There's a conversation that happens in almost every food and ag company we work with. Someone pulls up the innovation pipeline. It's long. There are pilots in various stages, partnerships forming, new products in development, market tests underway. The activity is real and it looks impressive.
Then someone asks the uncomfortable question: how many of these turned into meaningful revenue in the last three years?
The answer is usually two or three. Sometimes zero.
We call this the pilot graveyard. It's one of the most consistent patterns in food, ag, and ingredients. A lot of innovation activity goes in, and almost nothing comes out the other side as scaled, commercial revenue.
What the pilot graveyard looks like inside food and ag companies
In startups, it shows up as a collection of promising tests that never graduate. Crop trials that generate good agronomic data but never convert to a commercial contract. Customer pilots that go well but don't have a defined path to a purchase order. The team is running multiple experiments across segments, geographies, or applications, and each one has its own rationale for existing. But there's no dominant pattern for growth, just a portfolio of potential.
In large food, ingredient, and ag companies, the dynamic is more institutional but equally stuck. Innovation teams maintain a formal pipeline. Each initiative has a sponsor, a budget, and a timeline. The quarterly reviews look busy. But when you ask which of these will generate $10M or $50M in new revenue within three years, the room gets quiet. Most of the pipeline is in permanent pilot mode, generating learning and activity reports but not revenue.
For investors, it's visible across the portfolio. Several companies stuck at the same stage: technically validated, commercially stalled. The follow-on narrative is getting harder to support because traction hasn't kept pace with the technical story.
Why innovation activity rarely converts to revenue
After running this diagnosis repeatedly, we've found the failure modes are predictable.
The first is that 'success' is never defined in economic terms. A pilot is considered successful if the customer is interested, if the data looks promising, if the partnership continues. But there's no threshold that says: if this pilot doesn't hit X revenue or Y conversion rate within Z months, we stop. Without that threshold, pilots run indefinitely and nobody has to make the hard call.
The second is that new bets are treated like extensions of the core business. The same sales team, the same channel strategy, the same pricing logic. But new ventures don't work that way. They need their own ICP, their own positioning, their own GTM motion. Forcing them through the core business machine almost always kills them.
The third is the absence of a dedicated commercialization system for pilot-to-scale. There's usually a process for getting a pilot started. There's almost never a process for converting a successful pilot into a scaled commercial operation. That gap is where most innovation value dies.
The fourth is structural: internal teams are optimized for running the core business, not for building new revenue streams. The skills, incentives, and operating rhythms are designed for optimization and scale, not for the messy, iterative work of finding product-market fit in a new segment.
What an innovation-to-revenue system looks like
A functioning innovation-to-revenue system does four things.
It creates a focused portfolio of bets instead of a long list of projects. This sounds obvious, but it requires killing things, which most organizations resist. The goal is not to have the most initiatives. It's to have the fewest initiatives with the highest probability of becoming real revenue.
It uses explicit criteria for when to scale, stop, or pause. These criteria are defined upfront, based on economic signals, not opinions or politics. If a pilot doesn't hit the threshold, it gets paused or killed regardless of who championed it. This is the discipline most innovation functions lack.
For each chosen bet, it builds a venture-style GTM design. That means a dedicated ICP, a clear wedge into the market, a channel and pricing strategy built for the new business, and a sequenced plan. Not a copy of the core business playbook. A purpose-built commercial approach for this specific opportunity.
And it assigns a defined owner and operating rhythm. A cross-functional team with clear accountability and a cadence dedicated to moving a small number of bets toward scale. Not a committee that meets quarterly to review slides. A team that runs weekly against real commercial milestones.
How to know when your innovation function needs a commercialization reset
There are a few signals that come up consistently.
The phrase 'too many pilots, not enough revenue' has become a recurring theme in leadership conversations or board reviews. People know the problem exists. What's missing is the framework and discipline to solve it.
Leadership is starting to question the impact of innovation on actual growth. The pipeline looks active, but confidence in its commercial output is declining. Innovation is starting to feel like a cost center rather than a growth engine.
Budget cycles or board reviews are forcing hard prioritization. The company can no longer fund everything, and there's no clear basis for choosing which bets to keep and which to cut.
You have multiple promising bets and no systematic way to evaluate which ones have real commercial potential versus which ones are just technically interesting.
At that point, a structured commercialization reset will do more for your growth than another initiative.
How 9 North converts innovation pipelines into revenue
For ag, food, and ingredient companies, 9 North acts as an Innovation-to-Revenue Conversion Engine. The work has a clear sequence.
We start by mapping the current innovation pipeline and surfacing the pilot graveyard. This means looking honestly at every active initiative and assessing where each one sits on the spectrum from 'technically interesting' to 'commercially viable.' Most companies have never done this rigorously.
From there, we narrow the list to a smaller set of high-impact bets. This is the hardest part of the work because it requires saying no to things people care about. But focus is the thing that makes the rest of the system work.
For each surviving bet, we design the commercialization and GTM system. Dedicated ICP, positioning, channel strategy, pricing, sequencing. Built for the new business, not borrowed from the core.
Then we align leaders and teams on what gets scaled, in what order, and why. And we support the early phases of commercialization so the system is tested and refined against real market feedback before the company scales investment.
The outcome: fewer projects, more launches that matter, and a clearer line between innovation activity and revenue.
Questions we hear
Q: What is the pilot graveyard in ag tech?
The pilot graveyard is the pattern where companies run many pilots and innovation initiatives but very few cross the line to scaled, commercial revenue. The activity looks impressive but the revenue impact is thin. It's one of the most common patterns in food, ag, and ingredients.
Q: Why do food company innovation programs fail to generate revenue?
Most innovation programs lack commercialization discipline. New bets are treated like extensions of the core business instead of new ventures that need their own ICP, GTM design, and commercialization system. Without explicit scale/stop criteria, pilots run indefinitely.
Q: How do you prioritize which innovation bets to scale?
Effective prioritization uses explicit economic thresholds, defined scale/stop/pause criteria, and venture-style GTM assessment for each bet. The goal is fewer bets with real commercial paths, not more pilots.
