North of San Francisco there is a city called Petaluma where there is a cheese factory with the same name. Petaluma Creamery has more than a century of history and generated $50 million in its golden age, but several factors caused it to be on the verge of disappearing. The story of their salvation is proof that AI does not always come to destroy jobs, it can also save businesses.
A legendary cheese factory about to disappear. They count in Fortune that Larry Peter bought Petaluma Creamery in 2004 when the cooperative was about to close. It was he who turned it into a renowned brand that supplied hundreds of supermarkets and restaurants. After more than a decade of success, 2020 was the beginning of the end: the pandemic caused orders to drop, Larry had health problems and they lost Chipotle, one of their most important clients.
The computer cousin. It’s not a meme. Larry Peter had a cousin, Daniel Peter, who was not a computer scientist but something even better: 17 years working at Salesforce implementing planning systems for manufacturers. Furthermore, he had just taken a sabbatical so it was the perfect opportunity and he ended up becoming the CTO of the cheese factory (goodbye, sabbatical).
What Daniel found was a company that operated in a completely archaic way. All orders were recorded on paper, but invoices were entered in QuickBooks, an accounting software. The problem is that each of the more than 150 items had a code that employees had to know by heart, such as CY for yellow cheddar. As if that were not enough, it was invoiced in pounds, but the orders were always boxes or pieces. Goodbye, gap year.
First step: digitize. The first thing the company’s new CTO did was install fiber optic internet and began taking all the data accumulated over decades to the cloud. Once everything was digitalized and the house was tidy, Daniel built an operating system based on Salesforce and the Agentforce AI platform. This is where things got interesting.
AI agents to the rescue. With the house now in order, the intelligence layer was added and different tools were created to run the business. The first thing he did was load the jungle of codes for each article and replaced it with one that allowed searching with natural text. In addition, it automatically transforms boxes or pieces of cheese into pounds, making order registration a much faster process.
Another of the agents that he implemented is capable of predicting what a customer is going to order based on the purchase history, so orders can be placed faster and if a customer forgets something the system remembers it. There is also an agent who plans delivery routes that can be modified with natural prompts and, finally, an agent is dedicated to controlling the traceability of the milk, recording data such as weight, temperature, time and origin.
The human touch. AI agents improved the entire company’s operations, but there is one thing they do not know how to do and that is search for clients. For this, Larry Peter had the help of Kevin Goddard, who worked as a salesperson in the sector for decades. The result of joining their network of contacts with the new tools, managed to make the company go from having only 13 clients to more than 300. Petaluma Creamery is still far from billing 50 million at its peak, but they already plan to reach 10 million next year.
The future. AI is reconfiguring the labor market and in many cases that translates into massive layoffsbut this is not always the case and the story of this cheese factory shows the other side of automation and AI. “It is very likely that this place would not exist without her” says Daniel Peter, the CTO cousin. In the end, it seems that he liked life between the factory and the farm and the sabbatical year is going to last a little longer than expected.
Image | Petaluma Creamery
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