Home / A recipe for financial success: How Planted weeds out growth blockers with Yokoy

A recipe for financial success: How Planted weeds out growth blockers with Yokoy

Last updated: October 24, 2023

Customer story, Finance Transformation, Spend Management

Rachel Steding

Head of Customer Success, Yokoy

Swiss-grown Foodtech startup, Planted, has a success story as delicious as its plant-based meats. With one part curiosity, two parts drive, a dash of creativity, Planted was founded in 2019 and is now shaking up the traditional meat protein industry with sustainable, tasty as well as healthy plant-based meat products ranging from planted.chicken, planted.kebab to planted.sausage or planted.duck. All their products are produced using only natural ingredients, setting a new standard in this new category. Grounded by the vision of disrupting the protein space with foundational values of sustainability and humaneness, Planted’s growth has skyrocketed on an international scale – and by adding Yokoy to their internal tool mix, it’s only the beginning.

Company overview

Kemptthal, Switzerland

244 employees

Foodtech

Yokoy Invoice

Yokoy Expense

Yokoy Pay

11 entities live

Challenge: When spreadsheets don’t cut it

Even though Planted is firmly rooted in the Swiss market, its international footprint has raised some complexity around spend management. Before, the team relied heavily on paper-based manual processes and siloed software solutions for the P2P (procure-to-pay) and T&E (travel and expense) processes. Moreover, handling international invoices and receipts with a standardized and scalable approach became a veritable ordeal. Ultimately, inefficiencies in these cumbersome processes jeopardized the company’s scalability and hindered growth.

Solution: Scalable automation – one bite at a time

To mitigate these risks caused by inefficiencies, Planted came up with a strategic pivot towards streamlined spend management. It revolved around three pillars, namely scalability, flexibility, and an entrepreneurial mindset that responds innovatively to global demands for progressive solutions underpinned by Swiss quality. The company stood firm in creating a spend management framework that was both smart and flexible enough to evolve alongside its growth trajectory. It was Yokoy’s modular spend management suite that made the cut.

One of Yokoy’s standout features is its flexibility through an open API, which integrates seamlessly with Planted’s ever-expanding tech stack, which is something no other spend management solution can offer. It’s this type of agility that allows Planted to add or replace other software solutions and legacy tools with ease. More than this, Yokoy’s adaptability allows for swift rollouts to new countries and entities, making it a perfect spend management companion for Planted and its ambitious global aspirations.

Impact: Weeding out growth blockers

Planted now uses Yokoy’s entire AI-based spend management suite and processes thousands of invoices, expenses and card transactions in an automated and fully integrated manner. The finance team has managed to focus their work on analytics and strategic spend areas that contribute to Planted’s expansion, while the repetitive and manual tasks are handled by Yokoy’s AI.

“Together with Yokoy, we can now quickly and flexibly seize new growth opportunities. The spend management suite integrates seamlessly into our growing tech stack, and we can add new user licenses at any time as we attract new talent to Planted.”

Matthias di Bianco, Head of Accounting at Planted

While plant-based meats and a spend management suite don’t seem the likeliest of counterparts, it doesn’t take long to recognize just how much unites them; an entrepreneurial spirit with Swiss flavor, an appetite for innovation, and a hunger to grow far beyond what was ever thought possible.