Why Food Processors Are Still Using 4 AM Spreadsheets

Every morning at 4:30 AM, someone at your packhouse is rebuilding yesterday's plan.

Orders changed overnight. Inventory counts are off. A grower called—the delivery that was supposed to arrive at 6 AM is now coming at 10. And the Costco order that was due Thursday? It's now due Wednesday.

Sound familiar?

The Planning Problem Nobody Talks About

Here's what we've learned after working with dozens of food processing operations: the planning problem isn't a technology problem. It's a speed problem.

Your ERP knows your inventory. Your MES knows your production. Your quality system knows your defects. But by the time you pull data from all three, reconcile the discrepancies, and build a new plan... the world has already changed again.

This is why spreadsheets survive. Not because they're good—but because they're fast. A skilled planner can open Excel, look at their mental model of the operation, and make decisions in minutes that would take an enterprise system hours.

The problem? That mental model lives in one person's head. When they're sick, on vacation, or (inevitably) retire, it walks out the door with them.

What AI Agents Change

AI agents are different from traditional software because they don't just show you data—they act on it.

At Terrantic, we've built five AI agents that work together to handle the planning cycle:

Demand Sensing — Predicts what's coming before orders are even placed
Dynamic Allocation — Matches supply to demand across customers and facilities
Production Scheduling — Builds the daily plan, balancing all constraints
Line Optimization — Squeezes throughput from every run
Reconciliation — Closes the loop and feeds learnings back

These agents don't replace your planners. They augment them. The 4 AM scramble becomes a 7 AM review. Instead of building the plan, your team approves it—and spends their time on exceptions and improvements.

Real Results

At one apple packhouse, this shift meant:

80% less time spent on daily planning
11% more throughput through the same lines
$250K saved in the first year
Zero 4 AM wake-up calls

The head planner told us: "I used to spend my mornings putting out fires. Now I spend them preventing them."

Why Now?

The technology finally caught up with the problem. Large language models can now understand operational context. Machine learning can now learn from your specific constraints and patterns. And cloud infrastructure can now process real-time data at the speed operations require.

But perhaps more importantly: the people who run food operations are finally ready to trust AI. Not because they want to—but because they have to. The talent shortage is real. The complexity is increasing. And spreadsheets can only scale so far.

What's Next

If you're still running on 4 AM spreadsheets, you're not alone. Most operations are. But you don't have to stay there.

We'd love to show you what Terri and Planner+ can do for your operation. Not a sales pitch—just a 30-minute conversation about your biggest planning headache and whether we can help.