Heartland Grains freed $2.7M in working capital and won a national buyer with farm-to-shelf traceability
A grain aggregator buying from 600 growers was losing contracts to competitors who could prove provenance, and tying up $2.7M in working capital on inventory it couldn't match to orders. A supply-chain platform with verifiable traceability collapsed the gap between bin and buyer — and unlocked the premium contracts.
This is an illustrative case study. Company names, identifying details, and testimonials have been changed to protect client confidentiality. The technical solution and target outcomes are representative of the work we do. We extend the same confidentiality to every client.
Where they started
Heartland Grains aggregated grain from 600 growers across four states into 22 storage elevators, then sold to millers, ethanol plants, and food brands. The problem was visibility: grain was commingled in bins with no record of which grower's crop went into which shipment, so when a national food brand asked for farm-to-shelf traceability as a condition of a $9M annual contract, Heartland couldn't answer. They lost the deal. Inventory was tracked on a whiteboard per elevator, working capital tied up in unmapped stock sat at $2.7M, and the trading team spent 30 hours a week reconciling what was actually in the bins against what the spreadsheet said was there.
What we built
We deployed our Supply Chain Management platform with lot-level grain tracking from grower delivery through bin assignment, blending and shipment, a verifiable traceability record that ties every shipment back to its source growers and inputs, and demand forecasting tied to buyer contracts so the trading team knows what to move and when. Growers check in deliveries on a mobile app, elevator operators record bin assignments on a tablet, and the traceability packet generates automatically when a shipment loads. The platform went live in 11 weeks and replaced the whiteboard inventory, the reconciliation spreadsheet, and the three-week manual process of assembling provenance documents for buyers.
Target outcomes
More from this project
We lost the biggest contract in our history because we couldn't prove where our grain came from. A year later we walked back into that same buyer's office with a traceability packet that generated in two minutes — and we won the deal. The working capital we freed up was real money we put straight back into expanding two elevators.
Representative testimonial — name and role changed to protect client identity.