Why Produce Deals Are Still Broken
(And What Needs to Change)
Walk into many produce companies today and you’ll see a strange contradiction: businesses handling millions in transactions are still managing deals through fragmented workflows that feel decades old, only now with more software layered on top. A single deal workflow often involves a purchase order in one place, a sales order in another, logistics tracked separately, invoices handled by accounting and communication happening across email, text or WhatsApp.
The issue is not a lack of software: the issue is that the deals workflow itself is still broken today in the produce industry.
Modern Systems, Fragmented Execution
Most produce businesses already have an ERP where they can create orders, manage inventory, generate invoices and run reports. But when it comes to actually running a deal in real time, those systems usually fall short.
Traditional ERP platforms were built to record transactions, not to coordinate the deal as it happens and even less for produce business, where speed and accuracy matter. That´s the reason why teams must fill the gaps manually: Sales negotiates outside the system, Operations manages execution across separate screens, Accounting reconciles the results later and the whole Communication flow lives in side channels.
The result is a process that technically works, but creates friction at every step.
Running a deal usually means moving through a chain of disconnected records, purchase orders, sales orders, shipments, invoices and payment follow-up. Every change in price, quantity, cost or timing has to be reflected across multiple places, usually manually and totally disconnected from other endpoints who play a key role within the whole process: that is where mistakes happen and control starts to slip.
The Real Cost: Lost Visibility and Slower Communication
The biggest cost of fragmentation when setting up a deal this way, is not just inefficiency: it is the loss of visibility.
When a deal is spread across systems, teams struggle to answer the questions that matter most:
- Are we making money on this deal?
- Have all costs been captured?
- What is the status of the shipment?
- Has the customer been invoiced?
- What still needs to happen?
At the same time, communications remains one of the biggest bottlenecks: Customers ask about availability, pricing and shipping; Suppliers need updates, Carriers need coordination and Internal teams need alignment.
But most of those interactions happen outside the deal itself, across disconnected emails, calls and messages. That means context gets lost, updates are harder to track and teams spend too much time chasing information.
Adding More Tools Trying to Solve the Problem
So how produce companies try to fix all these problems today? Answer is simple: adding more (new) software, intensive use of spreadsheets for tracking, new messaging apps for coordination and separate tools for logistics or accounting. But what is usually hard to realize is, adding more tools will not solve the problem itself: by doing it this way, they simply turn the workflow more fragmented and even hard to manage.
What is missing here is not another feature, another document or another app: it is a unified way to run the deal.
Produce businesses need one place where they can define the deal, understand profitability, execute operations, manage communication and track progress from start to finish: without that, teams are forced to keep stitching the process together manually.
The Shift Needed: From Recording Transactions to Running Deals
Forward-thinking produce companies are starting to move in a different direction: instead of relying on disconnected systems and side workflows, they are looking for a way to manage the full deal in one connected pipeline, so, no lose ends from the very start to the end.
This shift is not about replacing any existent ERP: it is about adding the missing operational layer that allows produce businesses to run deals the right way and not just document transactions after the fact: that is where the next evolution of produce software is heading.
There’s a Better Way to Run Your Produce Deals
What’s broken is not just the tools: it’s the way deals are managed.
Today, most systems force teams to break a single deal into pieces: orders, shipments, invoices, payments and manage each step in isolation. That creates gaps, delays and constant reconciliation. The alternative is to treat the deal itself as the system: one place where pricing is defined, costs are tracked in real time, logistics are coordinated, communication stays attached to the workflow and every step, from procurement to final payment, IS REALLY CONNECTED.
When the deal becomes the center of operations, everything changes:
- Teams stop chasing information and start acting on it
- Profitability is visible before, during and after execution
- Communication stays in context instead of getting lost in side channels
- Execution moves faster because there’s no need to reconcile across systems
This is the shift from simply managing records to running the business in real time.
If you are in produce and your team is still stitching deals together across multiple systems, documents and conversations you must know you are not alone because a lot of produce companies today, specially brokers, are really trapped into this scenario. But you should know there is a better way.
Still managing produce deals across multiple systems and side conversations?
Book a 15-minute demo and see how modern produce teams are running their deals from start to finish, in one connected workflow.