Asakana

Food distributors run their operations through texts, calls, spreadsheets, and paperwork rather than modern software. Sales reps and admin staff are reluctant to change how they work, so even when companies invest in new systems, those systems go unused and the manual work continues. Orders arrive as messy shorthand, handwritten notes, voicemails, and informal messages that reference customer-specific habits and unwritten rules, which existing software is not built to understand. This leaves staff manually handling order entry, credit memos, returns, upsell suggestions, cutoff reminders, past-due collections, PO creation, and new customer discovery.

Asakana works behind the scenes inside the communication channels and systems distributors already use, including email, phone calls, voicemail, text, WhatsApp, and WeChat, without requiring staff to change behavior. It reads messy inputs like spreadsheets, PDFs, and handwritten notes, and is trained to handle wet order sheets that standard OCR fails on. For each incoming order it references that customer's order history, message history, shorthand, and the distributor's product catalog to replicate what an experienced sales rep would do, handling mistyped SKUs, misspellings, and multiple languages through its own AI search. It then connects directly to the distributor's existing ERP (such as QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, Zoho Inventory, or in-house systems), building API connections where needed, to automate order entry, credit memos, returns, upsell suggestions, cutoff reminders, past-due collections, PO creation, and new customer discovery.