From Garage Pop-Up to $16M Grocery Store: The Riverwards Produce Story with Vincent Finazzo

Alan Li (00:00)
Today's guest, Vincent Fanazzo, is the founder of Riverwoods Produce, a small batch grocery market in Philadelphia with two locations. And Vincent majored in art at Columbia College Chicago and came to Philly hoping to work at the art museum. But when that didn't pan out, he ended up joining a grocery chain called Whole Foods. And 15 years later, he now owns two brick and mortar locations, employs over 75 people, and has rethought what a grocery store can be.

Vincent, thanks so much for joining the podcast.

Vincent Finazzo (00:32)
Thanks for having me.

Alan Li (00:34)
Awesome. Well, before we dive into RiverWords, we'd love to just hear a little bit more about your background from yourself.

Vincent Finazzo (00:42)
Sure. Like you said, I went to school for art and art history in Chicago. I'm Michigan native. I grew up in the Detroit area. I went to school in Chicago. I ran away to New York. I worked at art galleries and things there. And then I ended up in Philadelphia trying to get a job at the museum and stuff like that.

And Whole Foods was right near the art museum. And I walked in and that was literally when they had like kiosks in the store that you could like apply through with a touchscreen, which does not exist anymore. Yeah, yeah. And I applied for every single open position. And yeah, they hired me as a janitor.

Alan Li (01:28)
You applied in person. Wow.

Vincent Finazzo (01:40)
I started at Whole Foods as a janitor. I worked my way around. think it was 2010-ish.

Alan Li (01:46)
And what year was this?

Vincent Finazzo (01:55)
And, ⁓ yeah, I work my way into different departments. I ended up in produce was really good at it became a buyer moved stores around the Philadelphia metro area. And then.

came back to the store that I started at to run that produce team. And then I kinda, I was young and I was in my mid 20s and got antsy and was trying to start things. And that's right when Whole Foods was starting to.

⁓ boiled down their logistics to be more streamlined and function like a bigger grocery chain. So things like ⁓ working direct to farmers and DSD stuff really started to stop. They wanted you to order from the warehouse so that the regional Whole Foods would all have the same things and kind of those like consistency aspects that ⁓

Alan Li (02:47)
Mm-hmm.

Vincent Finazzo (03:08)
They wanted to go for so I left and I took a job with a national produce brokerage company. So think like any other brokerage company, but I would ⁓ buy and sell produce by the tractor trailer, mostly out of the ports. So the tropical port down in Miami, Florida, central Florida, like a mock Lee, which is responsible for growing a very large percentage of like.

commodity produce like, you know, an example, there's a company down there that I visited that we were talking like. Thousands and thousands of acres of green beans, just straight monocrop. Little dystopian. You know, picking green beans, filling dump trucks, literal dump trucks with green beans that would back into a facility, dump them into a chiller.

And there would be a series of conveyor belts and out the other end would shoot a pallet of prepacked and bagged green beans. So very, very big ag, right? Which was a little different from the kind of organic and local side of things that I started, but it. Abled me to understand how food moved around the country and around the world and the idea of shipping and freight and ports and all of that.

So I kind of grasped a little bit of that. And then I was living full-time in Philadelphia and friends were opening restaurants and bars in the neighborhood fish town, which now is very different than it was 15 years ago. And I was the...

guy who was doing produce, right? So all my friends that were opening restaurants were like, can you get me a case of lime with the lemons for the bar? And I was like, I can, but that's not really what I do right now. And then I kept getting asked and yeah, I left that brokerage company and I started to deliver produce to restaurants full time. ⁓ I would do that in the morning and you know,

We can we can get into it, but you don't make much money off of wholesale. ⁓ 5 bucks a box is like average. So if you think you think 15. Boxes. You know, you're you're lucky if you're coming out of there with 50 bucks, you know, maybe maybe 70 bucks and that's just. What you make that's not paying you or fuel or anything so.

Alan Li (05:29)
Yeah.

Wow.

Vincent Finazzo (05:57)
I grew the wholesale side of the company pretty fast. It was a popular neighborhood. There was lots of things opening up. I was the young dude kind of doing that. And so we grew it. And we started to have lots of leftovers because anytime a chef would call me, I would do anything that they would ask. They're like, I only need a half a case of oregano. I'd say, okay.

Well, the distributor, you know, the wholesale markets, the big, big guys, they don't sell you a half a case. So I buy a half a case of oregano and then I'd have another half case. And maybe if I could do it right, I could keep it until the next time they needed another half case. You know, and this involved everything from like using my own refrigerator in my house to, um,

A garage that a friend had and buying a refrigerator and ripping all the shelving and plastic out of it to get the most box that I could to stack things in there. To building my own walk-in cooler in that garage where there is a system called CoolBots, which are amazing. And they allow you to hack an air conditioner, like a window unit.

So can actually trick the thermostat on an air conditioner to run cooler and for longer temperatures without freezing out. And you can insulate an area or a closet or whatever and kind of turn it into a walk-in cooler. So I did that and I was in this garage and...

Alan Li (07:51)
Vincent, how many ⁓ restaurants are you supplying to at this point?

Vincent Finazzo (07:56)
At this time, maybe like 10 or 12. You know, not really paying myself doing like construction side gigs to make ends meet. And I had really cheap rent at the time. So it was fine. ⁓ But kind of the origin story of Riverwoods is ⁓ saying yes to everything, no matter what it would take. And so one of these scenarios, there was this bar.

that's on the Delaware River downtown, it a big popular like drinking spot. And it was fall and they were doing an October fest. And I was asked, sorry, it's my cat. I was asked to ⁓ get them like 200 pumpkins. And I knew where the pumpkins were. I knew how to get them. I knew the farmer that grew them. And

Alan Li (08:38)
It's all right.

