How Kodiak Cakes is building a procurement function that punches above its weight

Growth That Outpaces Process

Kodiak Cakes started with a flapjack mix. Today, it’s one of the leading brands in the US breakfast space. That single product became a full portfolio: baking mixes, frozen waffles, oatmeal, granola, bars, muffin cups, and syrup. Each new product brought new ingredients. Blueberries, specialty proteins, cocoa, grains, nuts, dairy. The company is still growing fast, with ambitions to become a billion-dollar brand, and every expansion makes the ingredient mix more complex.

The team responsible for sourcing all of it? Three people.

Ankit Shah is Associate Director of Ingredient Procurement at Kodiak Cakes. He and two colleagues split the full ingredient portfolio between them: fruits and nuts, grains, cocoa, dairy, everything. Before Kodiak, Ankit spent years at one of the largest food manufacturers in the US. There, strategic procurement, operational buying, and commodity risk management were each handled by separate, dedicated teams.

At Kodiak, those three jobs belong to the same people.

“Here we’re wearing multiple hats. In my previous job we were more strategic procurement and then we had operational procurement. But here we have to be both strategic and operational procurement. And on the strategic side, we also have to be our own commodity risk management team.”

— Ankit Shah, Associate Director of Ingredient Procurement, Kodiak Cakes

Growth that outpaces process

The team responsible for sourcing all of it? Three people.

At Kodiak, those three jobs belong to the same people.

Kodiak’s growth outpaced its processes. Until recently, RFPs went out once a year at year-end, with no regard for seasonality or market timing. There were no formal commodity risk management standards. Procurement, finance, and R&D had no shared language for what ingredients should cost. The brand has scaled fast. Now, procurement is building the function to match.

A new mandate

Over the past year, Kodiak has invested in procurement as a strategic function. New leadership, new talent from large CPGs, and a clear directive: procurement doesn’t just buy ingredients. It protects margin and helps Kodiak compete on shelf price.

“We’re laser focused on cost savings, analyzing the markets, making sure we’re covered, making sure we have contracts for every single category.”

That’s a big ask for three people. They needed a tool that could close the gap between a team of three and a fully staffed department.

Vesper as the commodity risk team

Kodiak’s ingredient procurement team uses Vesper every day, across every category they manage. The entire team uses the platform religiously, whether they’re looking at cocoa, fruits, grains, or dairy.

“We don’t have a commodity risk management team. Vesper helps us essentially have an ad hoc commodity risk management team, because the tool brings those abilities to our day-to-day roles.”

That daily use spans multiple workflows. The team uses Vesper’s AI forecasts and market analysis to build a bi-weekly commodity dashboard for leadership, covering their top inflationary ingredients. They use Vesper’s cost models to work with finance on should-cost calculations. And they’re now building a sourcing calendar that aligns RFP timing to crop cycles and market conditions, instead of running everything at year-end like before.

“Instead of going to different websites, different tools, and piecing everything together from multiple supplier updates, Vesper gives us a very focused view of what the market’s doing.”

Kodiak is also working with Accenture to build out internal commodity risk models. When the team showed Accenture how they were using Vesper, the reaction was straightforward.

“Accenture thinks it’s a very good tool. They’ve advised us to continue using Vesper as our baseline for commodity risk management.”

Earning a seat with leadership

Finding the right price is one thing. Getting leadership to trust the number behind the decision is another. At Kodiak, Vesper’s AI forecasts and confidence intervals have become the language procurement uses to talk to the rest of the business.

— Shown for illustrative purposes. This is an example of Vesper’s AI price forecast view with confidence intervals the type of data used to inform buying decisions and leadership conversations:

“Leadership loves the confidence intervals. They want to see that for every single commodity, especially the ones critical to the P&L. It helps us create opportunity cost conversations with leadership. Upside, downside, how long to book, what happens if we don’t.”

The leadership team especially values being able to see forecast reliability at a glance. In monthly meetings, Ankit can pull up forecast accuracy for each individual commodity forecast, right there in the room. That transparency turns a procurement update into a strategic planning conversation. Short-term forecasts inform immediate buying decisions. Long-term forecasts help the team plan coverage and assess risk across the portfolio.

