We built Heatvelo because S&OP cycles deserve better than yesterday's POS.

I spent eight years in supply chain and demand planning roles at CPG companies in the Upper Midwest. The last four of those years I was running S&OP processes for a mid-market natural food brand — watching the same conversation repeat in every quarterly planning review. Commercial team asks why we missed a trending SKU. Operations points to the ERP forecast. ERP forecast points to the scan data. Scan data was correct — it just didn't see what was coming.

The problem isn't the ERP. The problem is that POS scan data is a lagging indicator for any SKU where demand is shaped by external forces. Weather changes demand for soups, cold brew, trail mix. Social content creates demand spikes for specific ingredient combinations weeks before a grocery buyer even notices the trend. CPI pressure shifts basket composition from premium to mid-tier on a 6-8 week lag from the macro event. None of that information is in the scan data. It's all out there in the world, measurable, and systematically ignored by every ERP demand module I've worked with.

I started building Heatvelo in early 2025 specifically to solve this problem for the CPG segment I know best: $50M–$2B brands with multi-channel distribution, where the accuracy gap is large enough to be materially costly but the budget doesn't justify a custom data science team. The 94% accuracy claim isn't marketing copy — it's the number I kept targeting in my own S&OP processes, the number that would make a production commitment decision defensible in a planning review.

We're based in Minneapolis because that's where I live and where I understand the CPG landscape. It's also home to one of the most active food manufacturing and distribution clusters in North America — the proximity to that ecosystem is not incidental.