Vincent Finazzo (08:53)
I didn't have any place to put them other than this garage. It was my friend's garage, the back of her row home in Philly. And so I coordinated him to drop off 200 pumpkins and bins to this little garage so that I could like stash them for three or four days to then take them to this restaurant so they could do all their decorations for Oktoberfest. And as I was doing it, some neighbors were like, what are you doing?

⁓ can I buy a pumpkin from you? And that's literally how it started. So ⁓ a few months later, ⁓ we launched our first pop-up market out of that garage, which is a 20 by 20 foot garage. You know, it didn't have power. I would run an extension cord from my friend's house. ⁓ and, ⁓ yeah, we opened with like a line down the street.

Alan Li (09:54)
with just pumpkins.

Vincent Finazzo (09:54)
for these,

no, no, I filled it with like other stuff to like when I opened the pop-up, the pumpkins happened naturally, cause I was just loading them. And so I would flip them on the side and you know, that's when I quickly realized I was like, man, like instead of, know, adding 10 or 15 bucks to a full bin of pumpkins or whatever I can add.

Alan Li (10:05)
Yeah, I see.

Vincent Finazzo (10:23)
three bucks to a pumpkin and there's 50 in a bin. And now all of sudden the retail margins from my days at Whole Foods kind of came back into play. And I was like, ⁓ this makes so much more sense. And then I, yeah, filled that market, filled that little garage up with produce, turned it into a tiny little market and ⁓ opened it. And it was crazy. the success goes right off the bat. ⁓

Alan Li (10:35)
Yeah. Got it.

Awesome.

Okay. I'm excited to dive into a bit more of, you know, the founding story of River Words and how it's doing, but I'd love to just go back a bit to ⁓ just even when you started at Whole Foods, was that because you wanted to work at the museum in Philadelphia and then the Whole Foods was right next door that I assume was just on a whim and you just needed a job.

And I assume you applied to other places too, or were you actually focused and said, you know, I really want to work in food because of X, Y, Z reason.

Vincent Finazzo (11:27)
So I was applying everywhere. I applied to every museum and art institute in Philly. Whole Foods, it was a proximity decision for sure. But my family has been just a huge inspiration for me. I grew up in an active kitchen with my mother and.

You know, my grandfather had a very large garden. You know, I wouldn't call it a farm, but I would call it a very productive ⁓ piece of property. And I've always been comfortable around food and I loved grocery stores. I've always loved grocery stores. So it was like not hard for me. I remember like in college, when in Chicago, like going to fruit markets and trying to cook in my dorm room and

when everyone is just like eating junk. It was just natural to me to want to be like that. So food has always been second nature.

Alan Li (12:31)
Okay. And then ⁓ tell me about the decision point of leaving Whole Foods or working at the brokerage. Why did you want to leave Whole Foods at that point?

Vincent Finazzo (12:42)
I was just getting antsy. I was young. I wanted to start stuff. ⁓ I had been approached by other wholesale outlets because, like I said before, Whole Foods had switched the way that they did things. So they stopped allowing buyers to buy directly from farmers to deliver straight to a store. And they wanted it to go through their hubs. ⁓

Alan Li (12:52)
Mm.

Vincent Finazzo (13:13)
So those farmer kind of got cut off. So they would keep calling or, you know, they had my number. They'd be like, what's going on? And I'd like, I can't buy from you anymore. And so I kind of knew that there was like, the supply was there, the resource was there.

Alan Li (13:23)
I see.

Got it. And when you were at the brokerage, you said you were working at a lot of ports and places where, you know, single source ingredients would come in and come out package the other end. ⁓ Who were like, were these from other countries and, know, green beans from another country coming into, you know, somewhere on the East coast. And then who were you selling to just all the grocery stores in the U S or tell me a little bit more about that.

Vincent Finazzo (13:49)
Yeah.

Sure. So this operation was mostly based in Florida. So there is a tropical port in Miami that mostly takes in things from Mexico, Central and South America and some African, like East African countries. ⁓ Then you have Central Florida, which I said like is a big

Part of the U. is agricultural industry grows a lot of big egg stuff tomatoes onions things like that commodity produce. And then you have the Philadelphia terminal market, ⁓ which gets a lot of stuff from Europe. And.

Items via the I-95 corridor that would come up from Florida and the South and things like that. And then you have Hunts Point and Queens and they get a lot of stuff from overseas as well. you in the grocery store, you know. On the East Coast, you're getting a wide selection from all over the world most of the time.

Alan Li (15:23)
Okay, so you're helping brokerage these ingredients to different fulfillment centers who would then also distribute to local grocery stores or chains as well.

Vincent Finazzo (15:34)
Right, sorry, you didn't ask that question. Okay, so I would then buy. By the container 1 item, like lines or. 8 plant and then I would sell that to. Smaller distributors or regional grocery chains distribution centers. So, like, I would have a number for some buyer of.

tomatoes at Giant and I would call him and I would say, have these coming out of Immokalee, Florida and they're this price FOB. And he would say, I need them cheaper. And then I'd call my boss and play the whole game. ⁓ And then we would sell them. I would sell all of it, sight unseen.

Alan Li (16:29)
So you never even touch any of the limes or the green beans. It's okay. You're brokering the transaction. It makes sense. Okay.

Vincent Finazzo (16:32)
Never.

Correct. Yeah.

And I did that for a little over a year. There was good money in it, but it was relatively soulless. And it was just a sales job. ⁓ I could have been selling, you know, socks or, you know, water bottles the same way. But I learned about these ports. I learned about everything from...

