How Industrial Networking Solutions Helped a Food Manufacturing Facility Scale from Startup to Industry Leader

When our customer first launched, their yogurt product wasn’t “cool.” Most grocery store shelves were dominated by traditional brands, and the “healthy, high-protein” movement hadn’t yet caught fire. But they believed in a different future: one where better ingredients and accessible nutrition could redefine the category.

That belief paid off. As consumer demand for clean, protein-packed foods exploded across the U.S., they went from a small startup in upstate New York to one of the fastest-growing food companies in the country. Today, they’re a household name.

But at the height of demand, their network couldn’t keep up.

What happens when success outpaces infrastructure?

At their original manufacturing plant, production kept grinding to a halt. Their network was failing multiple times per day—shutting down the entire facility, stopping mixers, conveyors, and packaging lines midstream. Restarting operations took hours. The downtime costs were mounting, the leadership team was frustrated, and the company’s skyrocketing growth was at risk.

Their VP of Engineering made the call to INS:
“Our plant is shutting down 2–4 times a day, every day. Can you help us?”

As soon as possible, an INS engineer was on a flight to New York.

The Diagnosis: IT Thinking in an OT World

When the INS team arrived, what we found was a classic example of a well-intentioned IT solution gone wrong in an industrial setting. The network had been designed by a traditional IT integrator—optimized for corporate connectivity, not plant-floor reliability.

The result was a fragile, unstable system in which even touching a cable could take the entire plant offline. We literally tested it: touching one Ethernet cable made the entire plant go dark.

Digging deeper, INS found the real problem: IT traffic and industrial control traffic were sharing the same network. Based on INS’s experience with comparable environments, a typical industrial network handles approximately 10,000–15,000 packets per second. Theirs was being pummeled with nearly 70,000 packets per second, overwhelming the system.

The Fix: Restoring Control and Confidence

INS’s engineers mapped the entire network and presented their team with a data-backed diagnosis. Within two hours, INS isolated IT and OT traffic, corrected misconfigurations, and helped stabilize plant operations.

An issue that had plagued this customer’s IT team for months—addressed by INS in an afternoon.

Production resumed almost immediately. No more daily outages. No more system reboots. For the first time in months, the plant floor returned to production levels.

Today, INS can proudly say we’ve been their connectivity partner for 13 years and counting. That single moment marked the beginning of a long-term partnership and fundamentally shaped the way they manufacture today.

Building the Backbone of Expansion

After restoring their original plant, this customer asked INS to support its next major project: the construction of a new facility in a new state. That location would grow to become the largest manufacturing plant for this specialty in the world.

When INS arrived, the new “facility” was just an open field and a few temporary engineering trailers. We designed the plant’s network architecture from the ground up—the digital backbone that would enable automation, efficiency, and data visibility at scale.

Today, INS continues to support their growing global footprint, from upgrades to current locations in the United States to new initiatives — both at home and abroad.

Beyond Connectivity: Building the Data Model of the Future

What began as a network overhaul evolved into a digital transformation. With INS as a long-term partner, this customer began to see the potential of data not just as an output of operations, but as a driver of strategy.

INS introduced their team to Inductive Automation’s Ignition® platform, a game-changer for industrial data visualization and control. Using Ignition, they could move away from isolated systems and manual spreadsheets toward real-time dashboards, SQL-driven tags, and web-based visualizations that connected people, processes, and production.

This was more than a fix. It was a transformation of how the organization used and trusted data.

From Reactive to Predictive Manufacturing

Over the years, INS has helped this customer evolve from firefighting technical issues to proactively designing the “plant of the future.”

Their plants today operate on a unified network standard, a framework so reliable that no new project moves forward without INS-recommended configurations and components.

Even as our customer has grown its internal OT team, the relationship with INS remains strong. INS continues to supply the technology, consulting, and data expertise that help them innovate with confidence. Over thirteen years, the partnership has evolved far beyond vendor and client. It’s become a model for what industrial collaboration should look like: trusted, strategic, and relentlessly future-focused.

INS isn’t there to “fix a problem.” We’re there to help them think about where manufacturing is going, and how to build the infrastructure to get there.

From network chaos to digital clarity, INS helped this customer turn connectivity into a competitive advantage—one that continues to power their global expansion and innovation today.