On this episode, we’re joined by Sean Campbell, COO at Semifreddi’s - the Bay Area-based beloved artisan bakery known for its sourdough.

Before Semifreddi’s, Sean led operations at Kiva Confections, helping scale one of the nation’s top cannabis edibles brands from ~$20M to ~$150M in revenue, and held ops roles at Double Rainbow Ice Cream and San Francisco Salt Company.

He’s a rare operator who’s scaled ops in traditional food, frozen, ambient, and regulated cannabis, bringing a cross-category playbook for formulation, production lines, co-manufacturing, and NPD.

Sean lays out the margin levers that actually move the P&L, how to build supply-chain redundancy, and the tradeoffs between in-house manufacturing vs. co-packing. We dig into the ops leader’s evolving role from $20M to $150M+, and the nitty-gritty of forecasting COGS and margins.

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Episode Highlights:

🥖 Semifreddi’s origin story and what makes a 40-year bakery scalable today
🍫 Scaling operations at Kiva from ~$20M to ~$150M
📉 The 5 levers
👤 The ops leader’s role from startup to scale
🌿 Making the pivot from traditional CPG to cannabis (and back again)
📊 Forecasting COGS & margins
🛡️ Supplier redundancy, tariffs, and de-risking your BOM
🏭 In-house manufacturing vs. co-manufacturing
🗺️ Expanding geographically
🧪 NPD best practices: stage-gates
🧠 Hard-won lessons: what Sean would have done differently

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Table of Contents:

00:49:09 - Semifreddi’s origin story
02:52:03 - Scaling ops at cannabis edibles company: $20M - $150M
11:32:08 - Key margin levers
17:40:08 - COVID supply chain disruptions
18:50:27 - An ops leader’s role as a company scales
23:14:07 - Making the pivot from traditional CPG to cannabis
27:38:16 - Forecasting COGS and margins, where things go wrong
31:30:22 - Supply chain redundancy, tariffs
34:11:25 - In-house manufacturing vs co-manufacturing
40:02:00 - Ops and expanding geographically
44:48:01 - NPD (new product development)
49:07:11 - Learning lessons

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Links:

Semifreddi’s - https://www.semifreddis.com
Follow Sean on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-campbell-87393021/
Follow Adam on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-martin-steinberg/
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