Alan Li (16:45)
Hmm. Yeah.

Vincent Finazzo (17:03)
supply and demand in a physical sense to arbitrage to, you know, just the things that happens with fresh food.

Alan Li (17:11)
Yeah. Yeah. And then with that experience, you were then able to work as a wholesaler to restaurants in the Philadelphia area, because you understood how these products moved in from either overseas or even locally. and you wanted to have a more fulfilling job. Is that the transition to why you started working with restaurants?

Vincent Finazzo (17:34)
Yeah, it was more of a connection to where the food goes. ⁓ from being in brokerage, I would know the produce houses that specialize in certain things. So when it would come to a restaurant in Philadelphia that needed something, I would know who specialized in those typically. So I could go to them, now as a customer, not as a vendor, and buy it. ⁓

You know, and it started with me and my Honda Civic to I bought like an old bread van with like sliding doors. It was sweet. It would only go like 50 miles an hour ⁓ and fill it up and deliver it. and, ⁓ you know, I would just fake it in the wind. I would hit up other distribution companies to restaurants and,

Alan Li (18:14)
Yeah.

Vincent Finazzo (18:30)
talk my way into getting their price list to see how they were pricing things. And then I'd be like, okay, you know, I can fit it in this range. I can make this money. Yeah. ⁓

Alan Li (18:40)
Yeah. And are you,

you were fulfilling these orders yourself to the restaurants? Wow. Out of your own car. And you said around 10 to 15 restaurants you're working with and there are $5 a box. And how much does a restaurant order? You said around 10 boxes.

Vincent Finazzo (18:45)
Yes. Yes.

Well, it can depend. You can get a local bagel spot that just wants something a couple times a week. They want vegetables to make batches of veggie cream cheese. And then they just need cucumbers, lettuce, tomato, onions, avocados to put on top of bagels. But they just need a case every two or three days. So you stack that.

Alan Li (19:06)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Vincent Finazzo (19:26)
And yes, up until this point in the story, it is only me. I will let you know when I hire another person.

Alan Li (19:33)
All right. How

much how much money were you making doing this?

Vincent Finazzo (19:38)
Nothing, anything. I think the first year of RiverWards, let's...

I think the first year Riverwood's made like $35,000.

Alan Li (19:52)
That's revenue or profit.

Vincent Finazzo (19:54)
Yeah.

Revenue. No, oh I'm sorry. For the 35, that first number is profit. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm going back in time. Cause then it switches. It switches from net to gross just by from numbers in my head. It was like 35,000 the first year. And I was like, I maybe can make this work. And then it jumped up.

Alan Li (19:57)
wow.

Okay, okay.

Vincent Finazzo (20:22)
to like 150, 160 K. And then we started to get like velocity and that was cool. And then that's right when we launched the pop-up.

Alan Li (20:35)
Uh-huh. And the 150,000, just to be clear, this is, we're still talking profit or we're talking the net.

Vincent Finazzo (20:42)
We're

talking gross now, net.

Alan Li (20:45)
Okay, and just

gross now. So, okay, so just for the audience so that they understand the 150,000, you're selling $150,000 of goods to restaurants, but then the profit that you keep is maybe what, like 10, 20 % off the top of that or something.

Vincent Finazzo (21:03)
Yeah, at this time though, I wasn't taking any money out of the company, right? would just, because here's the issue with wholesale ⁓ is that you have to spend it before you get it, right? A restaurant, yeah, you have to pre-buy it, you have to deliver it. And if you got good restaurants, maybe they'll give you COD. That'd be awesome.

Alan Li (21:09)
Mm.

Yeah, because you have to pre-buy it, yes.

And COD for the audience is cash on delivery, meaning they pay you when they receive it, but a lot of them, you know, will pay you 30 days later or 60 days later, right?

Vincent Finazzo (21:32)
So yeah.

Top, Yeah,

no 60 or 30. It was like, you know, 7 or 7 or 14, sometimes 3 weeks. Yeah, you know, but then I, it turned into not only like. My typical day then. Let's we have to start it at like. 4 PM. Okay, so at 4 PM the day before.

Alan Li (21:48)
Okay, seven or 14 days later. Got it.

Okay.

Vincent Finazzo (22:06)
Orders start coming in via email and text. You know, restaurant A wants four cases of potatoes and a bag of onions and red peppers, you know, and restaurant B wants arugula and radicchio and...

Alan Li (22:25)
And you're keeping track of this over text and email?

Vincent Finazzo (22:28)
I would then build spreadsheets. it'll come in. Correct. then I, yeah. So, yeah, it's so funny because I haven't thought about this in a minute. So this is great. So yeah, it's insane. So it would come in via text, via voicemail, via email, whatever they wanted. I didn't care. I would put it into a spreadsheet and those orders would come in all night. So you think some restaurants,

Alan Li (22:30)
Okay, so then you put it in Excel.

Vincent Finazzo (22:57)
they would shoot their orders in at four or five, six p.m. But some might shoot it at like 10, 11 midnight.

And so I would wake up at like 3.30 or 4 a.m., get the rest of them, put them into a spreadsheet, get into a car at first. The first purchase I made was that truck, and I bought it for like 1,500 bucks. And I get into that truck and drive it down to the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market. And I would have a hand dolly and a list and a clipboard and a pencil.

and I go and I buy every ingredient from every different house, do multiple runs to the truck, organize it in the back of the truck, then hand write. This is like in the very beginning, I would hand write invoices based on the receipts that I got. So I would just like mark everything up. I would do it and then I'd make notations on my own spreadsheet. And then I.

leave from the terminal and I drive and I hit all the restaurants and deliver everything. And then I get back to wherever I was landing, take my spreadsheet, re-record it into... ⁓

QuickBooks, I think I used something called Zero or Wave in the beginning that were free financial programs, but then I quickly went to QuickBooks and then start over.

