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Vinit has extensive experience across both emerging startups and multinationals, notably at AB InBev, where he led South Asia’s FPNA, budgeting and business performance.
Currently, as the CFO at The Whole Truth Foods (TWT), Vinit brings his strategic and financial expertise to drive the company’s mission of rebuilding the world's trust in its food. TWT is dedicated to the cause through its offering of products that are entirely clean and packaging that is transparent and honest. Their commitment is deeply rooted in the belief that customers do not want to be lied to or misled.
At TWT, what are your primary focus areas?
At TWT, a primary challenge for us is moving toward more data-driven decision making. To enable this, we want to consolidate all the data in one single place. With diverse data flowing in from production, finance, branding, sales, and more, our objective is to streamline this influx into a single source of truth. This will ensure that stakeholders across the org have access to consistent, reliable data.
Another crucial focus for us is to make data readily available for near-real-time decision-making. We believe that when decisions need to be made fast, having up-to-date data at your fingertips is imperative.
What were your past problem-solving strategies and the challenges you encountered?
Previously, in order to enable data backed-decisions, we established a dedicated team of data analysts, with each department having one analyst to help with decision making.
However, we encountered a common challenge where our data analysts often became consumed with data preparation tasks. Most of the time when we were problem solving, they ended up spending time solving data issues rather than on solutions for the problem at hand. Still for most of the decisions, we were not able to get the data and had to rely on piecemeal information.
To address this issue, we recognized the need to build a better data structure to enable effective problem solving using data. This is where GobbleCube came into the picture.
How does GobbleCube help TWT solve problems better?
GobbleCube helps us reliably monitor and track our performance across multiple channels — Blinkit, Instamart, Zepto, and Amazon, among others. By consolidating these metrics like channel-level sales, offtakes, inventory, and market intelligence, GobbleCube helps identify channel-specific opportunities to grow our sales and market share across the board.
What we liked the most is the ease with which we can compare how we fare versus our competition when it comes to assortment offered, on shelf availability, promotions, and merchandising visibility, and the areas of improvement we need to focus on.
With the data and insights now readily available across the teams, people will now focus on execution strategies rather than just getting data together and trying to answer base level questions.
This makes the interactions of our teams, including Shashank (our founder), much more productive and meaningful.
What was your experience collaborating with GobbleCube?
Working with GobbleCube has been a refreshing experience. It never felt like we’re working with a bunch of coders who are focused solely on building a tech tool. The entire team at GobbleCube has a deep understanding of business intricacies. What stood out for me was their proactive approach; they didn't just ask what needed to be built but actively contributed ideas and solutions.
Having partners who grasp both backend and frontend requirements has been a huge benefit. For instance, at the outset, we prioritized the process of data gathering, cleaning, and mapping before diving into the presentation of data into UI and UX. This collaboration elevated our approach to solving data and analytics challenges at TWT to a whole new level.
What suggestions do you have for GobbleCube to further enhance its offerings for businesses?
GobbleCube could consider expanding beyond revenue-focused analytics to include insights into costs and profitability metrics moving from contribution margin to EBITDA. Given that GobbleCube has already solved the difficult problem of integrating data from multiple sources in a single place, it is at a unique vantage point to target the overall financial health and performance. For instance, at a very overarching level, there will always be constraints in business where one needs to make choices like:
- Which customer do I prioritize for supply-constrained SKUs - the one where I get better margins or the one that has lower availability?
- How to allocate limited marketing budgets across channels to maximize ROI?
I feel that with the kind of vantage point that GobbleCube is creating, it could help our team make smarter decisions.
