From: Aline & Jon, Koko Kai Yogurt
People assume the hard part of running a yogurt company is making the yogurt. It’s not. The hard part is everything that happens before and after — the planning, the money for inventory, the daily accounting, the orders, the PO’s, the pallet, the truck, the cooler space.
And underneath all of it is a number most customers never see: what it actually costs to keep the lights on. Our electric bill has doubled in the past six months. Our sales haven’t doubled. Our margins definitely haven’t. That’s the quiet math every small food brand is doing behind the scenes — ingredient costs shift, utility costs climb, and the price on the shelf has to somehow absorb all of it without moving every time something upstream does.
So when we decided to move off glass, it wasn’t as simple as picking a new cup and calling it done. We had to engineer the whole switch from the ground up. That started with the cup itself — we were committed to finding a genuine alternative to plastic, not just swapping one packaging problem for another, and that search took a long time. Paperboard had to hold up to our texture and fill process without breaking down, which most options simply couldn’t. Once we landed on the right cup, we still had to change out equipment on our production line to accommodate a completely different sealing process — glass and paperboard don’t seal the same way, and getting that dialed in took real trial and error before we trusted it at full production volume. Then came building an entirely new run of inventory from scratch before a single case could ship. No coasting on existing stock. Everything, from packaging to labels to case counts, had to be built new.
Then came the part we take just as seriously: making sure our retailers didn’t feel any of that chaos. We worked with each of our wholesale partners across Hawaiʻi individually — timing new inventory around their existing stock, sending samples ahead of the actual switch, and giving them a real transition window so no store gets stuck juggling two versions of Koko Kai on the same shelf.
Getting a new package designed is one thing. Building it, stocking it, and helping every single retailer switch over without a hiccup is the real job.