Alan Li (24:27)
Sure.

Wow. That must have, but there must've been so many mistakes, right? If you're keeping track of a text email, voicemail, like, did you ever miss anything or what was the error rate on that?

Vincent Finazzo (24:46)
I mean,

errors happened, but I was pretty good. It was myself. I was pretty good at keeping organized. I think that's probably one of the reasons it worked is that I didn't have a lot of errors ever because these restaurants do not have time for errors. They can just go literally to anyone else. So some of them thought it was like a novelty to use like me.

Alan Li (24:56)
Wow.

Yeah.

Vincent Finazzo (25:14)
Cause they were like, it's crazy. I can text you and then it just shows up. You do it. You do it just like the big guys. ⁓ and then like I said, sometimes I would have leftovers because Alan, let's say you got a restaurant and you only wanted, you know, a half a bag of onions. Well, then I got to buy a 50 pound bag of onions. I got put 25 pounds somewhere. So it just kind of dictated its own growth in a way.

where I needed a place to put stuff. And so I threw a friend, she's like, if you clean out my garage, you can use it. I was like, okay, great. And then neighbors, cause we were in a city, saw me loading stuff in and out of this garage and they were like, what are you doing? You know, and that's kinda, yeah.

Alan Li (26:02)
Yeah. Got it.

That's how it started. And then the pop-up you said was hosted at your friends or was it somewhere else?

Vincent Finazzo (26:11)
friends garage. So that garage I was using, I just like turned it into a market. You know, I put tables and I set up produce and, you know, the register system, because it was like, there was no register system. There was no investment. I had no money. So I literally started RiverWords with like $500. It was nothing.

Alan Li (26:39)
my god.

Vincent Finazzo (26:41)
So like, we had a scale and two calculators. And this was our register system for the first like couple of months where you would like weigh something and you'd input the poundage and get the number. And then you take that number from one calculator and then you put it in to add it. And the other one to keep track of your total. And yeah, you know, it was insane.

Alan Li (27:02)
my God. What year was this?

Vincent Finazzo (27:08)
It wasn't 1945 like it fucking sounds like it was, it was like 2000. Like I said, 2015, 2014, 2015. And we ran this pop up and it was just a hit. Like the neighborhood loved it and it just went crazy. And

Alan Li (27:32)
For

how for like how is it such a hit? How did you get the word out? Or was it you literally just had it set up and people would drive by and just stop like

Vincent Finazzo (27:41)
It was very much in that early era of Instagram when things had a very, I'm trying to say, innocence about virality. And the right people kind of heard about it in the neighborhood. I knew a lot of people. a friend who wrote for one of the newspapers in the health and wellness column.

Alan Li (27:47)
⁓

I

Vincent Finazzo (28:13)
You know, and that's when health and wellness was mostly like, eat kale and go to the gym. It wasn't at all what it is today. You know, yeah. Yeah, so that's how it started. And then a very good friend of mine, he was a real estate agent, came into the pop-up and was like, I want to show you a building. And she walked me around the corner to this.

Alan Li (28:21)
supplements and peptides and stem cells. Yeah crazy.

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Finazzo (28:40)
big old firehouse that has been in the neighborhood, you know, hundred years and was like, this is for rent. And the landlord met me there and he was this like cool California dude. And he was like, we really want you to go on the first floor of this. And I was like, no way it is too big. I can't do this. Like 2000 square feet. And ⁓

Alan Li (29:01)
because

Vincent Finazzo (29:09)
He really wanted it to happen. Later, this gentleman has been a very good friend ever since. ⁓ But he said, I want you to write me a deal. He goes, Vincent, write me what your dream scenario is and let me know what it is. And my friend Laura was like, you should do it. You should do it. And I'm like, this is crazy. I don't know. So I go home and I write.

The most insane deal on paper. lease, a five year lease, three options to renew, no rent until first ring of register. They have to do all of this like white boxing for me. And then rent starts at like $1,500 for three months. And then it goes to 1800.

The next three and then it gets to 24 and then it gets to 26 and then it holds three grand for two years and then it goes up to 4000. Like I wrote this insane deal and I gave it to him and he looked at it and he said, okay. And I was like,

Alan Li (30:28)
Are you serious? Set the scene for us a little bit because that sounds way below market.

Vincent Finazzo (30:29)
Fuck. I'm sick.

It was, it was insane. It was way below my, I did that on purpose because I didn't think I could do it I didn't want to do it.

Alan Li (30:41)
Why is he agreeing to do this for you?

Vincent Finazzo (30:46)
Okay, so I cannot wait to if we can, you know, he is such a funny person. He's, he's a brilliant human because he saw the value in what local food could bring to the neighborhood. And he saw what a grocery would do to the nine apartments that he owned above. He, he.

Alan Li (31:10)
so he owned the buildings, the whole building, and he thought this could bring extra value to the neighborhood and increase the value of also the apartments. Okay, that makes sense.

Vincent Finazzo (31:20)
Yes.

⁓ so he, you know what mean? He would go against what his partners would say and he'd be like, no, we're gonna go with Vincent. He had restaurants that wanted to go in there and stuff like that. And sure enough, so he said, yeah.

Alan Li (31:31)
Wow.

What do you think market

rent was for that space? Was it like five grand, six grand or more?

Vincent Finazzo (31:42)
It

was probably between like six and seven grand, ⁓ which would be, yeah. No, see, that's like the thing is like, I am too honest for that. ⁓ You know, it doesn't work like that. I just was like, this is how it has to be.

