Sarah Rachmiel, Connecting Home Cooks with Restaurant Suppliers Impacted by COVID-19

July 6th, 2020

Hope everyone had a great long weekend!

Many places, especially food suppliers, have been severely impacted by COVID-19. As a response, Sarah Rachmiel co-founded Local Porter, an intermediary connecting home cooks with independent restaurant suppliers. In doing so, she's paving a way for local ingredients to have a place in your kitchen, while also helping these companies survive and thrive during a troubling economic climate.

In this feature, Sarah shares with us why she started her career in consulting, experience at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, transitions from Fortune 500 to start-up, and ultimately, her founding of Local Porter. Read along to soak up her incredible career advice for ambitious women, such as yourself.

Early Career

You studied Neuroscience at Vanderbilt, and then went into management consulting at Deloitte after graduation. Why did you choose the consulting path, and how do you think starting out in consulting has benefited you long-term?

As a Neuroscience major, I was on a pre-medical track. During my junior year of college, I realized I didn’t want to be a doctor, so started attending various on-campus recruiting events to learn about alternate career paths. After sitting in on the consulting sessions, I liked the idea of moving from project to project and solving hard problems with smart people. I also love to travel, so as a young 20 something it seemed like the ideal job to get a foundational understanding of “business”. I wanted to move back to my home state of California after graduation, and Deloitte had an excellent West Coast healthcare practice.

Consulting turned out to be a great place to start a career. The expectations are high, the pace is fast, but you learn so much so quickly. In addition to the skillset you develop as a consultant, employers and hiring managers strongly value experience with top consulting firms, so Deloitte has continued to be a positive stamp on my resume as I sought new opportunities. And while I started on healthcare-focused projects, I eventually landed on my first retail case and absolutely loved it. It was a professional “aha”’ moment: I knew I wanted to focus my career in retail.

During your four years at Deloitte, what skills did you learn that have been transferable to other roles? On the flip side, is there anything about starting out in consulting that made working in industry more challenging later on?

While I gained exposure at a high-level to various functional areas across different industries, after four years I couldn’t quite claim to have deep functional or industry expertise in any one given area. However, what I did refine early in my career were all the soft skills that can be equally important - how to work in teams, how to influence without direct authority, how to interact with executive leaders, how to structure an approach to a tough problem, how to make decisions and be effective in various environments, etc.

In making the jump to industry, you quickly realize consulting in a given industry isn’t the same as operating in that industry. As a consultant you often get to see a small piece of a bigger picture, and it can be hard to appreciate the surrounding complexity in the day-to-day operations. It’s why as a hiring manager today, when reviewing a resume with consulting experience, I’m also looking for deep functional or industry experience, whether through consulting or other roles. The other big difference - if you don’t like a particular assignment, in industry roles you don’t always get to finish it quickly and move on to the next!

After Deloitte, you decided to pursue an MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Why did you pursue an MBA, and how do you think business school impacted your subsequent career choices?

Business school is a great way to make a career transition - it can serve as a reset where you take time to develop additional skills (for me finance was a big area to beef up!), build new networks, and explore alternative career paths. I wanted to transition from consulting to retail, and several of the retailers I was interested in had post-MBA roles available.

A business school network can be extremely powerful. I often tap mine for career advice, introductions, leads on new roles, learning about new topics, and recruiting for open roles on my team or in my organization. I also help give back to the students and the program, so it’s been a highly valuable community to be part of.

Walgreens & Walmart

You spent over two years at Walgreens before moving on to pursue a product role at Walmart eCommerce. What prompted the career switch, and what was the most exciting part about working for a Fortune 1 company?

I loved my time at Walgreens. I moved from a retail strategy role after business school to buying, where I managed multi-million dollar P&Ls, launched a few new businesses for the company, and touched almost every area of brick-and-mortar retail: assortment, merchandising, branding, pricing, promotional strategies, vendor management, product development, global sourcing in partnership with our Hong Kong office, and store operations.

While I was there in 2016, e-commerce was a small part of Walgreens’ portfolio while Walmart started making large investments in the digital space, notably the acquisition of Jet. I pursued a role with Walmart to build a digital skillset as the industry was shifting to omni-channel retail. Walmart is truly an incredible company, the pace with which it moves and innovates given its size is remarkable. And so is the impact - many of the decisions I made impacted millions of customers immediately, which is really exciting in an e-commerce environment where you can move from concept to execution quickly.

Jet Black & Local Porter

After nearly two years at Walmart, you joined Rent the Runway’s co-founder, Jenny Fleiss, at Jet black: a personal shopping service via text message born out of Walmart’s incubator. While you were there, you launched and led the Retail Partnerships Division. What was the biggest change in going from a Fortune 1 company to a startup?

