For years, CAT Squared’s User Summit gave customers a place to learn, connect, and better understand how our solutions could support their operations. It was practical, customer-focused, and rooted in the real work happening inside food manufacturing plants.
But the conversations around food manufacturing are changing.
Customers are no longer asking only about individual features or isolated workflows. They are asking bigger questions about how information moves across the operation. How does live production affect processing performance? How does plant-floor activity connect to inventory, quality, traceability, and ERP systems? How can teams make faster decisions when the data they need lives in different places?
Those questions reflect a larger shift across the industry. Food manufacturers are not just looking for more technology. They are looking for more connected operations, clearer insight, and better ways to make decisions across the full production lifecycle.
That shift is why CAT Squared’s User Summit has evolved into POPCORN: The Innovation Summit powered by CAT Squared.
POPCORN builds on the foundation of the original User Summit, but expands the conversation beyond software capabilities alone. It brings together customers, technology partners, industry experts, and leaders from across the food production value chain to explore how connected systems, trusted data, and practical intelligence can help manufacturers move from operational complexity to operational clarity.
The original purpose of the event was simple: to help customers better understand the full scope of what CAT Squared could support across processing, quality, inventory, traceability, and enterprise visibility.
“We get a lot of comments from customers that say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you could do that,’ or ‘We didn’t know CAT Squared does that,’” explains Vernon Smith, President and CEO of CAT Squared.
That feedback pointed to an important opportunity. CAT Squared needed a more effective way to help customers and strategic decision-makers see the bigger picture — not just individual features, but how those capabilities connect across the food manufacturing environment.
“We wanted to find a more impactful way to educate customers on our full capability beyond the features,” Smith notes. “For this event, we wanted to help strategic decision-makers understand where CAT Squared could support broader operational needs across the food manufacturing environment.”
Over time, that customer education goal grew into something larger. The Summit became a place to step back from day-to-day demands and talk about the future of connected food manufacturing: how data, equipment, plant-floor systems, enterprise platforms, traceability, and process improvement all come together to support better operational decisions.
Now, with the broader CTB ecosystem involved, POPCORN has entered a new chapter. The conversation has expanded from what CAT Squared can support within the four walls of a plant to how connected solutions can support the full food production journey from farm to fork.
Food manufacturing does not happen in isolated areas of the business. Decisions made upstream can affect plant performance, labor planning, yield, inventory, quality outcomes, customer commitments, and downstream distribution.
That is especially true across protein production, where biological variability, live-side performance, processing execution, food safety requirements, and traceability obligations all influence the final product. A plant may have strong systems in place for individual functions, but if those systems do not communicate effectively, teams are still left piecing together the story after the fact.
A live-side issue may not fully show up until it affects processing performance. A quality event may influence inventory decisions, customer orders, or shipment timing. Equipment downtime may affect production flow, labor efficiency, and yield. A traceability question may require information from receiving, production, packaging, warehouse, and ERP systems before the full picture becomes clear.
When that information is disconnected, teams lose time. They spend more effort reconciling reports, searching for root causes, and manually connecting details that should already be working together. In a high-volume, highly regulated environment, those delays can affect performance, compliance, customer confidence, and profitability.
This is why the Summit conversation needed to grow beyond product education alone. Food manufacturers need practical conversations about how information moves across the operation, where context is missing, and how connected systems can help teams understand not only what happened, but why it happened, where it started, what it affected, and what action should come next.
Data collection has become a major focus across food manufacturing, but data alone is not the end goal. The real value comes from turning data into information that teams can understand, trust, and act on.
That requires more than dashboards and reports. It requires connected systems that give data meaning.
Food manufacturers are changing how they evaluate technology because the old piecemeal approach is no longer enough. A system can no longer be judged only by how well it performs one function in one area of the plant. The bigger value comes from how well it connects to the rest of the operation and whether it helps teams make better decisions before the same issues show up in yield, downtime, quality, labor, inventory, or customer commitments.
