The hidden cost of speed: why ‘move fast and break things’ breaks manufacturing

“Move fast and break things’. It’s Silicon Valley’s most famous motto, and it has infiltrated food tech with predictable results. I’ve watched brilliant founders try to apply this playbook to fermentation tanks, and the carnage is expensive.

The problem isn’t the intention – speed to market matters enormously in emerging food tech. The problem is that manufacturing operates under completely different physics than software. When you break code, you rewrite it. When you break a US$2 million fermentation facility, you’ve just burned through your Series A funding.

Tech has created immense wealth by iterating quickly, launching minimum viable products, and improving based on user feedback. It’s tempting to think the same approach works for manufacturing. After all, aren’t we all just building ‘MVPs’ now?

But here’s what the analogy misses: physical infrastructure has momentum. Software engineers can push updates overnight. Manufacturing engineers may need months to retrofit a poorly designed utility system. A software bug affects user experience. A manufacturing error can contaminate thousands of units or, worse, create food safety issues that damage your brand and put people’s health at risk.

Sometimes the fastest way forward is to slow down and plan

I recently worked with a precision fermentation company that epitomized this problem. Their mantra was ‘fail fast, iterate quickly’. They designed their pilot facility in six weeks, started construction immediately, and planned to ‘optimize as they learned’.

Eighteen months later, they’re still optimizing. What should have been a US$3 million facility became a US$7 million lesson in why manufacturing doesn’t follow software rules.

Manufacturing has what I call ‘physics constraints’ that software doesn’t face. You can’t A/B test a fermentation tank with live users. You can’t roll back a concrete foundation to version 1.0. You can’t scale a biological process by just adding more servers.

When food-tech companies try to iterate their way through manufacturing design, they discover these constraints the hard way. I’ve seen companies rebuild downstream systems three times because they ‘iterated’ instead of planned. Each rebuild didn’t just cost money – it cost months of market opportunity.

Ironically, the companies obsessed with speed often end up slower than those who invest time in upfront planning. That 30% cost savings and faster execution from proper front-end engineering? It’s not theoretical. I’ve tracked it across dozens of projects.

In software, mistakes are cheap to fix and often invisible to users. In manufacturing, mistakes compound. A poorly sized pump doesn’t just slow your process – it creates bottlenecks that constrain your entire facility. A sanitary design error doesn’t just require equipment changes – it can invalidate your entire HACCP plan.

I watched one company discover its downstream purification couldn’t handle the variability in its upstream fermentation. The ‘quick fix’ required rebuilding their entire facility layout. The delay? Eight months and US$4 million. The competitor who launched during their downtime? Still market leader today.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re predictable outcomes when you apply software thinking to physical systems.

That doesn’t mean that manufacturing companies should move slowly. It means they need to be strategic about where to move fast and where to slow down. Move fast
on market validation, product-market fit, and customer development. Move deliberately on facility design, equipment selection, and process development. The cost-influence curve in manufacturing is unforgiving – your ability to make changes decreases as costs increase.

The companies that succeed embrace what I call ‘planned agility’. They invest upfront to understand their constraints, then move quickly within them. They design for uncertainty without over-engineering. They plan for pivots without building facilities that try to do everything.

Manufacturing excellence isn’t about having the perfect plan from day one. But it’s also not about breaking things and iterating your way to success. It’s about making informed trade-offs based on the physics of your business.

The next time someone tells you to ‘move fast and break things’ in manufacturing, remind them: in the physical world, broken things stay broken until you spend real money to fix them. Sometimes the fastest way forward is to slow down and plan.

Because in manufacturing, the opposite of ‘move fast and break things’ isn’t ‘move slowly’. It’s ‘move deliberately and build things right’.

David Ziskind is the Managing Partner at Mach Global Advisors. He helps companies planning for or have recently secured Series A or B funding to launch emerging or first-of-a-kind projects successfully. This article is republished from the Q3 2025 edition of Protein Production Technology International, the industry's leading resource for alternative proteins. To subscribe to all future editions, please click here