How Claros Farm Replaced 14 Spreadsheets with Guidance

Claros Farm is a vertically integrated organic CPG brand. They source certified organic fruit internationally, process it through co-manufacturers, and sell finished goods through retail and ecommerce. As the business grew, so did the operational complexity — multi-stage production, international supplier traceability, organic mass balance reconciliation, and real COGS tracking across co-packing runs.

To manage it all, the team was running the business on 14 disconnected spreadsheets. The CEO, who built Guidance specifically to run Claros Farm, describes the breaking point clearly: the software he needed simply didn't exist.

The Challenge: The Spreadsheet Breaking Point

Claros Farm's operations are uniquely complex. A single batch of finished goods requires tracing certified organic raw materials from international suppliers, through co-manufacturers, into finished goods sold across multiple channels. Each step generates traceability, compliance, and costing data that had to be manually reconciled across spreadsheets.

The spreadsheet system was fragile in three specific ways:

• Inventory sync issues: When production logged a batch in the "Production Sheet," inventory wasn't automatically deducted from the "Inventory Sheet." This led to stockouts and rushed purchasing.
• The Mass Balance nightmare: Preparing for their annual USDA organic audit took a full week. They had to manually reconcile harvest yields against finished goods sales to prove they weren't selling more organic product than they grew.
• Inaccurate COGS: Because yield loss varied wildly between batches (e.g., moisture loss during drying), their standard Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) model was systematically wrong. They didn't know their true margins.

The Solution: One Source of Truth

Claros Farm implemented Guidance to replace their web of spreadsheets with a single, connected platform built specifically for CPG operations. Because Guidance was built from the inside of a real organic CPG company — not designed for generic manufacturing and retrofitted for food — it handled the specific complexity of Claros Farm's operation from day one.

1. Automated Lot Traceability

With Guidance, every harvest was assigned a lot code upon receiving. When those raw materials were processed into WIP (Work in Progress), Guidance automatically linked the new WIP lot code to the original harvest lot. When the WIP was packaged into finished goods, the linkage continued. This created an unbroken, click-through chain from the retail shelf back to the specific field — ensuring full FSMA 204 compliance.

2. Real-Time Organic Mass Balance

Guidance's production module requires operators to input the exact amount of raw material used and the exact amount of finished goods produced for every batch. The system automatically calculates yield loss. Because this happens in real-time, Claros Farm's organic mass balance report is always ready for an auditor — with zero manual reconciliation required.

3. Dynamic COGS Calculation

Instead of relying on a static "theoretical" Bill of Materials, Guidance calculates COGS dynamically based on the actual yield of each specific batch. If a particular run had higher-than-normal moisture loss, the COGS for that specific lot of finished goods automatically reflects the true cost of the raw materials consumed.

The Results

By moving to Guidance, the Claros Farm team eliminated 15 hours of manual data entry and reconciliation per week. The spreadsheet bottleneck was removed, allowing the team to focus on operations rather than data management.

Most importantly, Claros Farm passed their next USDA Organic audit with zero non-compliances. When the auditor requested a traceback exercise on a finished good, the team pulled the complete history — including all linked purchase orders, supplier certificates, and yield calculations — in less than 30 seconds.

Claros Farm now has the operational foundation required to scale into broader distribution without adding administrative headcount. And the platform they built to run their own operation is now available to other CPG brands facing the same challenges.