Alan Li (31:46)
And you come in at 1500 in the beginning. That's incredible. I need your negotiation skills.

That's great. Yeah.

And Vincent, how long was pop-up open before this opportunity came?

Vincent Finazzo (32:10)
one summer season.

Alan Li (32:11)
one summer season for a couple months and then your friend came and offered you this. ⁓ Okay, well, yeah, thank you for setting the scene. I assume, you you took it without hesitation and went off to the races.

Vincent Finazzo (32:26)
Yeah, yeah, so I did it. I did a Kickstarter for $20,000 and I got that and quickly.

Alan Li (32:36)
Cool. What was the

gift or the product that you were offering on the Kickstarter?

Vincent Finazzo (32:44)
varying degrees. Like, so the biggest one, I think that you would get like a CSA box that I would curate for six months or discounts at the market or gift baskets. And it was all food related things. and then once I signed the lease, had some numbers, got the Kickstarter, a friend of mine who, ⁓

Alan Li (32:58)
Got it.

Vincent Finazzo (33:11)
had money, like looked at everything. And he was like, all right, I'm going to lend you $15,000 at 3%. So you can buy a small refrigerated truck because that is integral to your operation. And, and then I'm also going to come on as your finance guy because again, it was just me, you know, they're during this pop-up, I am still waking up at 3am.

buying, delivering to restaurants, and then running this pop-up on Saturdays and Sundays, no days off for like two years or something. ⁓ I don't recommend it. It wasn't the most healthy thing that you could do. Yeah. And then we spent that Kickstarter money right away on a couple units of refrigeration. ⁓

Alan Li (33:53)
Wow.

Vincent Finazzo (34:11)
opened the store in a very, very like, you know, infant state.

Alan Li (34:17)
So just help me understand because you signed the lease. Rent is not too bad. It's at $1,500. You raised $20,000 from Kickstarter, $15,000 from your friend. That's $35,000. And that's all you needed to start a grocery store?

Vincent Finazzo (34:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have to understand that when we opened, it wasn't at all what it looks like now. So I bought, like, you know, when you go into a bodega and they have like the three door drink coolers that have the refrigeration on the bottom, they're self-contained. You can get those for like $2,500. Okay. So I bought three. I did the plumbing.

for the sinks in the back. Like I sweated the copper and I installed the sinks in the back room and the prep room and all that stuff. I assembled the walk-in coolers that we bought. That walk-in cooler was like 12 grand. ⁓ tables and stuff that we used to the racking, you I just used Metro shelving and then I would like modify it.

and with like plywood and stuff to make produce tables. ⁓ Our POS system, you know, we had graduated from the fucking calculator, two calculators in a scale to ⁓ Clover, which I don't know if you, I don't even know if it's still around. ⁓ It's kind of like a square, but Clover had the ability to hook up a scale so you could sell something by the pound.

Alan Li (35:46)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of like a square.

⁓

okay.

Vincent Finazzo (36:02)
And in the

beginning, Square did not have an integrated scale component. ⁓ So we do all this, right? We're getting press, everyone's freaking out, it's this cool building, the landlord did all this beautiful work to the outside and we opened and ⁓ it's a hit, it's great.

Alan Li (36:09)
Got it.

Ha

Vincent Finazzo (36:30)
You know,

there's people coming in and everyone's like, this is beautiful and we're making money. And we actually, make like, we do like the day one of opening, did like $10,000 worth of sales and it froze. Okay. So I didn't freeze Clover like,

Alan Li (36:47)
my god.

Vincent Finazzo (36:59)
they put a lock on our bank account. Yeah, because they were like, what's going on? Is this fraud? And ⁓ so then we sold everything. And so like, know how to do is wake up early, go down to the produce terminal, buy more. I just was taking money out of the register, because there was no other way. So I would take all the money out of the register, but everyone pays by card, so we get less. And it took like a good...

Alan Li (37:00)
They suspended your account.

Is this like fraud? Yeah.

⁓

Vincent Finazzo (37:27)
2, 3 days to get our account unlocked and. And then that, like, after opening. Now, I have to, I have to go back that isn't correct. $10,000 is way too high for what we were doing back then. It was probably like. Probably like, $4,000, maybe over the course of 2 days, that would add up to the 10. ⁓ Because in the beginning, once the hype kind of leveled out. I was like, if I can make.

$2,500 a day, seven ⁓ days a week.

we probably can make this work. Yeah.

Alan Li (38:05)
Yeah.

Okay. tell me when you first started, how many skews were there? Like how many ingredients or products did you have in this grocery store?

Vincent Finazzo (38:18)
Two or 300.

Alan Li (38:21)
So I just in my mind you have to front the money to buy this. So how are

Vincent Finazzo (38:27)
Not all the time, not all the time. So for produce, yes, for grocery, you usually can get terms, seven to 14 to eight terms, which is very risky, ⁓ but we were able to do that.

Alan Li (38:30)
⁓

I see. So unlike the produce business, when you're selling to restaurants, you front the money, but because you are your own grocery store now, you get to set the terms so you don't have to front the capital in the beginning for the products. I see. Okay. Now the math works better in my mind because I was like $30,000 to set up everything, to buy all the goods. Like that doesn't sound like much, especially with 300 SKUs.

Vincent Finazzo (38:59)
Yeah, corrupt.

Well, you know, when we opened, there was like negative $100 in the bank account on opening day, like ⁓ completely reckless. It's like, you know, whenever I talk about it, it's just insane. But like I said, it kind of drove its own growth in a way. The demand was there. People wanted food. ⁓ And yeah.

