Customer Case Study: House-Autry Mills

From Bicycle to Sports Car: Why House-Autry Mills Switched to ENTR

House-Autry Mills
Custom Foodservice & Private Label Solutions

Interviewee: Joost Grant, Senior Manager of Research & Development

"Genesis was a bicycle, and ENTR is a sports car."

That's how Joost Grant describes the difference between the two systems.

At House-Autry Mills, the R&D team is responsible for everything from new product development and cost savings initiatives to nutrition analysis, ingredient statements, and product documentation. As the company continued to develop and update products, they needed a faster, more intuitive way to manage formulas and nutrition data.

Today, ENTR has become a tool Joost keeps open throughout the day. However, before making the switch, even simple tasks could feel unnecessarily time-consuming.

The Challenge

House-Autry's R&D team is responsible for everything from new product development and cost savings to nutrition analysis and ingredient statements.

Before ENTR, even simple tasks required navigating multiple menus and waiting for the software to load.

"It had a very outdated, antiquated user interface, very confusing sub-menus."

Creating new ingredients required significant manual entry, and locating the correct version of a formula could be surprisingly difficult.

"You'd have to go through five or six different formulas to figure out what was your current one."

Over time, these small inefficiencies added up.

"I always dreaded having to open the old system."

The Solution

After evaluating several alternatives, House-Autry selected ENTR because it addressed the challenges they faced most often.

"Everything that you had mentioned on the website was exactly the solution I needed."

Faster Access to Information

One of the biggest improvements was speed.

Previously, answering a nutrition question often meant navigating through multiple records and waiting for information to load. Today, the process takes seconds.

"If somebody asks me a nutrition question, I can have an answer in 10 seconds."

What once took minutes can now be done almost instantly, allowing the team to spend less time searching for information and more time acting on it.

Less Manual Work

Creating and maintaining ingredient records used to involve substantial manual work.

With ENTR's specification data extraction tools, House-Autry can upload supplier documentation and automatically pull nutrition information into the platform.

"Good gosh, it's amazing."

This has significantly reduced the amount of time spent entering data and made it easier to keep ingredient information current.

Better Formula Development

Joost also highlighted ENTR's Targets feature as a valuable part of the formulation process.

While developing a high-protein pancake mix, the team needed to hit specific nutritional goals established by marketing.

Previously, Joost often relied on spreadsheets to model formulation changes and understand how adjustments would impact nutrition targets.

With ENTR, he can make changes directly within a formula and immediately see whether those targets are being met.

"The target thing is awesome."

The result is faster iteration and greater confidence during product development.

Seamless Migration

One of House-Autry's biggest concerns was migrating years of formulas and product history into a new system.

ENTR handled the migration process quickly and smoothly, allowing the team to transition without disrupting day-to-day operations.

"ENTR had no problem getting that merged over."

Most importantly:

"I don't think we had any downtime."

The Results

Since adopting ENTR, House-Autry has:

• Reduced manual data entry
• Accelerated nutrition analysis
• Simplified formula development
• Improved visibility into formula revisions
• Saved approximately two hours per week during active formulation periods

Most importantly, the team now uses their nutrition software proactively instead of avoiding it.

"I have ENTR open a lot of the time on my computer."

For Joost, that's the clearest sign of success. Nutrition information is always accessible when he needs it, formula development is faster, and routine tasks require far less effort than before.