The access to resources. In a startup environment you learn to be really scrappy and creative in how to achieve a stated goal since you can’t readily tap into an existing pool of resources/tools or specialized teams - you have to figure it out. It’s actually a really fun challenge that can lead to an optimal solution far from where your thinking began. Startup environments also force you to go “high and low” often since in the earlier days you ARE the function, which keeps you very close to the customers and core operations of the business. Within an hour I could go from meeting with senior leaders of a retail partner to packing their products in boxes for our customers. While it may take a little more effort at a larger company, it’s extremely important to continue to find ways to stay close to the core of your business and your customers.

Several months ago, Jet black shut down operations after you had spent a year and a half there and rolled its technology into Walmart. Looking back, what was the most important lesson you learned from your experience at Jet black?

Say yes to new opportunities and run toward the hard stuff, it’s usually where you learn the most. Jet black was the first portfolio company in Walmart’s incubating arm, which was designed to create solutions to address the future of retail. When presented with the opportunity to join Jenny Fleiss and the early team, I picked up and moved from San Francisco to New York because I wanted to be part of one of the next step changes in retail - shopping through conversational commerce. It can be more comfortable to stick with what you know, but I’ve found that the most learning takes place when you’re comfortable getting a little uncomfortable with a new role, team, functional area, etc. I’m really proud of what we built at Jet black, and excited to see how Walmart leverages the technology to serve millions of customers.

In the past few weeks, you’ve launched your own business, Local Porter, which connects home cooks with independent restaurant suppliers impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, bringing ingredients sourced by the best chefs in the world to your kitchen. What prompted you to launch your own company, and how have your prior experiences positioned you well to be a founder?

I’ve been quarantining in NYC, and read an article in Eater a few months back indicating that during the restaurant shutdowns, New Yorkers could now purchase ingredients typically bound for Michelin restaurants. I love to cook, so started reviewing the list of suppliers, many of which were selling directly to consumers for the first time. I noticed that many of these suppliers didn’t have a direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform, the shopping experience was fragmented since there wasn’t one place to shop products across multiple suppliers, and there were hundreds of other independent suppliers that had an excess supply of top quality ingredients and no outlet for them. Given my background in D2C retail, e-commerce, and marketplace technology, I thought this was something I could help solve, and wanted to do my small part to help the restaurant community during the COVID outbreak.

I called up a former colleague from Jet black who had experience in the restaurant industry (Brian Bush, my Local Porter co-founder), and we decided to give it a shot. We started with the idea that we could build one central platform connecting home cooks with independent restaurant suppliers impacted by COVID, and that 100% of the product sales would go to suppliers until things started to look normal again. Our main goal was to help producers, purveyors, ranchers, and farmers survive the pandemic, and a nominal service fee helped us cover the costs of hosting the site and processing payments. Fast forward two months, we’re now shipping nationwide and working with suppliers that source ingredients for Momofuku Ko, Blue Hill, Quince, Frenchette, Eleven Madison Park, and other top restaurants across the US!

Most new businesses don’t stem from pure innovation - founders often launch a business derived from a different way of thinking about a problem or area they know well, evolving it or putting it together in a new way. That’s what we’re doing with Local Porter. We’re also tapping our network to help in areas we don’t know as well.

We’re extremely grateful to Aspire to Her and Eater NY, among others, who have helped promote Local Porter to support the industry we love!

First-time founders often talk about how starting a company is quite different from working for one. What has been the best and the most challenging parts of launching Local Porter?

Best: figuring out how to make the business work to make a meaningful impact. It’s a new business so there isn’t a template. It’s been really fun getting this platform off the ground quickly knowing that each sale is helping the independent supplier community as well as helping consumers access top quality products they couldn’t purchase before (especially meat, which is still tough to find at local grocery stores!).

Most challenging: Getting creative in how to successfully launch a new business 100% digitally while we’re quarantining!

Advice

What do you wish you knew when you were first starting your career?

That most people aren’t 100% sure what they want to do “when they grow up”. There is often pressure to find THE perfect first job, and it’s more about jumping into a job that excites you or gives you meaningful experience that will lead to the next one. Once you have experience, you start learning what you do and don’t like, and that experience is what will qualify you for another internal or external role.

What advice do you have for young women in their early career who are interested in pursuing a career in the start up space?

Generally: Talk to people who have worked for startups to understand what it really means to be at an early stage company. I think the term “startup” can have a certain cool factor associated with it, but in reality it’s pretty gritty and all-consuming work -- which is what those who gravitate toward startups also find exhilarating. And if you’re interested, just do it! There is no perfect time to join a startup. You will only know if you like it if you give it a shot. And early in your career is such a great time to take chances and be selfish with your professional ambitions -- other life responsibilities will start to pile up!

More tactically: Should really believe in the startup team (particularly the founder) and the product, and understand the access to capital.

Who is one woman you aspire to be like?

My mom has always been one of my top role models. When she was 10, she immigrated to the US from former Yugoslavia with her parents, without speaking English and with little money. She ended up putting herself through college and then business school, and eventually became a senior executive in the male-dominated automotive industry. Watching her climb the career ladder has taught me two things: 1) dream big and 2) there is no substitute for hard work - put in the time!