliance issues or compliance challenges. We are tackling that in a big way with our next push, and that is to solve compliance and kind of critical control procedures across multiple industries. So if you think about it, I might need to test materials that come into my warehouse.
We have capability to do that now, but can you stop somebody from using it or can you move that off to a different process and have some control refinement of it and then it gets kicked back into that process again? So, probably control workflow to think about it that way.
Maureen: Interesting. I toured a very large wine making facility on the East Coast recently. It was fascinating. And so I was there when they were receiving trucks of grapes, you know, and so one of the trucks that had been trying to come in needed to be rejected because the truck was contaminated.
It was like, well, that doesn’t mean that the grapes are necessarily contaminated. But in that case, if the truck, then the grapes, you know. Iit all had to be contaminated. But if there was a way for that not to be a waste. And for it to be remediated in some way. And then like you said, kicked back into the process that would allow for some optimization.
Matt: That’s exactly the kind of challenge that we’re looking to solve. One of my most favorite manufacturing experiences was visiting the Gallo facility out here in California.
I didn’t realize they did it at that scale on the East Coast too. That’s pretty cool. Okay. So yes, you see all these, to paint the picture, you see all these giant semis loaded with grapes come in and they dump the grapes into this giant crushing facility. It is wild.
Maureen: That’s the facility that I went to see, Gallo East Coast. It’s not as big as the one on the West Coast, but yes, it was a Gallo facility.
I don’t know if your interest in manufacturing came from watching too much how it’s made as a kid, but yes, me too. And so I love to go see a facility. went, it’s one of my, I won’t go down the rabbit hole of some of the coolest that I’ve seen, although that could, we could probably compare some notes about like cool facilities.
It’s just such a fascinating thing to get an understanding of the background and for you too to be industry agnostic like we’ve been talking about and see the controls for something like pharmaceuticals, oil and gas compared to food and cannabis is gotta be so fascinating.
Matt: It is. If you get a chance to see a cannabis cultivation facility, it’s pretty hard to get into those because of course they have to lock them down. It’s another kind of fascinating process. It’s farming, but not farming. It’s a greenhouse, but not necessarily a greenhouse. It’s a very interesting mix.
Maureen: I agree. New York State, which is where I live, recently legalized recreational use of cannabis. And so as that was coming online, I’ve been able to tour some processing facilities as well as some cultivation as well. And again, another conversation that we could have, as a standalone, but yes, really fascinating to see how all of that works.
Matt: That’s great. I’m glad to know that Gallo has a facility on the East Coast. That’s pretty wild.
Maureen: Next time you visit with your parents, if you’re looking for the next place to fly to, I’ll let you know the nearest airport there.
Matt, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate being able to hear your story and talk a little bit more about the brand and your background and your interests and learn a little bit more about you. So thanks so much for taking the time.
Matt: Sounds good. Thanks, Maureen. Likewise.