Alan Li (39:17)
⁓ man. Okay. ⁓

Yeah.

How long was it from when you signed the lease to when it opened?

approximately.

Vincent Finazzo (39:49)
Probably.

8 to 10 months.

Alan Li (39:55)
Eight to 10 months. Okay. And you were able to negotiate TI or tenant improvements by the landlord. They would do the outside facade and then also help with the interior. And you would start paying once you started making money too. ⁓ Amazing, amazing deal and well done. ⁓ Okay. Walk me through what happens over the next few years, I guess. I mean, it seems like it was a hit off the bat. Was it just smooth sailing since then or?

Vincent Finazzo (40:03)
Mm-hmm.

Alan Li (40:24)
or tell me a little bit more.

Vincent Finazzo (40:26)
⁓ there was constant reinvestment. ⁓ so for the next, you know, let's call it to 20.

19, there was just constant, know, hey, we've outgrown these coolers or we need to add coolers in the basement or we need to, ⁓ you know, upgrade our electrical panel to handle more electrical capacity. need to, you know, so that's when the real cost of opening the store added up over those years. So for me to say to open

Alan Li (41:03)
I see.

Vincent Finazzo (41:07)
our Fishtown location today, I would say it would cost $1.2, $1.3 million.

Alan Li (41:17)
I see. But for the initial one, it was just spread out over the years as you reinvested and got better equipment. Tell me a little bit about if you hit your goals or not. Were you able to do the 3000, 4000 plus per day? And how did it creep up over the years?

Vincent Finazzo (41:35)
Yeah,

yeah, we kept it really tight ⁓ and we were able to like, get since we barely had any that going into it, we were able to get into the black very quickly after three, four or five months ⁓ and start generating some money. I would just dump it into labor and reinvestment, you know, and. ⁓

That's just kind of what happened. would, you know, I would be like, you know what? By the front door, I bet if we spend $18,000 on a new drink case that's like big and open and we fill it with drinks and we fill it with sandwiches and stuff like that, we'll get a good ROI. you know, then that's like, okay, spend 18, invest in it.

Alan Li (42:28)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Vincent Finazzo (42:33)
fill it, invest in the inventory and then wait for the ROI to come. And then we just did that all over that footprint and just micro-merchandised it to the max, taking cues from stores in Manhattan and San Francisco on just like how to use every single square inch and pack it out.

Alan Li (42:52)
Okay, and are you able to share roughly what a top line would be for a grocery store like this?

Vincent Finazzo (43:00)
What do mean by top line? you mean currently?

Alan Li (43:01)
your total revenue.

or, you know, back then and currently.

Vincent Finazzo (43:08)
⁓ yeah, so.

And you want it yearly or weekly?

Alan Li (43:16)
No,

just give me approximate is like, you know, we were doing $3 million, $4 million. Now we're doing six or I don't even know what the numbers are.

Vincent Finazzo (43:23)
Yes,

so it was like. $35,000 in the beginning and then like that like. 160 K then that went to like 380 and then that quickly went to like 700 and then we get like. 1.1 million and then 23 so right now.

And then right before COVID, we were at like four to five million a year.

Alan Li (43:58)
Wow,

from $30,000 to 5 million. That's incredible. And this is with the second location already added on now, or this is just that single location? Okay. So, and then just like from an outsider's perspective of grocery stores, you know, sometimes the revenue number seems good, but the profit margin can be bad because, you know, the margins on food isn't necessarily the best. How does that work? then obviously with all the reinvestment that you're talking about.

Vincent Finazzo (44:01)
Yeah. Yeah.

No, just a single location, pre-COVID.

Alan Li (44:28)
How do you think about that from a business model perspective?

Vincent Finazzo (44:35)
You know, we make our, our EBITDA percentage is 3.66.

Alan Li (44:42)
percent.

Wow, that's so low. But I guess that is what it is. Is that the standard in the grocery store industry?

Vincent Finazzo (44:49)
Yeah?

That's actually pretty good. ⁓ 3.66, Alan, don't forget the 6.6 at the end because it's almost four. And we are optimized in our two locations. So I will say like COVID happened, it hit us negatively in the beginning because there was limitations on retail square footage of.

Alan Li (44:56)
That's 3%. Wow. 6.6.

Yeah.

Vincent Finazzo (45:23)
customer occupancy and so we can only get so many people in the store at a time and we lost a bunch of money in the first 6 months. But then we took it seriously and people respected that and our profits grew. winter 2020, I signed another lease for our 2nd location. yeah, December 2020.

Alan Li (45:25)
huh. Sure. Yeah.

Vincent Finazzo (45:52)
Everyone is like in this post peak COVID, they don't know what's going on, is retail dead? So I was able to negotiate like another really attractive lease on that. And then in 22, our second location opened up in Old City. That store is twice as big as Fishtown. It also has a new element, which is our juice bar.

And that store is phenomenal and beautiful. ⁓

Alan Li (46:29)
Yeah.

Vincent Finazzo (46:30)
Now, you know, we, so that EBITDA percentage is what we are right now. ⁓

Alan Li (46:37)
across the blended

between both or the single store? Across both stores. Okay. No, this is, this is really helpful to understand because, um, you know, it's like, you know, they hear 5 million and then they're like, oh, wow, you made 5 million dollars. Well, no, it's 3.66 % of that. Um, I just usually come from world of tech and software and e-commerce where like EBITDA margins are, you know, anywhere between 20 to 40%.

Vincent Finazzo (46:40)
across both stores.

Alan Li (47:02)
But very, very different. ⁓ obviously with AI now, all those companies are collapsing, but people will always need food. So there's more durability, I think, in some of these businesses than maybe others.

