How Scott Conant’s Pasta Sauce brand scaled from 0 to 1,000 points of retail distribution with Analyst House.
“There’s no ‘that subject is not important to us, we’re only the finance team.’ You’re an extension of the founders’ table.”
Summary
The challenge.
Chef Scott Conant had a product and a vision, but needed capital, and financial infrastructure to get it off the ground.
The solution.
Analyst House helped convert Scott’s vision into a financial model that told a story about the growth potential of Martone Street. This model led to a successful pre-seed fundraise. As the capital arrived and a team organized around the idea, Analyst House managed everything involving dollar signs from controller services like bookkeeping, AP, AR, and payroll to strategic finance like monthly budgets versus actuals, variance reporting, investor relations, COGS negotiations, and data analysis. Scope deepened over two years into supply-chain negotiation, board reporting, and stewardship of the celebrity-led brand.
The outcome.
Two years in: nearly 1,000 retail doors, multiple seven figures in revenue, a follow-on round closed, and a 24-month plan compressed into 16 months, all without a single in-house finance hire.
The Challenge
A celebrity-chef platform with no financial scaffolding to turn brand equity into an investable business
Celebrity chef Scott Conant had spent more than two decades building a national platform. Near-daily airings on the Food Network, millions of followers, and a recognizable point of view in Italian-American cooking had made him one of the most visible names in the category. For years, he had translated that platform into restaurants, like Leola and The Americano Atlanta. As Scott’s brand kept growing in value, he wanted to share his original passion with the world: his famous pomodoro sauce.
Board member and Director of Business Development Ben Kaplan saw a path. Pasta sauce as a category was premium-izing. Scott’s brand is iconic, and a CPG company built at scale could turn the platform into something that compounded for a long time. With Scott Martino as Chief Operating Officer, the founding team had a brand, operators, and conviction. They still needed to raise capital, and a finance department to support.
Enter Analyst House.
Some friends of the team had worked with Analyst House before and made the introduction. The first call happened before the company was even incorporated.
Over weeks and months, Analyst House, along with the founding team, developed a financial model that explained how the company would scale over the next five years from an idea to a nationally recognized premium pasta sauce brand.
“Analyst House was very instrumental to putting an investable business model around a ‘why?’. That’s a really sort of unique partner to have along the way — and at that stage.” — Ben Kaplan, Director of Business Development & Board Member, Martone St.
The Solution
Analyst House grew from financial modeler to embedded finance department over two years and four stages
Analyst House took on Martone St.’s finance function in stages, deepening scope as the business grew. What started as a single modeling exercise became a fully embedded finance department.
Stage One: Building the Model that raised $1.5 million
The first job was translating a brand thesis into numbers an institutional investor would underwrite, and doing it with the limited information that can be expected from a company before its product is fully formulated. Analyst House built a 3-statement, investor-grade model alongside the founders as the business was being shaped. The model carried Martone St. through a roughly $1.5 million pre-seed raise and has been iterated upon continuously to support every decision along the way.
“The pivoting of the models as quickly as we needed them led investors to feel like we were buttoned up and justified on our financial approach. We did a lot of work very quickly to get that done when we needed to.” — Ben Kaplan, Director of Business Development & Board Member, Martone St.
Stage Two: Funding hits, now we need financial operations
Once funding hit the bank, the finance function had to switch on immediately. Analyst House stood up the books in QuickBooks, AP with Ramp, payroll with Gusto, and all the sales systems, including SPS Commerce, distributor portals like KeHE and UNFI, and Shopify for DTC.
CPG accounting and financial operations can be unforgiving: distributors aggressively charge off-invoice fees, billbacks, slotting, freight, MCB deductions, etc. Small, consistent leaks can compound quickly, and most early-stage brands don’t have the time or expertise to catch them. On one of Martone St.’s early distributor statements, Analyst House identified roughly $94,000 in billback charges across 87 line items. They contested them line by line, and recovered approximately $84,000. That single recovery covered the entire first year of the engagement.