Finance sits in on those conversations too. They see exactly where the data comes from. For the first time, procurement and finance are working from the same set of facts.

One set of numbers across the business

R&D picks suppliers based on quality. Finance models margin off last year’s prices. Procurement negotiates based on what the market is doing right now. When everyone works from different assumptions about what ingredients should cost, decisions drift apart. A shared cost model fixes that.

“Should-cost modeling allows us to know where we stand, what the true margin impact should be, what our component cost should be. It gives us a benchmark against the market. If our suppliers are charging us more, we can show what the price should be based on the analytics.”

— Shown for illustrative purposes. This is an example of how Vesper’s Cost Model breaks down ingredient costs, the kind of view used to benchmark supplier pricing and align on should-cost calculations:

Ankit’s team is working to make Vesper’s cost models a shared resource with finance. If procurement, R&D, and finance all look at the same numbers when making sourcing decisions, you get fewer arguments and faster sign-offs.

But cost models aren’t just for internal alignment. They’re also how Kodiak benchmarks against competitors. If a rival brand can hit a lower shelf price, the model helps trace where exactly the gap sits in the supply chain.

“If we want to benchmark against our competitors, how are they able to reach a certain price point? A should-cost model helps us look at our entire supply chain, all of our cost inputs. If we want to become more competitive in the marketplace and gain more share, we need to know our component costs.”

That’s procurement as a competitive function, not just a cost center.

Faster prep with Vesper Copilot

With a three-person team, every hour of prep time counts. Ankit uses Vesper’s Copilot before leadership meetings and when he needs to dig into a specific commodity market quickly.

“Doing it myself, I’d probably spend about an hour going through different supplier decks. Using the chatbot, it cuts my time down in half. I still cross-check against what suppliers are saying, but the bulk of the research is done.”

— Shown for illustrative purposes. This is an example of a Vesper Copilot query, the type of commodity research the tool delivers in seconds, with sourced answers ready to act on:

That time saving adds up when you multiply it across monthly leadership meetings, bi-weekly dashboards, and ad hoc requests from finance. Half an hour saved here and there is time Ankit can spend on the sourcing calendar or the hedging model instead.

Feature Spotlight: Vesper Copilot

An AI market analyst built into the platform. Ask a question about any commodity and get an answer grounded in verified prices, forecasts, analyst insights, and news from Vesper. Every answer includes source citations, so you can trace the reasoning yourself before acting on it.

Getting up to speed

Ankit joined an existing Vesper account at Kodiak. His onboarding followed the standard process: a kick-off call for general training, then a second call where his CSM tailored the platform to his categories. That meant setting up dashboards for his specific commodities, configuring the views he’d use for leadership reporting, and pointing out features he might have otherwise overlooked.

“Gabriel was patient and knowledgeable. The first call was general training and the second was really about tailoring the platform and dashboards to my needs. He made sure I knew about the Copilot and other features that would give me the most value.”

Within weeks, Ankit was building commodity dashboards, preparing leadership presentations, and using Vesper as the baseline for Kodiak’s commodity risk management.

Vesper’s Adoption Promise

Every user gets up to speed. Not just on day one.

Every account gets a dedicated Customer Success Manager, available throughout the subscription
Every new user goes through structured onboarding: general training, then a session tailored to their products, regions, and workflows
Training is unlimited. New joiners, refreshers, deeper dives into specific features, whenever you need it

What’s Next

Ankit’s team is still building. The sourcing calendar is going category by category, aligned to crop cycles and market timing. A preliminary savings calculation is in the works to show what market-aligned buying timing saves versus the old year-end approach. And the cost model rollout to finance is ongoing.

“We’re using Vesper in a lot of our processes across the board. It’s been key for us as we build out all these processes within procurement that have not necessarily been there yet at Kodiak. As we quickly scale up, we’re putting all these processes in place. And we have a great tool to help us out. Not often do you get to put on your resume that you’re helping build out a procurement function from scratch. That’s what we’re doing here.”

Three people, every ingredient category, and a tool that helps them punch above their weight.