Vincent Finazzo (47:03)
Yeah.

Yeah,

I think you just work to get the gross number higher. Because there is so many variables and we're we're inching our way closer to an even of like, 4 and 5%. As we work on our new locations. So, right now, we ended 2025 with. Just under 16Million.

Alan Li (47:30)
Nice.

Vincent Finazzo (47:43)
And gross sales. ⁓ Yeah, so that's what the 2 locations were opening a 3rd location in Detroit in the spring. And then we have a 4th location, hopefully in negotiation in Philly and that story is bigger that store is going to be 13,000 square feet and that will feature new perishable elements that we don't do. ⁓

Alan Li (47:45)
Wow.

Vincent Finazzo (48:12)
I really do believe in physical grocery retail and I think that there's a resurgence there.

Alan Li (48:21)
Yeah. And for those listening, if you haven't seen the Instagram of Riverwards Produce, I'd suggest taking a look. It's probably one of the most beautiful grocery stores I've seen and we'll have to check it out when I'm in Philadelphia. ⁓ Vincent, now that you opened two and you're planning to open more, what are some other insights about running a grocery store that the layman wouldn't know about?

Vincent Finazzo (48:33)
Thanks.

⁓ it's extremely physical. ⁓ it is.

Alan Li (48:58)
Hmm.

Vincent Finazzo (49:04)
It's very old school in a sense of commerce, right? Because there is so much effort you need to put into something. This is in a t-shirt store where you hang a t-shirt and you wait. There is perishability factors. is trends. Before social media, we would joke at Whole Foods.

And be like, why are all of a sudden all the raspberries just gone? Why is everyone buying all of the raspberries this week? And it's because like Oprah said that raspberries are good for you. you know, now there is a food trend that will pop up or a trendy CPG company. And we're the type of store that's expected to have it. And we always do. And so people come to us for that. They want to make the

Alan Li (49:44)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Vincent Finazzo (50:00)
you know, weird TikTok pasta or they see someone on Instagram coding some weird, you know, energy drink or a Dr. Genic.

Alan Li (50:15)
Yeah, I know, I get it. How big has your social media presence, and you have, think, 30,000 followers, how big has your social media presence, or how has that been a factor for the growth and marketing of your grocery chains or grocery stores?

Vincent Finazzo (50:16)
I don't know, lift goss.

So that

is the only form of marketing that we do. And I like to treat it as if it's an old school, periodical ad cycle type of deal where we just daily post items from the store. And it's very clean and simple. We sometimes use it for information, but it's just like, these are these beautiful carrots grown organically from this farm and they're in the stores now.

You know, we're importing figs from California or, you know, ⁓ truffles from Burgundy, France, or mushrooms from, you know, all over the world or in our own backyard. And so we curate food that way.

Alan Li (51:09)
Wow.

And Vincent, how many skews do you think you have across your two grocery stores now? I know you started with 300, but I imagine there's thousands now.

Vincent Finazzo (51:24)
Yeah,

it's like 4,300 right now.

Alan Li (51:30)
How do people keep track of all this? That sounds like insane to me.

Vincent Finazzo (51:36)
Yeah, I don't do it by text in a spreadsheet anymore, that's for sure. We have a very robust software program. It's integrated with our POS. We have grown from the free one that the bulk gives you to one that the big guys use. And so everything is tracked through our software.

Alan Li (51:39)
I hope not.

Okay.

Okay. So when someone buys it, you know, you know, you might need to replenish it, but what happens when, you know, people move stuff on shelves and like they get misplaced. Like, how do you deal with that?

Vincent Finazzo (52:11)
Yeah, you deal with it.

Alan Li (52:13)
You

Vincent Finazzo (52:14)
Like you mean an employee or a customer?

Alan Li (52:16)
Like a customer or an employee, what if they like, you know, they're like mixing stuff up. Like how do you stay organized with 4,300 skews? that's.

Vincent Finazzo (52:24)
Because there's constantly employees filling the shelf and they're catching it in real time. There's something that I will say and listen, I have been asked to join every digital form of Instacart and DoorDash and Uber Eats or whatever. There is a human aspect to grocery that can't be misunderstood.

Alan Li (52:44)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Vincent Finazzo (52:53)
There are people in those aisles, there are team members working constantly. They are asking you, Allen, are you finding everything you need? They will see you pick up a can of refried beans and then stick it in the baking section because you forgot something. It gets picked up within an hour, probably. It's just constant maintenance and upkeep. And we have a very strict standards about aesthetics and organization.

Alan Li (53:01)
Mm-hmm.

Wow.

Vincent Finazzo (53:23)
You know, the beauty of our stores is very deliberate. Grocery stores typically are not beautiful. ⁓ You know, they're big aluminum boxes with no windows. We have tons of natural light and we design them to feel good. You know, I am hunting those off-screen moments of clarity for yourself. And that is what RiverWards' tactic is, is that

Alan Li (53:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Vincent Finazzo (53:52)
We are nourishing for your body and your mind and your soul and you can't get that stuff from a screen.

Alan Li (54:00)
Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. ⁓

Do you guys also work with those? are you on Instacart too?

Vincent Finazzo (54:13)
No, so ⁓ we do not offer delivery. ⁓ The reason why is, yeah, so those sales are organic, physical sales. ⁓ There is no e-commerce as of yet. And the reason why is.

Alan Li (54:18)
Wow.

Vincent Finazzo (54:33)
I care so much about the in-store experience and I want you to be able to come in and sit there in front of the beautiful wall of produce and just like exhale, disassociate, whatever you gotta do. But I don't want an Instacart worker or a Dasher like on their phone, like reaching around you.

