The Upside and Downside of Spreadsheet Driven R&D

Many food companies rely on spreadsheets because they’re familiar, flexible, and seemingly “free.” But in practice, spreadsheets introduce hidden costs, hidden risk, and massive inefficiencies that directly impact speed, compliance, profitability, and risk to your organization. 

Here’s what we’ve learned from working with hundreds of industry professionals:

1. Spreadsheets Introduce Risk at Every Step

Small errors can snowball fast. One broken formula or mistype in a spreadsheet can throw off your nutritionals without anyone noticing. And when multiple folks are working on the same file, accidental changes are more likely to happen. 

A big part of the risk comes from the fact that information is usually taken from an already prone-to-error spreadsheet and then manually entered into an NFP-generating software, creating even more opportunities for mistakes. These aren’t “what-ifs”; they’re some of the most common reasons products end up mislabeled.

2. Spreadsheets Slow Down Innovation

Formulators spend hours reconciling formula version control, manually updating ingredient nutritionals, fixing formulas on broken spreadsheets, and doing manual nutrition calculations. The team is trying to move into production, and meanwhile, the developer has gotten their 4th email asking, “Is this the approved formula?” (Yes, that’s a true story.)

That’s not innovation. That’s admin work.

3. Spreadsheets Don’t Scale

When a company adds more products, more suppliers, more claims, etc., spreadsheets become overly chaotic, and they aren’t searchable in any meaningful way, with slow and unclear change tracking. If you’re looking for specific formulas or versions, you end up digging through endless tabs, filenames, and shared drives. 

That might work when you’re a small team, but as an organization grows, the messier the web of data becomes. 

4. Spreadsheets Create a Collaboration Bottleneck

Usually created by one developer, with a layout and formulas built-in that only they truly understand, spreadsheets are cryptic to anyone else on the team. This makes onboarding, knowledge transfer, and cross-functional collaboration nearly impossible until that formula is put into a different system. 

As a result, teams often can’t answer basic questions like, “Is this the latest formula?” “Has Regulatory started approving these ingredients?” “Which supplier are we using?” Every part of the business slows down because the data is held by one individual (and what happens when they’re out of the office?).

So, when is it time to move on?

• When the risk of error is too high - and too costly
• When the time spent on spreadsheets and email “admin” monopolizes your product developer’s time
• When you need complete traceability throughout your product development lifecycle
• When moving through commercialization is a workflow nightmare - hand-offs are slow and error-prone
• When your product portfolio is growing, but your spreadsheet system can’t scale with it
• When leadership needs visibility into the pipeline and data accuracy that spreadsheets just can’t provide

Spreadsheets Helped You Start - But They Won’t Help You Scale

Most great food brands were built on spreadsheets. Excel is flexible, fast, and incredibly useful - especially in the early days.

But eventually, the flexibility that once empowered your team starts to create more risk, drag, and rework than it’s worth. At a certain point, complexity outgrows the tool.

If You’ve Hit That Tipping Point, ENTR Can Help

A purpose-built platform like ENTR gives you all the flexibility of a spreadsheet - but with structure, automation, traceability and compliance guardrails that spreadsheets just can’t provide.