Building every growth channel from zero
- Client
- foodcircle GmbH, a B2B platform for food ingredients and financing for F&B companies (Berlin)
- My role
- Chief Growth Officer
- Dates
- Feb 2020 – Mar 2022
- Scope
- acquisition, sales, operations; managed a team of 6
The starting point
Food manufacturers buy ingredients like it's 1995: phone, fax, three brokers and a 40% margin lost to middlemen. foodcircle wanted to fix that with a digital wholesale platform offering transparent prices, certified organic suppliers, logistics, and 60- or 90-day payment terms built in.
When I joined there were no acquisition channels, just founder-led sales. Then COVID hit, supply chains broke, and suddenly everyone wanted a digital alternative. The trick was being findable when they went looking.
What I did
Built three channels in parallel, then let the data pick the winner.
I set up organic (SEO, content, social), paid search and outbound at the same time. I tracked each one as its own cohort: customers, orders, GMV and contribution margin by signup month.
Treated Google Ads like a weekly experiment, not a campaign.
From February to July 2020 I ran week-by-week iterations on ad groups per ingredient (cocoa, hemp protein, turmeric, coconut oil), headlines built around minimum order quantities ("Minimum order 25kg", "Order a pallet online"), remarketing, and a launch into Italy with localised copy. Each week we killed what didn't convert and doubled what did.
Made outbound scalable.
Lead lists came from the big trade fairs (Anuga, WorldFood, TuttoFood, Natural Products), enriched and sequenced, with LinkedIn automation on top. I tracked every sales hire's efficiency month by month: customers acquired, orders, booked GMV against salary and bonus.
Went vertical first.
Ice-cream manufacturers became our beachhead. We learned their production cycles and ingredient specs, then expanded into dairy, superfoods, nuts and dried fruit.
Fed the funnel with content.
I added an organic-ingredients ebook, webinars, case studies and trade-press features, all wired into an AARRR framework with clear KPIs at every stage, from enquiries to wallet share and referrals.
Results
- Monthly GMV scaled from €30K to €2.2M, 12x year over year
- CAC down 70% through performance-marketing optimisation and outbound playbooks
- In year one: 20k monthly users and 200+ food manufacturers and suppliers active on the platform
- Managed a team of 6 across marketing, sales and operations
The cheapest channel on a dashboard is rarely the cheapest channel on a P&L. Measure CAC fully loaded, by cohort, against what customers actually buy over time. Then be brave enough to move the money.