Before Glimpse, Refresh Gum's founder and its outsourced accountant were spending two to three days a month reconciling deductions by hand, on a brand collecting as little as 25% to 50% of what it invoiced. Since onboarding, that work is handled end to end, the brand has recovered $53K, and the founder sees every dispute in real time without touching a spreadsheet.
Refresh Gum is a better-for-you confectionery brand founded in a home kitchen in 2020 and launched in May 2022, making chicle-based chewing gum, sugar-free mints, and energy and focus products built around clean ingredients and nostalgia. The company grew from self-distribution out of the founder's car in New York City to 7,000 stores across all 50 states, with key accounts including Whole Foods and Wegmans. It runs on a scrappy team of two to three people, ships through eight distributors (UNFI, KeHE, and McLane among the core), and relies on an outsourced accountant for its finance function. Founder and CEO Ryan Stafford built the brand solo and stayed close to the numbers himself, which is exactly why deductions became his problem to manage.
Refresh Gum was Ryan's first company in CPG, and deductions were a category he had never encountered. "We'd be getting checks where we'd expect to receive 100% of them, but we'd only receive 25% or 50% of what we actually invoiced," he said.
There was no system behind the response. Refresh Gum's outsourced accountant worked every deduction by hand, and Ryan cross-checked the output himself to make sure nothing slipped through. The two of them chased shortage claims by pulling BOLs, reconciled promo scans, and tracked the whole thing across spreadsheets. "We would allocate at least 2 to 3 days on average, cross-checking, making sure that everything was correct. It was lots of Excels, lots of cells, and a little too much fluff within it," he shared. As distribution scaled from a handful of accounts toward thousands of doors, the deductions grew more frequent and the manual approach stopped being sustainable, which is what pushed him to look for a real solution.
Glimpse replaced the manual reconciliation with an automated system that captures and codes every deduction, disputes what is winnable, and gives Refresh Gum a single real-time view of where its money is going. The shortage claims that used to mean digging up BOLs, and the promo scans that used to live in spreadsheet tabs, are now handled inside one platform with a Glimpse team behind it doing the disputing. For a founder who had been personally cross-checking every line, that meant getting days back and a job off his desk.
Ryan evaluated a few other tools and came close to moving forward with them before choosing Glimpse. Three things decided it: the technology, where the platform was heading, and a personal touch he did not find elsewhere. "The personal touch, speaking to the founders of the company, speaking with people directly...knowing that someone was going to take care of us," he said. Within about a month of onboarding, he could see the difference.
"We're saving time, we're able to see everything crystal clear. We went from spreadsheet chaos to the perfect lens into our deductions."
Ryan Stafford
Founder & CEO of Refresh Gum
When asked directly for honest, critical feedback on the onboarding process, Ryan had none to offer. "Everything was super easy," he said, describing it as "extremely seamless, amazing communication, an amazing team." He even went so far as to say, "you couldn't pay me to say anything bad about Glimpse."
The headline for a team this lean is time. The two to three days a month that used to disappear into cross-checking now go back to running the business, and the deductions workflow that once sat on the founder's desk is handled for him. Alongside that, Glimpse has recovered $53K in deductions for the brand, dollars a two-person team would otherwise have written off.
The impact reaches past recovery into strategy. With every deduction visible and coded in one place, Ryan can see which promotions are costing more than they return and adjust the calendar accordingly.
"It's given us the notion to scale back on certain areas that we're not seeing value with."
Ryan Stafford
Founder & CEO of Refresh Gum
By his own rough estimate, the brand is now losing meaningfully less to deductions than it did before, though the clearer win is that he no longer spends his own days finding out. He has also become a repeat referrer, sending other founders to the platform. "I've had around 5 to 7 brands ask whether to go for Glimpse. I've said yes, 100%, every time."
For a lean CPG brand, cash on hand is survival. As Ryan put it, "keeping cash flow is the most important thing so that you're staying around as long as possible," and the time and dollars Glimpse frees up go straight back into marketing, the team, and the brand. As Refresh Gum expands its gum, mint, and energy lines, keeping the founder out of spreadsheets is part of what lets him build.
"Glimpse, you are my knights in shining armor to fight deductions."
Ryan Stafford
Founder & CEO of Refresh Gum
Glimpse is an AI-native deduction management service built for CPG brands selling through distributors and major retailers. Glimpse automates the entire deductions process — from coding and validation to dispute resolution — using AI agents trained on distributor- and retailer-specific rules. Glimpse automates the workflows overwhelming manual teams, disputing all the invalid deductions that manual teams can't address.
With Glimpse, over 200 brands have recovered invalid deductions, eliminated manual work, and improved bottom-line performance without adding headcount. Glimpse has processed over $1 billion in invoice volume. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Based in New York.