Operational clarity begins when plant-floor activity, production performance, quality events, inventory movement, equipment behavior, and traceability records no longer exist as separate pieces of information. When those details are connected, teams can see patterns sooner, understand cause and effect more clearly, and respond with better context.
That does not mean technology replaces operational experience. It means technology should support the people making decisions by giving them information that is accurate, timely, and connected to the work happening across the operation.
CYNERGY represents CAT Squared’s vision for bringing greater synergy to food manufacturing operations. The name reflects more than a platform identity. It points to a broader approach to connected production, where systems, people, data, and processes work together more consistently across the food value chain.
Through CYNERGY, CAT Squared is focused on helping food manufacturers connect key areas of their operations, including first processing, production operations, warehouse management, food safety and quality, continuous improvement, maintenance planning, optimization, and traceability. The platform is designed to support manufacturers that need stronger visibility from the point of work to the enterprise level.
The evolution of CYNERGY also reflects CAT Squared’s connection to CTB sister companies across the broader supply chain.
“CTB companies touch many parts of the food production supply chain; there’s a significant opportunity to think more intentionally about integrated solutions,” Smith explains.
That idea became an important foundation for both the CYNERGY initiative and the current direction of POPCORN. The goal is not simply to connect systems for the sake of integration. The goal is to help manufacturers reduce friction, improve visibility, and create a stronger foundation for operational decision-making.
When production activity, downtime, inventory, quality, and traceability data are integrated, teams gain a more complete operational picture. That can support faster root-cause analysis, stronger compliance, more consistent execution, and better communication between the plant floor and the enterprise.
POPCORN has evolved with the industry. What began as a way to help customers better understand CAT Squared’s capabilities has grown into a broader conversation about connected food manufacturing, practical intelligence, and the future of operational performance.
“This Summit is totally different,” explains Smith. “The focus is no longer on presenting isolated capabilities. It is about telling an overarching story that follows the supply chain from the farm to the product reaching the customer, reflecting how modern operations actually function.”
This year’s Summit is built around the realities food manufacturers face every day. Sessions explore live production systems, processing execution, plant-floor data, operational intelligence, traceability, ERP integration, regulatory outlooks, data standards, and the future of connected agrifood systems.
The agenda reflects the full production lifecycle because that is where today’s most important operational questions are taking shape. How does upstream performance affect downstream execution? How can plant-floor data support enterprise decisions? How can manufacturers improve traceability without adding unnecessary complexity? How can systems work together in ways that help teams make better decisions faster?
The event also creates space for customers, partners, and industry experts to share real-world lessons. Technology adoption is most valuable when it is grounded in operational experience, practical use cases, and honest conversations about what it takes to connect systems in complex production environments.
Food manufacturing is entering a new phase of digital maturity. The focus is shifting from isolated technology adoption to connected operational intelligence. Processors want stronger visibility, more reliable data, better interoperability, and clearer direction for how technology can support measurable performance improvement.
Smith summarized the desired takeaway for attendees in terms of confidence and direction. He explained that CAT Squared wants attendees to leave with the understanding that “we have the right vision,” “the right roadmap,” and are “the right partner to take them on this journey” toward Industry 4.0 and the smart factory of the future.
That is the purpose behind POPCORN. It is not only a new name for a customer event. It is a reflection of how CAT Squared is expanding the conversation with customers, partners, and industry leaders around the future of connected food manufacturing.
The companies that make the most progress will be those that look beyond individual systems and consider how information flows across the entire operation. They will ask where data is being collected, where it is being delayed, where context is missing, and where better integration could improve decision-making.
POPCORN is designed to bring those conversations together, helping food manufacturers examine what connected operations look like in practice, how CYNERGY is evolving to support that vision, and how the industry can move from disconnected data to operational clarity.
POPCORN: The Innovation Summit powered by CAT Squared takes place August 10–13, 2026, in Hot Springs, Arkansas.