What Small Businesses Learn the Hard Way and How AI Could Change the Odds | Doron Petersan

Take a peek inside the room where building a successful food business takes far more than a great product. Founders and start-ups must navigate operations, manufacturing, inventory, distribution, marketing, finance, quality, and regulation, often without the specialized teams and internal resources available to larger companies. In this episode of Inside the Room, Susan Bond talks with Doron Petersan, founder of Sticky Fingers and a veteran food entrepreneur, about what she learned while building businesses across bakery, restaurant, retail, and CPG manufacturing. Together, they explore what happens when systems and requirements built for large organizations must be managed by founders themselves or extremely small teams. They also discuss Doron’s emerging vision for AI solutions designed specifically around the needs of founders and small food businesses. Ian Reagan, Managing Partner, SafeScan LinkedIn:   / ireagan   Website: https://www.safescaninspection.com/ If your business is facing a foreign material event, or wants to be ready before one happens, get in touch with Ian and the SafeScan team to talk through what reinspection could look like for you. I hope you enjoyed this episode! If you found this conversation useful, please like, subscribe, and share it with someone who'd benefit. Susan and the Inside The Room podcast team Susan's LinkedIn:   / susan-bond   Website: https://www.bondadvisorygroupllc.com/ Listen on: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0z4x4D6... Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/in... Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/de2... #insidetheroom #fdaregulatory #foodregulation #regulatoryaffairs #foodsafety #foodtech #alternativeprotein #functionalfoods #dietarysupplements #agtech #foodinnovation #regulatorystrategy #marketaccess #foodindustry #compliancestrategy Inside The Room is a podcast of conversations with the food, nutrition, and ag operators who turned regulation into a competitive edge, for founders and operators building the next generation of these industries. Each episode is a look at the regulatory gate standing between a promising product and the market, and what it actually takes to get through it. Host Susan Bond spent over twenty years inside the regulatory world, including roles across the Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance and the Sprout Safety Alliance at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Kerry, and Abbott, and holds a Master's in Biotechnology. She now runs Bond Advisory Group, helping organisations turn regulatory complexity into a strategic advantage, and brings that same operator's view of what it takes to bring a product to market on schedule to every episode. Inside The Room is built for founders, CEOs, chief scientific officers, and regulatory and quality leaders at funded, scaling companies across novel ingredients, functional foods, alternative protein, fermentation, dietary supplements, pet and animal nutrition, and agtech. Listeners get a genuine, peer-level look at how the operators ahead of them cleared their own regulatory gates, and what they'd do differently next time.