How Little Spoon Manages a Perishable Supply Chain at Scale
Little Spoon ships close to 30,000 cold-chain orders a week. On the Startup to Scale podcast, Director of Strategic Operations Garrett Otondo shares how the team scaled its perishable supply chain — and how Owlery replaced six tracking spreadsheets with one platform and stood up an EDI integration in two weeks to unlock retail.
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Key Takeaways
- Scale changed everything. Going from ~50 orders a week to nearly 30,000 shipments a week made sourcing, cold chain, and freight coordination exponentially harder. Little Spoon runs four fulfillment centers (Los Angeles, San Antonio, Chicago, New Jersey).
- Freight was "the Wild West." Before dedicated oversight, logistics ran on six different spreadsheets tracking inbound, outbound, spend, and contract rates — overwhelming, and not giving ops leadership data for strategic decisions.
- A "TMS-lite" was the right fit. Traditional TMS platforms were more than they needed. Owlery combined the spreadsheets into one view with high-level analytics, custom reporting, and integrations with carriers and fulfillment centers.
- Automation eliminated repetitive data entry. Loads created in their supply planning system push automatically to Owlery, which sends ASNs to the FCs — what used to be manual and time-consuming now happens in one click. BOL discrepancy reports compare what was shipped, on the BOL, and received.
- Proactive tracking. Hourly truck location updates and configurable late-threshold alerts let the team recover problem loads early instead of finding out days later.
- Freight spend is finally legible. Monthly spend by co-man, lane, and freight group can be compared to budget in minutes; Owlery data powered Little Spoon's first quarterly business reviews with its top three freight providers.
- EDI in two weeks. When Little Spoon's EDI partner backed out at the finish line of its retail (Target) launch for lack of an ERP, Owlery spun up the EDI integration in about two weeks.
6 → 1
freight spreadsheets consolidated into one platform
2 weeks
to launch EDI integration for retail