Alan Li (54:36)
Yeah.

Vincent Finazzo (54:58)
getting mad because the lines are too long because the cashiers are engaging every customer on a human level. There's no self-checkouts in my stores purposefully. And it's meant to kind of trigger that nostalgic fact of like a market experience, you know? So, and listen, I'm very well aware of the economic opportunities that delivery offers these days. And we've been exploring

Alan Li (55:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Vincent Finazzo (55:27)
Our own form of fulfillment centers and things like that. ⁓ But they're they're very labor intensive. And I watch a lot of the big guys that have deep deep pockets. Open very large fulfillment centers and then close them. You know. You know, Kroger did this in the South and close a bunch of them on Amazon Fresh just doesn't exist anymore.

Alan Li (55:47)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Vincent Finazzo (55:57)
You know, they started it, they built all these stores, were banking on these digital carts and them to be retail food hubs for fulfillment and they closed them off. They closed them all last month or yeah, it'll be last month. So it's crazy, know, if food is,

Alan Li (56:17)
Wow.

Vincent Finazzo (56:28)
I watch the big guys attack it all the time. I watch them throw hundreds of millions of dollars at projects. And right now, what I'm convinced is that returning to an old sense of grocery and commerce has value. You know?

Alan Li (56:35)
Mm-hmm.

I love how intentional you are with that decision. And it's honestly admirable because you are giving up potentially a lot of economics by choosing to do so, but that does mean you stand for something too. you know, as if I was a citizen in Philadelphia, I would be more inclined to visit RiverWords than maybe some other grocery stores. So that's really cool.

Vincent Finazzo (57:18)
Thanks, yeah. It could change. I think there are ways to go about it. ⁓ But I think that there is such a visceral romanticism about picking your own produce out. I don't know what your diet is, Alan, but I'm sure no one will ever pick a tomato for you as good as you.

Alan Li (57:36)
Yeah.

Well, maybe my

wife, but that's the only other one.

Vincent Finazzo (57:49)
Yeah, right.

You know, but like if you've ever door dashed or instacarted food, your produce, no one cares. They don't care, right? It's not a can of beans. There is a life to it. So I think that, you know, as we farm out experiences left and right, you know, I want to hold on to grocery. And I think there's a way to marry tech and what I'm doing. And I've been working on

Alan Li (57:53)
Yeah, of course.

Yeah. ⁓

Vincent Finazzo (58:18)
systems for that, you know, we're just taking it day by day.

Alan Li (58:21)
Cool. No, excited to see what you do, but I know whatever you do do, ⁓ it will be intentional and with the customer in mind. So that's really cool to see. Vincent, I know we're running up a bit on time, but one question I like to ask is, if you could look back on your journey over the last 15 years, ⁓ is there anything that you would have done differently?

Vincent Finazzo (58:48)
Sure. ⁓

I think trusted myself. the beginnings, I would always think that I needed a partner to do it. And then I would quickly learn that they didn't care about me as much as me. And that was frustrating. I just wanted them to care and to put the effort in and... ⁓

I don't know if that's because I have high standards or I was working harder or what, but I didn't have the confidence to go at it alone a few times. So I've had a few partnerships throughout the process that have come and gone.

Alan Li (59:39)
Mm-hmm. Okay. Now that's a great piece of advice. And I'm sure for all the listeners, maybe about to break, make their own or their first brick and mortar store or open their first business. A lot of the times it feels like you don't know what you're doing, but I think, you know, most people don't know what they're doing and you need the courage to start and just check along.

Vincent Finazzo (1:00:06)
Yeah, I would say don't worry about that. Don't get hung up on feeling like you mastered it, right? There's that 80-20 rule I'm sure you've heard of. ⁓ 80 % of your revenue comes from 20 % of your customers or vice versa. But there's a way that I like to look at it is that.

Alan Li (1:00:24)
Yep.

Vincent Finazzo (1:00:34)
No one ever, or I should, let me restart that. Not many people do the last 20 % of anything. And there's very few of us that finish something. And it is so important as an entrepreneur to know that you do have to push yourself to finish it. And it might not be perfect, but do not get hung up on perfection. Do not, it will.

it will drown you, I promise. What you have to do is finish it, look at it, how can you do it better? Do it again. Because if you keep focusing on refining it down to the, at a molecular level, you'll never ever get a thing done.

Alan Li (1:01:06)
Mm.

So.

Yeah. I think the one of the common saying is don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough and you just keep iterating and it'll continuously approve, but you have to put something out there.

That's great. Great notes of the Yvonne. ⁓ Vincent, if people want to get in contact with you or follow along the journey, what's the best way for them to do so?

Vincent Finazzo (1:01:47)
The best way for people to get in contact with me would probably be to shoot me a message on LinkedIn.

Instagram gets pretty clouded these days, so I would stay away from that. There's a lot of messages there. Our Instagram is a beautiful place to follow along on the journey of the Philadelphia locations. ⁓ I am opening a new RiverWards in Detroit, Michigan this spring. This is a very passionate personal project about food access and food deserts, and we're going to plop a

River Wards, Detroit down in the Little Village neighborhood on the East side. And ⁓ it should be open by early summer. I'm very excited about this. ⁓ And, you know, I'm always open to talking with entrepreneurs or people that have an idea about food products or food businesses, you know, yeah.

Alan Li (1:02:55)
Amazing.

Awesome. Well, I'm really excited for the upcoming openings and Vincent, thanks so much for sharing your story and your journey. This has been a really fun episode.

Vincent Finazzo (1:03:06)
Yeah, Alan, thanks for having me.

Alan Li (1:03:07)
Alright.