GoldFinch Case Study: Pascha Chocolate

Are you a chocolate lover?

Pascha Chocolate takes chocolate to a new level. They are obsessed with purity and have created organic dark chocolate products that are deliciously good for you and our planet. Chocolates from Pascha are “the most divine and transparent chocolate indulgences in the marketplace, full stop, no shortcuts”.

Pascha selects the finest organic cocoa beans with exceptional taste characteristics. All the beans are directly sourced from certified organic farms using approved agrarian, social and ecologically sustainable methods. Factories are carefully selected for their cleanliness and commitment to quality.

Their chocolate is certified organic, non-GMO, allergen-friendly, vegan, has no preservatives, sulfites, emulsifiers, or sugar.

“The cleanest, purest dark chocolate on the planet”

– Simon Lester, Founder & CEO Pascha Organics

Pascha’s dark chocolate is:

• Great for your heart
• Helps clear brain fog
• Good for your skin
• Nutritious

We recently spoke with Simon Lester, Pascha’s founder and CEO, regarding the contributions GoldFinch Cloud Solutions and Salesforce have made to their growth.

I began the business in 2013 with the vision of making the cleanest, purest dark chocolate on the planet.

One of the biggest difficulties was finding a factory that was clean enough. They can’t ever have run milk chocolate because that meant we could never get the level of purity that we desired -the milk powder gets into the fabric of the building. Peru is a big source of our organic cocoa beans and we do most of our manufacturing there.

With our supply chain in place, we put all our energies into building our sales base, primarily in the US because it is a huge market. We looked around for a system which would be cloud-based, could handle different currencies, product traceability (for our organic certification), and more. We wanted one system that could do it all, and we thought we found it.

“They actually have what we need!”

– Simon Lester, Founder & CEO Pascha Organics

Gradually, as we grew, problems arose:

• Lot control and traceability were buried too deep and at too granular a level so that data was not easily accessible;
• Invoice receipt processing was flawed;
• The custom deduction processing tool was found to conflict with the accounting records.

We didn’t have the ability to customize the system to run things our way. We could get the customization, but with a high initial cost plus a yearly fee.

Probably most frustrating of all was the reporting. We were processing transactions but we could not configure reports the way we needed to, which really meant we had an accounting system as opposed to a total business system.

It became insane. Then the partners got into litigation. That was our cue to move on and look for something that was truly fit for purpose – which is not easy as a small company with specific requirements and a tight budget.

I immediately began the search for a new ERP system and literally kicked the tires on every system on the market. We had very specific requirements and we did not want to compromise, at all. No one system could do what we wanted (and we did not want multiple, integrated systems) within a reasonable cost.

We needed to manage our core business activities and processes easily and intuitively, and then report and analyze the data in different dimensional ways. Most systems attempt this and can handle it to a greater or lesser degree. Mostly lesser.

Then I was walking the floor at a food expo and saw the GoldFinch booth. What the heck, I thought, let’s try it. And to my amazement these guys have actually done it. They actually have what we need!

GoldFinch is able to handle our transactional management and do it beautifully. Some of the details of managing distributors, warehouses, billing, commissions and chargebacks are quite complex. It required some customization which GoldFinch support immediately understood. They modified the system to give us exactly the cut of data we need, at no charge, during implementation.

“Analyzing the data is incomparable”

Our old system could not handle our ecommerce business without a lot of time and effort. GoldFinch created a simple integration with Shopify that pulls the orders in, processes
them and then boom, out the door. Salesforce has a lot to do with this functionality. It saves us 10 hours a week!

Previously lot tracking was cumbersome. Now it is much cleaner and simpler. The data is accessible and is robust – I know exactly what is in each lot code batch and where it has
gone. No guessing, no duplication, do hidden sub-lots. It just does exactly what we need.

“GoldFinch checked every box, with a lower total cost of ownership”

– Simon Lester, Founder & CEO Pascha Organics

Analyzing data with GoldFinch is incomparable. I think they leverage the underlying database functionality of the Salesforce platform. I recall a line from an on line demo I had early on – there is almost nothing you cannot do in terms of data reporting and configuration. This is our finding and it is incredibly powerful – whatever cut of information and analysis you want to use to understand your business, GoldFinch can handle it – and you do not need to be a code-writing tech head to do it. It is so user-friendly and flexible.

We have configured sales commission reports with invoices and deductions by broker, we can combine shipped and open orders in one sales report, we can look at gross margin by segment or sub-segment or any way we want to. For a data and analysis junkie like me it is very helpful – no excuses now not to use this multi-dimensional data to profitably grow our top and bottom line!

Our ecommerce sales are growing rapidly. Before, we had to process each order manually, and we projected we might have to hire another person for this operation.

Now, with GoldFinch and the capabilities of Salesforce, we just press a button. Oh, and now there are no mistakes.

There’s great potential for us with Salesforce. It’s brought huge improvements to our ecommerce business.

“Bottom-line: we trust the GoldFinch Salesforce solution. It’s robust, it’s fast and it’s way better than anything else outt here. I really couldn’t ask for more!”

– Simon Lester, Founder & CEO Pascha Organics

We were not using Salesforce when we decided on GoldFinch and I was worried that there’d be a “language” barrier”. Now I’m using Salesforce to drive our outreach and control the lead flow. With the automated workflows, it’s not always on me to remember. Plus, there’s huge functionality in the Salesforce ecosystem.