Matthew Wadiak
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Matthew Wadiak’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It was a tornado, I've got to tell you. So, yeah, we built our first center in Queens. We very quickly moved to a fulfillment center in Brooklyn. And we were packing 20,000 boxes a week on Mounder Street in East Williamsburg. Just like we had boxes lined up on the curb. We had trucks pulling up to this little one-way street, like big semis, like on an hourly basis. And then shortly after...
We filled that up. I got on a plane and I flew out to California and opened up our... In year one, our first fulfillment center in Richmond, California. And then very shortly after that, a fulfillment center in Grand Prairie near Dallas, Texas. So on a weekly basis, I was chief operating officer of the company. So I was flying...
to California and Texas every single week as we were hiring thousands of people to run fulfillment. And the challenge was beyond just building lots of stuff that had never been built before, packing food in a way that had never been packed before. So if you go to a grocery store today, anywhere in the world, you'll find fish that's vacuum skin packed. You'll find an individual steak.
You'll find individual chicken breasts. None of that existed. 15 years ago. So it was pretty much foam overwrapped trays. But if you put something like that in a box and you send it in the mail, it's going to leak everywhere. So we had to really like, you know, do a lot of innovation around packaging around little sauces and little, um, Small portions of spice packets, things like that.
And in many cases had to build engineering around machines to pack those items are now used commercially. So actually, a lot of people don't know this, but much of the work that Blue Apron did in lean packaging is now used in grocery stores that you can see it in the grocery store of it in.
We tried to. We looked at a lot of 3PLs to try to manage fulfillment for us. At the end of the day, so I'm actually, my history is in food and cooking, and I started my career as a chef before I started my first business, and that migrated into Blue Apron over the years. So for me, being a food person, the quality of ingredients was really important.
And part of the problem with the food system is that you can buy really commoditized food and have it packed for you in scale. But the kind of ingredients that you can use in a recipe is highly, highly limiting. So that wasn't an option. If we wanted to use really great ingredients,
pasture-raised meats and fresh herbs and organic produce and things like that, we really needed to work with farmers and then pack those ingredients ourselves. So behind the scenes, besides fulfillment, we built an entire supply chain around 250 farms growing food specifically for Blue Apron and then packaging those ourselves because that was our only option.
So while it would have been nice to work with 3PLs, the issue is that they're generally expensive and... If you're not dealing with commodities or basic services like shipping and packing, in food, expensive, time-consuming, you lose all semblance of quality control, and that also affects customer service and customer-oriented rock. So we did it when we built it. It was a lot of work.
Yeah, so everybody's seen the office and you know that there's a big separation between the office and the warehouse, even though they're in the same building. We definitely had that complex where we had our engineering side, our web product, our marketing, our big office in New York City, and then we had all the fulfillment centers.
There are like almost too many. Yeah. I mean, yeah. So I could tell something anecdotal and kind of funny. Sure. So one customer called up or sent an email. I can't remember. And she was convinced that there was the tail of a rodent in her box. When we were all freaked out. So she sent this blurry cell phone picture, 15-year-old cell phone. I'm not a great picture.
And we're like, oh my God, that's so horrible. And I think our ops manager, his name was Gary Kliegman, got on an airplane, flew out to her house, was like so apologetic, wanted to inspect the beast and opened it up. And it was, it was a beetroot. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah.
So, like, stuff like that, you can just imagine tales like that and just, like, you know, suffering and just a lot of boxes in transit all the time. So a lot of funny, funny stories and, you know, stressful times, like running out of an ingredient and, you know, halfway through packing boxes or something like that, power outages, you know, natural disasters, all kinds of stuff.
But ultimately... Yeah, fresh food.
Yeah. I will say when you're working with people like that, the ops team, the marketing team, my co-founder, Elia, who is our CTO, you build these kind of friendships that are just like, these are my guys for life. We're just so, so close and connected even today. And it's nice to have gone through that experience with like-minded folks.
So moments like that. In reality, something happened. You know, people tend to be pretty forgiving as long as you poison somebody or whatever. But, you know, we were hyper vigilant around that kind of stuff. We were young and we were you know, we wanted everything to be the best. So we put a lot of work into it. But there were there were there were a few funny stories like that along the way.
Yeah. So folks looking to exit a company, whether it's a sale or IPO, a lot of the business becomes oriented around, you know, readiness for sale or IPO, which includes a lot of internal audit, a lot of systems. You know, at one point we were running, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue on QuickBooks, you know, like putting an ERP in place. I'm like, oh, it's for the NetSuite.
NetSuite is an easy today, but It was really difficult back then, especially when you're transferring over that much receivable and billing and complex systems. So I would say there are challenges associated with that. Any entrepreneurs out there listening, integrate your CRM and your ERP early. Don't do what we did. Yeah. The culture changes a little bit around that.
Certainly, there's excitement around those events, but it's very important to not lose creativity and engagement and innovation around product because... It's many companies get to that point, probably including Blue Abram and fail to innovate at the speed that they need to, as they did when they were early, because they're becoming more conservative. They're worried.
They're getting ready for this financial event. And the financial event should not define the company. The company's innovation should define the company. So I'd say that that is, you know, was an area, the financial stuff was an area of focus. I think, you know, in hindsight, it's important to make sure the creativity and product innovation remain at the most important, the highest level.
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