#194 - AI for Ops with YANY Beauty and Phenomenal Foods Co

The Startup CPG Podcast · 29 Apr 2025 · 39m · Episode 148

AI in practice: 6 real uses of AI described

What this episode covers

Yaminah Childress, founder of YANY Beauty, and Veronica Blue, founder of Phenomenal Foods Co, discuss how small CPG teams leverage AI for operational efficiency. Veronica uses ChatGPT to manage recipe costing, unit economics, and investor projections, while Yaminah employs tools like Perplexity AI for market research and Contractor AI for legal agreements and forecasting. The episode highlights how these founders use AI to replace traditional back-office functions, enabling solopreneurs and small teams to scale without hiring extensive staff. They emphasize treating AI as a tool rather than a threat, using it to automate complex data tasks and generate accurate financial models.

AI in practice

Where this conversation describes AI being used to build or deliver a product. Part of the AI in practice tracker.

Running the companyContractor AIseveral times a month

Yaminah Childress used Contractor AI to generate legal agreements for influencers and content creators by answering pre-written prompts, eliminating the need for external legal review for standard contracts.

“I use Contractor AI, which is a new tool that I use for things like forecasting. I use it for agreements. … it can write those agreements for us … it's already pre prompted so you don't have to have an attorney to ask you the questions it asks you ahead of time.”

Yaminah Childress ·

Running the companyPerplexity AI

Yaminah Childress used Perplexity AI to conduct market research for UK expansion, retrieving specific market share data and competitive landscape facts to inform business strategy.

“Perplexity AI search engine is all about facts and figures. And so it was, it's able to give you market share, what it would look like if your brand went into whatever country … it gives you all of those really specific market research tools…”

Yaminah Childress ·

Running the companyChatGPT

Veronica Blue used ChatGPT to create two-to-three-year financial projections based on real input data rather than historical percentages, improving the accuracy of investor-ready numbers.

“I'm always chatting with ChatGPT. Probably the most helpful thing that I've been able to do is work with my costing, scaling, recipes, things like that. And then I kind of fold all of that data that it gives me into my two to three year projections.”

Veronica Blue ·

Running the companyChatGPT

An unnamed brand used ChatGPT to aggregate retailer onboarding documents and data to distill requirements into standard operating procedures (SOPs) for PL partners and distribution centers.

“I talked to a brand who hasn't yet launched, that is launching in Target, and they are using AI to aggregate a bunch of retailer data and onboarding documents. So then they can take that data in those documents and they can distill it down and create SOPs for their three PL partners…”

Caitlin Bricker ·

Running the companyChatGPT

A user named Clara used ChatGPT to extract and format deduction data from difficult PDF retailer reports into structured data sheets, saving time compared to manual entry.

“someone was asking about that in the Slack and she was like, chad, GPT can extract all of that for you into a nice little formatted data sheet. And then you'll just have your data table of all of the deductions coming in.”

Daniel ·

Running the companyChatGPT

A user named Clara used ChatGPT to remove check digits from 100 UPCs faster than using Excel skills, demonstrating speed advantages for simple data manipulation tasks.

“I spoke to somebody named Clara and Clara shared with me that she is very handy with Excel, but she was able to remove check digits from a hundred UPCs way faster with ChatGPT than she could do with her Excel skills.”

Caitlin Bricker ·

Mentioned

Companies
YANY Beauty, Phenomenal Foods Co
Tools
ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Contractor AI, Replit

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