Greenhouse Spotlight

Innovafeed is on a mission to revolutionize animal and plant nutrition, and their journey with Tulip has been nothing short of groundbreaking. At their facility in Nesle, France – the world's largest insect farm – they are scaling production by an incredible 500%. By combining a culture of rapid experimentation with a disciplined approach to scalability, they have transformed their operations and empowered their team to solve complex challenges collaboratively. This spotlight delves into the story of the team behind the innovation, their impactful projects, and the key lessons they've learned along the way.

The team at Innovafeed is a unique blend of talent, with backgrounds ranging from development and biotechnology to process engineering. This diversity is their strength. As Thomas Riehl, Operating System and MOM Director, puts it, "By mixing these different profiles, we have the possibility for better collaboration on the different functional and technical aspects of implementing an MES."

Innovafeed’s culture is built on a simple but powerful principle: "try first." The team carves out time throughout the year to explore and experiment with new functionalities in Tulip and other systems. This ethos of rapid experimentation is supported by a robust feedback culture, where new ideas are tested and then refined based on real-world input.

The team also maintains a rigorous commitment to standards. From day one of their MES journey, Innovafeed established universal naming conventions and a unified data model across all shop floors, preparing for scale. This foresight prevents data silos, streamlines development and data capture, and ensures that every solution is built to last.

As a pioneer in a new industry, Innovafeed’s operations and processes change rapidly, and their innovative team needed a solution that could adapt just as fast. "We wanted to have a very flexible platform with the ability to change a process in a few hours or days," Thomas explains. Autonomy was key; they wanted to own their transformation, not be dependent on external resources.

After evaluating several options, Tulip stood out. The true test was a Proof of Concept (PoC) designed to validate the citizen developer approach. Thomas assigned a complex task—machine integration—to a purely functional user with no prior development experience. In just a few weeks, the user successfully built the integration in Tulip. "That's the moment we said, 'Okay, I think we want to move forward,'" Thomas recalls. The team even made significant changes to the UI of the app just a few hours before the final demo, shocking internal stakeholders with their speed and agility.

The team’s collaborative spirit and feedback-driven culture truly shone during the Nesle 3 project. This highly automated facility is the largest vertical insect farm in the world, and as a first-of-its-kind factory, there was no existing blueprint to follow. Thomas’s team needed to define the processes and digital solutions for the site, while it was still under construction.

Success hinged on the close partnership between team members like Thomas, an IT expert, and Richard, a process engineer. They were co-located on-site, breaking down traditional silos between departments. "By working so closely together, they trained and grew each other," Thomas says. Thomas brought IT best practices and system architecture knowledge, while Richard provided the crucial end-user perspective and deep process understanding. The team also collaborated extensively with other departments, including Quality to define genealogy and traceability requirements and Production to define process flows and key metrics. This continuous dialogue ensured that the solutions were technically robust and supported every major stakeholder group.

This culture of feedback also extended directly to the shop floor. The development team ran agile sprints, bringing operators in for demos and interactive sessions. By seeing their suggestions incorporated into the apps in near real-time, operators became co-creators of the solution. This direct line of communication was transformative. "They were first very surprised that we were listening to their requirements," Thomas notes. The process didn't just improve the final product; it built a powerful sense of ownership. "It changed completely their perspective to, 'We are building something for us.'"

The impact of Innovafeed’s work extends far beyond a single project. By bringing together different teams into focused “task forces,” Innovafeed continuously improves existing processes. In one instance, a task force reduced the execution time of a key process by a factor of three by refining an existing system integration. This dedication to optimization is critical as Innovafeed scales up production from 1,000 pallets a day at go-live to 6,000.

This success has allowed Thomas’s team to expand its support across the organization. They now partner with commercial teams to manage customer orders and shipment preparation, providing greater visibility into the entire value chain. Furthermore, they work closely with the central data team, providing clean, structured data that fuels business intelligence and reporting. This collaboration ensures that the rich data captured on the shop floor translates into actionable insights for the entire company.

Having proven their strategy, Innovafeed continues to grow, building with Tulip as a component of their expandable digital model. Innovafeed’s story is a powerful testament to what can be achieved when a diverse, empowered team is given the right tools to innovate. They are not just building the MES of the future; they are cultivating a new paradigm for operational excellence.