Case Study · Food Manufacturing

SunButter builds a unified data warehouse to forecast business performance.

How North Labs helped a growing food manufacturer replace 21+ hours of monthly manual reporting with a centralized data warehouse, automated pipelines, and predictive analytics.

The Challenge

Growth the data program couldn't keep up with.

SunButter is a leading brand of sunflower seed butter, serving consumers with nut allergies across the country. As the business grew, their existing data program couldn't keep pace. Reporting was fragmented, slow, and entirely manual.

Manual Reporting

21+ hours a month

Sales leadership spent 21+ hours a month combining sales reports, industry trends, retail data, and wholesale inventory spreadsheets, relying on pivot tables and manual extraction for analysis.

Reactive Inventory

Gut feeling, not data

Inventory monitoring at the store and wholesale levels was based on "gut feeling" and trailing monthly reports, leaving the team reactive rather than predictive.

SunButter needed to evolve from spreadsheets and intuition to a single source of truth.

One that could centralize internal and external data, automate reporting, and power forward-looking decisions.

Business Impact

From spreadsheets to forecasts.

21+ hrs
Reclaimed monthly. Days of manual data preparation, spreadsheet combining, and pivot table analysis eliminated, freeing sales leadership to focus on strategy.
1
Single source of truth. All internal and external data centralized, enabling informed decisions on order fulfillment and region-specific sales performance.
ML
Predictive forecasting. Machine learning insights replaced "gut feeling" with data-driven predictions for inventory levels and sales trends, both over time and across product lines.
The Solution

A modern data warehouse, end to end.

North Labs evolved SunButter's data culture by designing and implementing a modern data warehouse backed by advanced cloud and data infrastructure. The solution addressed every layer of the data lifecycle, from automated ingestion through transformation, reporting, and predictive analytics.

Goals

Goal 01

Remove manual work

Eliminate manual intervention and data preparation entirely.

Goal 02

One source of truth

Create a centralized source of truth combining internal and external data for reporting and ad-hoc analysis.

Goal 03

Share the signal

Leverage data sharing for industry trends, retail data, wholesale inventory, and sales performance.

Goal 04

Predict, don't react

Deploy machine learning for future inventory and sales predictions, replacing intuition with evidence.

What We Built

North Labs designed a comprehensive data platform using Snowflake as the central warehouse, with automated ingestion pipelines, serverless compute for data processing, and modern ETL tooling to transform raw data into queryable, reportable assets. The reporting layer was migrated from spreadsheets to Power BI, giving stakeholders interactive dashboards for the first time.

Predictive models were layered on top of the warehouse, providing machine-learning-powered trend analysis and forecasting across both time-series and dimensional data, enabling the team to anticipate demand rather than react to it.

The Outcome

Hands-off, and forward-looking.

Automation

Completely hands-off

Files are automatically uploaded and processed on a weekly basis, transformed into a usable form for querying, and mirrored in Snowflake to be leveraged in the BI tool of preference.

Decisions

Informed and fast

With all data in one place, business stakeholders can make informed decisions on future order fulfillment and region- or store-specific sales, while eliminating days of formatting and combining spreadsheets.

Forecasting

Forward-looking intelligence

Machine-learning-powered insights provide trend analysis and predictions across horizontal analytics (changes over a period of time) and vertical analytics (changes to a particular column or set of data), turning raw data into forward-looking intelligence.

Interested in working with us?

Let's talk about how North Labs can help you build a unified data foundation for your business.