The Good Food CFO podcast · The Good Food CFO

BABOYOT with Harvest Chocolate: Using Data to Drive Smart Growth in a Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Business

·53 min·3 clips

Matt says his revenue mix is roughly 50% in-store, 25% online, and 25% through retailers.

Sarah Delavan talks with Matt Cross, co-founder of Harvest Chocolate, about the numbers behind a bean-to-bar chocolate business. Matt and his wife, Elizabeth, built the company after years working in fine dining across San Francisco, Napa Valley, Chicago, and New York City. The conversation keeps its feet on the ground. A simple profit assessment becomes a way to think about the business, not just a report to file away. Sarah explains how people can take data from QuickBooks and move it into the tool with a copy-paste workflow, which keeps the process light enough to actually use. That matters because the point is not to build a perfect finance system on the spot. It is to make the numbers easier to read. They also talk about a mistake that showed up after a switch from QuickBooks NextUp to QuickBooks Online. Once that issue was found, it could be corrected. Sarah notes that some people use the profit assessment as a projection tool. That idea opens the door to a simpler forecast. Instead of trying to do everything at once, she and Matt focus on sales projection. Matt had said he could work through a forecasting course, but for the purpose of office hours Sarah steers them toward something faster. They use a Shopify report showing sales by channel over the last 12 months or 2024 as a whole. From there, they calculate each channel's percentage of total revenue. That simple ratio work changes how the numbers look. It can make a business see where its weight is actually coming from. From there, the conversation turns toward growth and the question of where the company should expand next. The tone stays calm and explanatory, with Sarah checking that each step still makes sense. By the end, the episode feels like a working session that turns noisy data into a usable next move.

As heard by us

A grounded growth conversation for founders trying to turn sales data into decisions.

Harvest Chocolate co-founder Matt Cross gives the piece its weight, while Sarah Delavan keeps it grounded in the work of running a bean-to-bar chocolate business.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a simple way to turn Shopify and QuickBooks numbers into a clearer sales forecast, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Good Food CFO podcast