“All those details are what are going to make or break a company. In CPG, you can easily give away an extra 10 to 18% in unexpected charges. There’s always a question that comes to the surface [with Analyst House] that I wouldn’t have thought of.” — Scott Martino, COO, Martone St.
Stage Three: Finance becomes an extension of the Founders’ Table
As the business scaled, data started to flow more regularly: point of sale data, velocity data, industry data, financial data, manufacturing and inventory data. The company needed a strategic finance department to support with frequent financial decisions. A standing weekly meeting was born where the founding team and Analyst House synced on ongoing questions and initiatives, like:
- Optimizing cost of goods sold
- Supporting with fundraising
- Running market analysis to determine new SKUs and sizes
- Making production plans and supporting the sales and operations (S&OP) process so the company uses its cash efficiently and carries neither too much nor too little inventory
“We get a startup-quality work ethic — a sense of relentlessness about the mission that doesn’t clock out at 5:00. There’s no siloing into ‘that subject is not important to us, we’re only the finance team.’ You’re really like an extension of the founders’ table.” — Ben Kaplan, Director of Business Development & Board Member, Martone St.
Stage Four: Stewarding a Celebrity-Led Brand
Creator-led CPG comes with a particular set of risks. Scott Conant’s brand is critical to his livelihood, and every external partner with visibility into the business is a risk. Confidentiality over both personal and company information matters more than in even a typical startup. If company details leaked to the press or a third party, the damage would extend to Scott personally, and to his reputation. The team at Analyst House takes great care to protect Scott and his privacy and reputation.
“You’ve crafted a relationship with Scott where he can trust you guys with the most intimate details of his life. We don’t feel like that’s been a risk at all with Analyst House.” — Ben Kaplan, Director of Business Development & Board Member, Martone St.
The Results
From zero to nearly 1,000 retail doors without a single in-house finance hire
Two years in, Martone St. has gone from pre-product to seven-figure run-rate and approaching 1,000 retail distribution points including Sprouts. A pre-seed round of approximately $1.5 million has closed, and a follow-on round has closed behind it. The team set up contract manufacturing, sourced raw materials from suppliers, managed national logistics, and kept a close eye on cash as the company scales.
On the operations side, distributor relationships are managed with a level of rigor that has earned Analyst House trust. The country’s largest food retail distributor unlocked Martone St.’s brand portal well in advance of when it normally would for a brand of its size, a direct response to the quality and relentlessness of Analyst House’s work.
“ROI happens every week. It’s not a moment-in-time thing. Day to day, we’re getting added value because you’re always thinking about being responsible with cash and ensuring the ROI on your fees is outperforming any other vendor in the mix.” — Ben Kaplan, Director of Business Development & Board Member, Martone St.
The harder-to-measure result is what Scott Martino describes as confidence. He has worked with finance teams in past ventures where projections never lined up with reality, where the numbers in the room never quite matched the business outside it. That isn’t the dynamic now.
“We turn over every stone. There are multiple wonderful people asking the right questions — and when we get to the answer, I always feel super confident. When you’re confident in the direction forward, you focus your energy on being successful.” — Scott Martino, COO, Martone St.
Why It Matters
For CPG founders, financial rigor is the difference between struggle and survival
Most CPG founders don’t go looking for a finance partner until something is broken or on fire: a funding round, an audit, a dispute threatening cash. Martone St. recognized at the idea stage that rigor in finance, accounting, and data is what allows CPG companies to scale.
What Analyst House offered was an embedded finance team that started before there was a company, and grew into strategic work as the business needed it. The same partner that built the first investor model is the same partner sitting on supply chain negotiations and stewarding the brand today.
For CPG founders and operators trying to translate a strong story into a durable business, Scott Martino’s framing of the partnership is the one that lands.
“I view you guys as employees. Colleagues. I forget you’re contract, essentially. It’s pretty amazing.” — Scott Martino, COO, Martone St.
