Scaling CPG Operations from $10M to $100M: What Changes?

Getting a CPG brand to $10 million in revenue is hard. Scaling it to $100 million is a different kind of hard. The tactics, tools, and team structures that carried you through the early stages will start to break down as your business grows in complexity. What once felt scrappy and efficient starts to feel chaotic and fragile.

Most of the operational pain you experience between $10M and $100M isn't caused by growth itself. It's caused by systems and processes that weren't built to handle it. Here's what changes as you scale, and what you need to rethink along the way.

At $10M, spreadsheets are the backbone of most CPG operations. Inventory tracking, purchase orders , margin analysis, fulfillment schedules: it all lives in a patchwork of Google Sheets and Excel files maintained by a small team that knows where everything is. And it works, mostly, because someone on the team has the full picture in their head.

At $30M, $50M, and beyond, that approach falls apart. You have more SKUs , more warehouse locations, more retail partners, and more channels to manage. The person who used to hold it all together is now overwhelmed, and the spreadsheets they built are riddled with errors that nobody catches until they become expensive problems. Stockouts during peak season, duplicate purchase orders, and inaccurate margin calculations become recurring issues rather than one-off mistakes.

Spreadsheets can't model future cash flow or inventory needs with any reliability, and they make compliance and audits significantly more stressful ( Settle ). The shift from spreadsheets to real systems is one of the defining operational transitions of this growth stage. But choosing the wrong system can be just as damaging as having no system at all.

A $10M CPG brand might sell through DTC , Amazon, and a handful of regional retail accounts. A $50M brand is likely managing DTC, multiple marketplaces, national retail partnerships, wholesale accounts, and possibly international distribution. Each channel has its own ordering patterns, compliance requirements, pricing structures, and fulfillment expectations.

This complexity doesn't grow linearly. Every new channel creates new demands on inventory allocation, order routing, and financial reporting. You need to know not just what you have in stock, but where it should be, how fast it needs to get there, and what it actually costs to fulfill through each channel. According to McKinsey , traditional scale advantages like established distribution and customer relationships have eroded enough that smaller, more agile competitors can now compete effectively, putting even more pressure on growing brands to optimize their channel operations.

Without a unified system to consolidate and manage orders across all of these channels, your operations team spends most of its time firefighting instead of building scalable processes. The brands that navigate this stage successfully are the ones that invest in consolidating their order management early, before the complexity becomes unmanageable.

At $10M, your cost structure is relatively simple. You know what you pay your co-manufacturer, what shipping costs, and roughly what your margins look like by product. But as you scale, the variables multiply. You're dealing with different landed costs depending on the supplier, varying freight rates by fulfillment location, promotional allowances, retailer chargebacks, and shifting input costs.

Most growing CPG brands reach a point where they cannot answer the question: "What is my margin by SKU, by channel?" They know their top-line revenue is growing. They can see their aggregate COGS . But the granular, unit-level economics that should be driving pricing, assortment, and channel strategy are buried in a tangle of disconnected data.

This is one of the most significant blind spots a scaling brand can have. You might be growing revenue while unknowingly subsidizing unprofitable channels or products. The Consumer Goods Forum has found that 55% of CPG companies struggle with managing cash flow due to the high costs of production and distribution cycles. Getting visibility into true landed costs and contribution margins at the item level isn't a nice-to-have at this stage. It's essential for making sound decisions about where to invest and where to cut.

For many CPG brands in the $20M to $50M range, the instinct is to solve operational chaos with a traditional ERP implementation. It seems logical: consolidate everything into one system, get a single source of truth, and professionalize the back office.

The problem is that legacy ERP implementations are notoriously risky and slow. According to Gartner , between 55% and 75% of ERP implementations fail to meet their objectives. Research from Panorama Consulting shows that only about 23% of all ERP implementations are considered successful, with an average cost overrun of 189%. For a mid-market CPG brand, a failed or delayed ERP implementation isn't just an inconvenience. It can stall growth for a year or more during the exact window when speed matters most.

Even when ERP implementations succeed, they often introduce a different problem: rigidity. Traditional ERPs require you to conform your processes to the system's logic. But scaling CPG brands are constantly evolving their workflows as they add channels, suppliers, and fulfillment partners. A system that takes months to modify every time your business changes isn't solving the underlying problem. It's just replacing one set of constraints with another.

The brands that scale most efficiently are the ones that find a way to get enterprise-grade operational infrastructure without the 12-to-24 month implementation timeline and the rigid, one-size-fits-all architecture.

At $10M, your operations team might be three to five people who wear multiple hats and know every corner of the business. At $50M, the temptation is to solve growing complexity by hiring more people. More inventory analysts, more purchasing coordinators, more operations associates to manually process orders and reconcile data.

But headcount is expensive, slow to ramp, and doesn't solve the root cause. If your processes are manual and your systems are disconnected, adding people just adds more hands to the same broken workflow. According to CustomerThink , roughly 40% of mid-sized CPG companies struggle to scale operations while maintaining quality and efficiency. The real unlock is automation and system design: building processes that scale with the business rather than requiring proportionally more labor as complexity grows.

This means automating purchase order creation based on demand signals, setting up rules-based order routing, and building workflows that enforce data quality at the point of entry rather than fixing errors downstream. The goal is operational leverage, where revenue can grow significantly without a proportional increase in operational headcount.

One of the least discussed but most critical challenges at this growth stage is master data management. Your product catalog, supplier records, location hierarchies, and cost structures form the foundation of every operational decision. When this data is inconsistent, duplicated, or scattered across systems, everything downstream suffers: inaccurate inventory counts, wrong costs on purchase orders, misaligned financial reporting.

At $10M, sloppy master data is manageable because someone on the team knows the workarounds. At $50M and beyond, bad master data creates compounding errors that are nearly impossible to trace. CPG brands that have invested in digital supply chain tools and centralized data management consistently outperform those that haven't ( McKinsey ). Getting your master data unified, accurate, and governed isn't glamorous work, but it's the highest-leverage investment you can make in your operational infrastructure.

The pattern is consistent across nearly every CPG brand that makes this journey. What got you to $10M was hustle, intuition, and a willingness to make things work with whatever tools were at hand. What gets you to $100M is deliberate operational infrastructure: unified data, automated workflows, real-time visibility, and systems that flex as your business evolves.

The brands that stall between $10M and $100M almost always share the same failure mode. They either clung to manual processes too long, or they invested in rigid systems that couldn't keep pace with the speed of their business.

This is exactly the problem DOSS was built to solve. DOSS is the Operations Cloud for physical product companies, providing a unified suite of modules for inventory management , procurement , and order management that adapts to how your business operates. Rather than forcing a 12-to-24 month monolithic implementation, DOSS layers capabilities iteratively, delivering value in months instead of quarters or years. You get real-time visibility into landed costs, contribution margins, and inventory across every location and channel, all while keeping your existing general ledger in place. Software should adapt to your strategy, not constrain it. If you're navigating the $10M to $100M growth curve and feeling the operational pain, explore how DOSS can help.