Transforming a $70M Food Distributor’s Operations

Overview

This case study documents how a West Coast food distributor operating at approximately $70M in annual revenue replaced manual, error-prone workflows with a unified operational system built on Stryda.

The company distributes meat and sushi products to restaurant customers, managing processing, packaging, labeling, routing, invoicing, and sales across multiple teams and warehouses. Prior to Stryda, the business relied heavily on pen-and-paper processes and disconnected tools, creating growing operational, financial, and ownership risk.

The transformation resulted in:

• dramatic reductions in daily processing time
• materially fewer manual errors
• protection of customer relationships
• a foundation for scaling revenue without increasing headcount

Before Stryda

A Manual Operation at Scale

Despite operating at a significant scale, the company’s core workflows were largely manual:

• Warehouse labeling, weighing, and packaging were done by hand
• Orders moved from sales to operations via paper and informal handoffs
• Truck routing and invoicing relied on human memory and manual checks
• Customer data lived with individual sales reps rather than the company
• QuickBooks was used only for limited accounting functions and provided no support for warehouse execution, invoicing, labeling, or order integrity.

The Breaking Point: Why Leadership Acted

Several compounding risks forced leadership to reconsider its long-standing resistance to technology implementation.

Loss of Customer Ownership

The company lost three top sales representatives, who were able to leave with their customers because there was no centralized CRM or company-owned customer database. Leadership realized that customer relationships — one of the company’s most valuable assets — were not actually owned by the business.

Costly, Frequent Errors

With an average order value of approximately $1,000, delivery errors were expensive. Wrong packages and misrouted deliveries occurred multiple times per week. While not formally tracked, leadership viewed these losses as a known and recurring cost of doing business.

Regulatory Pressure

New food safety requirements under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Traceability Rule increased urgency around traceability, labeling accuracy, and data integrity — all areas where manual workflows posed compliance risk.

Inability to Scale

Manual processes consumed so much time and labor that growth required proportional increases in headcount. Leadership recognized that without operational leverage, innovation and expansion were effectively stalled.

Employee Burnout

Early mornings, long manual processes, and constant error correction contributed to burnout. Leadership viewed the departure of top sales staff as a warning sign.

Evaluating the Options

Leadership explored traditional ERP and WMS vendors, including Seasoft.

• Seasoft onboarding quote: ~$250,000
  Limitations:
  
  • No restaurant ordering application
  • No robust CRM
  • Limited post-sale customization
  • Long implementation timelines (6+ months typical)
    

After delaying the decision for nearly a year, leadership chose a different path: commissioning a custom-built system that would later become Stryda.

The deciding factors were:

• lower onboarding and monthly costs (approximately half of Seasoft’s)
• faster path to value
• willingness to tailor workflows to their exact operation and a single system spanning warehouse, sales, routing, invoicing, and CRM

The Stryda Implementation

Scope of the System

Stryda replaced and unified multiple functions into one platform:

• Restaurant Ordering App
  A customer-facing app replaced manual order-taking by sales reps and eliminated data loss between sales and operations.
• Warehouse Management (WMS)
  Smart scanners, scales, and printers replaced pen-and-paper labeling, weighing, and packaging.
• Routing & Delivery Verification
  Digitized routing, scanning, and delivery checks reduced missed and incorrect deliveries.
• Invoicing & Payments
  Automated invoice generation and printing replaced manual paperwork.‍
• CRM & Customer Data Ownership
  Centralized customer records ensured relationships remained with the company, not individuals.

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Onboarding Reality

Because the system was initially built for this distributor, implementation evolved alongside development. However, based on what is now prebuilt in Stryda, leadership and the Stryda team estimate that new customers with similar operations can reach initial go-live in approximately four weeks, assuming readiness and cooperation.

A typical onboarding includes:

• ~2 weeks of preparation and configuration
• ~2 weeks on-site with all departments involved
• parallel operation of old and new systems to avoid disruption
• training across warehouse, sales, drivers, and finance

Operations continued throughout onboarding with no shutdown.

The most complex portion of onboarding is the WMS transition, which also delivers the largest operational gains.

The Turning Point

The defining moment came on the first day the WMS went live.

Morning warehouse processing — which previously took approximately 6 hours — was completed in about 1.5 hours, smoothly and without confusion.

For leadership and skeptical managers, this was the moment when trust shifted from pen-and-paper to digital workflows.

Measurable Outcomes

Time Savings

• Warehouse processing: Reduced from 6 hours to 1.5 hours each morning with 30 staff. An 810-hour weekly time savings.
• Drivers: 20 minutes saved per delivery across 12 drivers, primarily from reduced invoicing and quality-check time. A 270 hour weekly time savings
  

Labor Optimization

• No layoffs
• Time savings were reinvested into higher order volume and operational stability.
• Enabled revenue growth without expanding headcount
  

Error Reduction

• Fewer wrong-package deliveries and misrouted orders
• Clear product separation across warehouses reduced expiration and duplication risk
  

Cost Reduction

• Significant reduction in paper usage.
• Fewer costly delivery mistakes (previously ~$1,000 per error)
  

Visibility & Trust

• Real-time inventory visibility aligning departments
• Clean digital audit trails eliminated lost orders
• Finance and operations began working from the same data
  
  

Organizational Impact

• Sales risk decreased through centralized customer data
• Managers gained confidence in digital systems
• Approximately 70% of Stryda’s proposed operational changes were accepted and implemented — a high adoption rate for a previously tech-resistant organization
• Additional accounting features were requested and added after trust was established
  
  

Leadership ultimately asked Stryda’s founder to take on a formal CTO role, underscoring how critical the system had become to the business. While declined, the relationship remains deeply collaborative, with ongoing development based on operational needs.

Why Stryda

For this distributor, Stryda succeeded where traditional systems fell short:

• Faster time to value
• Lower total cost
• Full-stack coverage (WMS, CRM, ordering, routing, invoicing)
• Hardware integration
  
• Customization without enterprise bloat
  
  

Most importantly, Stryda restored control over data, customers, operations, and growth.

Conclusion

This case demonstrates that even highly manual, change-resistant distributors can successfully adopt modern operational systems when the solution aligns with how the business actually runs.

For distributors operating in the $5M–$120M revenue range, Stryda provides a path to:

• reduce costly errors
• meet regulatory demands
• protect customer relationships
• and scale revenue without scaling chaos

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