Perdue Farms: Empowering business strategy with AI

In 1920, Arthur and Pearl Perdue bought a small flock of laying hens and started selling eggs from their farm in Salisbury, Maryland. A century later, Perdue Farms is a $10 billion food and agriculture company that is still family owned, now in its fourth generation. Along the way, Perdue built one of the most recognizable names in American food: a flagship chicken brand Frank Perdue made famous by pitching it himself on TV, a premium portfolio of brands, and a leading position in no-antibiotics-ever protein. Its expertise spans the whole journey, from running hatcheries to getting a pack of chicken onto the shelf before a shopper reaches for it, alongside more than 3,000 farm partners who help feed families nationwide. That end-to-end mastery is Perdue's superpower. Making the data behind it move as fast as fresh chicken does is what this story is about.

But a century of growth also leaves a legacy-sized data challenge. Getting a perishable product onto the shelf at the right moment takes careful coordination, and five years ago that coordination ran on analytics requests and waiting. Vital data sat siloed across disparate spreadsheets, and turning it into a useful insight could take weeks to months. For a company selling farm fresh food, that lag meant missed restocks, excess inventory, and lost sales, all weighing on overall business performance. The team spent their days assembling data instead of analyzing what it meant for the business, and problems hid in the gap.

Instead of building a big data team, Perdue bet on the business

According to Sumita Munshi, Director of Data Analytics at Perdue, “There's usually a tug of war between IT and business. There's always that question of how much freedom to give to people.” Perdue decided to empower the end user so associates could log in and experiment with their data directly using visual and AI-assisted tools. To connect the team, Kyle built a layer of player coaches, or “mini CDOs.” They teach teams how to make data work, and pair across groups that share data so they can collaborate instead of inadvertently duplicating work. 

Perdue started with two or three teams. Today, 85 builders work across 21 departments on the same operating model, now fully scaled, adding player coaches and engineers along the way.

Giving that much freedom to that many people takes a platform IT can trust and the business can actually use. Snowflake is the compute and storage layer, and Dataiku is the orchestration engine the business runs on top of it. Associates once spent half a day getting a dataset ready. Now, the pipelines run on their own; people come into the office, the work is done, and they spend their time analyzing it and applying their domain knowledge and best judgment for next steps.

Guardrails don't stop the work, they are the work

Governance at Perdue isn't a gate at the end. Quality checks, lineage, and ownership run inside the flow, so the guardrails are just part of the process rather than a stopgap bolted on afterward. The team treats governance as an accelerator, not a constraint. That's what made it safe to hand the platform to 85 people who don't write code: the business can see how any answer was built before acting on it. It's also why experimenting doesn't feel reckless. When something works, it's already inspectable enough to move toward production.

Compounding value 

Transportation costs run high these days, and Perdue needed to find a solution for shipping air. When boxes aren't 100% full, the trucks carry empty space instead of product. The team combed through transportation data to find an opportunity worth millions of dollars. They used Dataiku to run the calculations, size the packaging correctly, and cut down shipping costs.

The goal was never one or two high-value projects, but a platform that lets the business do its own transformation, across departments. Five years in, grassroots fixes compounded to drive an incredible savings of $100 million in return–capital Perdue can reinvest in their goal of becoming the most trusted name in agricultural products, and continuing to empower consumers, customers, and farmers with trusted choices.

A business strategy AI enables — not the other way around 

Before spinning up agents, Benning first asks the team what business transformation they're after, then works out where AI belongs in the process to drive results. The foundation holds either way. Because the architecture is layered, Perdue can take on new technology without re-architecting from scratch, whether that's analytics today, or agentic AI tomorrow. That pattern already shows up in how the team works with Cobuild: AI drafts the pipeline, then the builder reviews everything in detail. Move fast, but see the work. 

For Perdue, AI success isn't a model or a milestone. It's business experts being able to answer their own questions, and a century of hard-won knowledge — how to raise poultry without antibiotics or growth promotion drugs, how to make conventional agriculture more sustainable — living somewhere other than one person's memory. A fourth-generation family company spent a hundred years learning how to do this work well. Now it can hand that down, into the next century.