“The speed has been remarkable, honestly. Most projects drag on for a long time and they’re very complicated. This project has moved very swiftly. In the past, it would have taken years.” 

Lance Schultz, Chief Technology Officer, KLN Family Brands 

You don’t sell much peppermint candy in July 

When you’ve been making confectionary, popcorn, and pet food since the1940s, you learn a thing or two about manufacturing consumer goods. Like that candy sales spike in the run-up to the holidays and Valentine’s. Or that it’s best to start the day by producing allergen lines, so you don’t lose hours later cleaning equipment.  

KLN Family Brands is a 3rd-generation family business who’ve made treats loved by people or pets since the age of ration books. 

But they’ve never found tech that can keep pace with them. That can predict trends and seasonality. React in the face of tariff updates. Or forecast based on evidence, not estimations. 

When you can’t turn data into decisions, you waste money, stock, and your best people’s time. 

The power to turn data into good decisions 

The first problem we solved with KLN was around quoting: an engine to work out if a request that came in was a good deal. 

But when we showed them what we’d made, something else caught their eye: our product showed they had excess capacity. The focus turned to forecasting and planning. 

We shadowed the team as they mapped out days and dealt with disruption. The product we built with them became Flow: AI that brings together quoting, forecasting, scheduling, and production planning. 

With Flow, KLN can: 

• forecast by customer and SKU, factoring in seasonality, promotions, and global events that hit demand and supply 

• schedule the day to get more out of the lines, and people, they have 

• watch the AI re-plan the moment a new order comes in or a machine fails 

• understand why they lost a specific SKU to a competitor, and learn how to win it back. The ability to interpret audio or pressure is crucial in a world where problems can’t always be put into words: it’s the distinct rattle of a pipe, or the rhythm of a pump that’s off by a beat. Technicians learn to recognise subtleties like these over a lifetime. AI gives that experience to workers at all levels, helping them troubleshoot on their own. 

Set the AI a complex task overnight, and planners can now wake up to recommendations to pick from in the morning: like a memo on your desk. 

“It wasn’t him telling me ‘here’s our platform and this is what we use.’ It was understanding what do you need, and then creating a platform for that.” 

Jeff Peichel, Operations Planning Manager, KLN Family Brands 

Paul doesn’t have time to flick between eight tabs  (but he does have 20 seconds) 

Shadowing KLN’s team in person showed us the reality of their day to day. Like the fact that one of their forecasters, Paul, had to look at eight different tabs at once just to forecast one SKU. Now, he gets one UI to look at, and an answer in 20 seconds.  

“I look at it as a digital companion. When they come to work every day, they now have a digital companion that they can have a conversation with, ask questions to, or utilize to help them make their day faster and easier,” said CTO, Lance. 

The result: a more profitable plant 

Flow is in the pilot phase with KLN right now. But already, their forecasters, planners and sales teams are seeing how it’s helping them rightsize their inventory, increase throughput, and align better to customer demand. 

Next, we scale

Once the pilot phase is over, we’ll work with KLN to put Flow into production for all of their sites and business units: for agentic forecasting, planning & scheduling, and sales analysis. 

For KLN, scaling Flow isn’t just an operational decision, it’s a people decision. A third-generation family business that has always measured success by the lives it improves in Perham, their planners and schedulers deserve tools that reflect that same value. Tools that free them from firefighting so they can think ahead, spot opportunities, and do the work that actually moves the business forward. That’s what Flow is being built to do – with them, not just for them. 

Andy Peeters summed it up nicely: 

“Being a people-first company, we feel like it’s our responsibility to try and make people’s jobs easier. And we would be irresponsible if we weren’t digging into how we can do that with artificial intelligence.”  

Ready for your operations to Flow? 

Find missing capacity, win more work, and keep customer commitments.  

See Flow in Action