Völur Vision 2.0 launching at World Agri Tech London September 22

Opinion: The Meat Industry Runs on Spreadsheets. That's a $500M Problem — and Opportunity.

OSLO, NORWAY, September 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Anna Turvoll, CEO & Chair Völur

Every industry likes to call itself "traditional." Meat processing actually is. Walk the planning office of a processing plant today and, next to millions of dollars of automated cutting equipment, you'll usually find the same tool that ran the business thirty years ago: a spreadsheet, and an experienced planner who holds the real logic in their head.

That's not a criticism of the people. It's a description of an industry that modernized its equipment long before it modernized its decisions — and the gap between the two is now one of the largest sources of untapped value in food production.

Change doesn't fail on ambition. It fails on tempo. Enter Völur Vision 2.0.
I've spent my career around industries mid-transformation, and the pattern is consistent: the technology is rarely the hard part. The hard part is asking an industry that has run on hard-won intuition for decades to trust a system it didn't build, on a decision it used to own personally. In meat processing specifically, that intuition is real expertise — knowing how a carcass should be cut isn't guesswork, it's years of pattern recognition. The opportunity isn't to replace that judgment. It's to give it a tempo upgrade: the same instinct, running against every order, every price signal, and every yield outcome in real time, instead of once a shift. That's why we are launching our platform this week in London at World Agri Tech.

That reframe matters for how change actually lands. The plants making the fastest progress aren't the ones that mandated a system and walked away — they're the ones that treated their planners as the domain experts training the AI, not people being replaced by it. Adoption follows trust, and trust follows proof: show a planner their own logic reflected back, improved, and the resistance that usually kills enterprise software rollouts largely disappears.

The opportunity size is why this is worth getting right.
We size the addressable value in red meat planning alone in the billions of dollars globally, with a serviceable slice worth several hundred million — and that's before extending into other proteins. It's a number that sounds abstract until you translate it: it's the sum of thousands of small decisions, made slightly better, every single day, across an industry that has never had the tooling to make them any other way. Multiply a few percentage points of yield or fewer expedited shipments across every carcass, every plant, every day, and you get a number no single automation upgrade could touch, because automation was never the layer where that value was hiding.

That's the case I'd make to any leader in an industry ripe for change: don't ask whether AI belongs in a business built on decades of manual expertise. Ask what tempo your business would run at if that expertise could act on every decision instead of the few someone had time to think through. In our experience, the industries with the most catching up to do are usually sitting on the most value once they close the gap — you just have to bring people with you at a pace they can actually trust.

Anna Turvoll
Völur
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