Why the CPG Industry Is Still Stuck in Spreadsheets — and What Comes Next

Ask a CPG operator how they manage their promotional activity, retailer accounts, or product listings, and there's a good chance the answer involves a spreadsheet. Maybe several. Maybe a shared Google Sheet that seventeen people have editing access to, with color-coded tabs and a naming convention that made sense six months ago but now requires a decoder ring.

This isn't a failure of imagination. Spreadsheets are genuinely powerful, endlessly flexible, and available to everyone. For early-stage CPG brands running on minimal infrastructure and maximum hustle, they're often the right tool for the moment. The problem is that most brands never really leave the moment — they just build more spreadsheets on top of the ones they already have.

The cost of spreadsheet-heavy operations isn't usually visible in any one place. It shows up in small ways: the hour spent consolidating data from three different files before a retailer review. The error in the promo submission because someone was working from an outdated version. The new hire who takes three weeks to get up to speed because all the context is locked in files on someone else's drive.

Cumulatively, these costs are enormous. A mid-sized CPG brand or brokerage that's running on spreadsheets is effectively paying a tax on every piece of work their team does — a tax in time, in errors, and in the cognitive overhead of managing information manually.

CPG has always been a relationship-driven industry, and relationship-driven industries tend to be slower to adopt operational software. When your competitive advantage is knowing the right buyer at Kroger, investing in software infrastructure can feel like a distraction from the real work.

There's also a switching cost problem. Moving off spreadsheets requires migrating data, retraining a team, and convincing stakeholders that the disruption is worth it. For a team that's already stretched thin, that's a hard sell — even when the long-term benefits are obvious.

The brands and brokerages that have made the shift aren't using enterprise software built for Fortune 500 companies. They're using platforms built specifically for how CPG works — with account management, promotional tracking, task management, and communication built into a single system that reflects the actual structure of their business.

The result is an organization that operates with less friction. Information is findable. Accountability is clear. New people onboard in days instead of weeks. And when a retailer asks a question, the answer is already in the system.

Spreadsheets aren't going anywhere. They're still the right tool for plenty of things. But as the foundation of a CPG operation? The brands that are still building on them are carrying a weight that their competitors have already put down.