Growing global. Running lean.

The challenge

Beyond Meat’s customer service team covers a lot of ground. From the US, a team of three manages order processing, customer support, credits, returns, and pricing for all North America and Latin America. In Europe, a single team member handles the same scope for a growing base of retail and foodservice distributors, with a dotted line back to the U.S. team.

For a company built on rapid growth, that coverage model worked as long as the work could be managed. But as Beyond Meat expanded into new international markets and added distributors in the UK and EU, the volume of incoming purchase orders grew faster than the team did. Most of those orders arrived the same way they always had as PDFs in an email inbox, waiting to be keyed manually into NetSuite.

On a busy day, that meant 30 orders landing at once, each requiring individual data entry with no room for error on items, quantities, pricing, or ship-to locations. There was no specific order day and no enforced cutoff window. Orders came when they came, and on heavy days, manual order entry was essentially all the team did.

“If we received 30 orders in one day, that’s pretty much all we did that day.“
— Jessica Powers, Manager, Customer Service, Beyond Meat 

The risk was not just time. Every manual entry was an opportunity for a wrong item, a wrong quantity, or a wrong price to make it into NetSuite and downstream to a customer. Before automation, an error reached a customer in roughly 1 to 3 percent of orders. For a lean team with no margin for rework, that exposure mattered. 

The solution

The shift began by connecting Beyond Meat to their Canadian retail distributor and growing the SPS network from there. Orders that had been arriving as PDFs started flowing directly into NetSuite as validated sales orders, without anyone on the customer service team touching them. The time savings were immediate, and so was the reduction in manual entry errors. 

From there, the model extended into Europe. As Beyond Meat’s customer accounts grew to include Zandbergen, Martin Brower (which handles McDonald’s across the UK), and The Hughes Group across the UK, each new account joined the SPS network and automated their purchase orders with Beyond Meat. Onboarding a new distributor to automated fulfillment typically took about three months. With SPS managing the connection, most new partners now go live in a few days, and only the more complex ones take a few weeks. The EU team member who had always worked alone did not need a second hire, because the order volume that would have required one was being absorbed by automation. 

The integration runs through NetSuite, which has been Beyond Meat’s operating system across its global growth, expanding from a domestic ERP to a multi-currency, multi-subsidiary environment as the company added European manufacturing. SPS routes orders directly into NetSuite and handles mapping changes, new distribution center additions, and configuration work. The customer service team does not need to understand the integration underneath, and the IT team does not need to dedicate resources to managing fulfillment. They work in NetSuite. SPS keeps the connection between the two current. 

“I don’t have the technical knowledge to do the mapping myself, and our IT team doesn’t have the daily bandwidth to execute this. SPS takes care of it all for us.“
— Jessica Powers, Manager, Customer Service, Beyond Meat

The results

Since automating fulfillment through SPS, Beyond Meat’s customer service team has handled the complexity of international growth without adding headcount. Today, roughly 300 to 500 orders a month flow automatically into NetSuite, work that previously meant line-by-line keying from a PDF. Across the team, that automation has cut order processing time by roughly 25 percent compared with a fully manual workflow.

“SPS Commerce has saved at least 25 percent of our order processing time over the last 2 to 3 years.“
— Jessica Powers, Manager, Customer Service, Beyond Meat

The reduction in manual entry has also cut human error risk sharply. Wrong items, wrong quantities, and wrong pricing no longer make it into NetSuite and downstream to customers. What used to happen in 1 to 3 percent of orders is effectively eliminated for the accounts that operate via SPS Commerce. 

“SPS and EDI order fulfillment has greatly maximized our reduction in risk of putting in the wrong items, the wrong quantity, wrong pricing. That’s significant for us.“
— Jessica Powers, Manager, Customer Service, Beyond Meat

Seventy percent of Beyond Meat’s customers now order through automated fulfillment, and the team’s goal is to keep raising that number along with the efficiencies that come with it. For a brand growing across continents on a lean team, the network is what lets the volume scale while the headcount stays flat.