The product is ready for foreign markets. The process behind it isn't.
Businesses whose quality is recognised outside Italy, but who handle foreign buyers, price lists, paperwork and reorders by hand, in several languages, on tools that don't talk to each other. What they're short of isn't time to make better products: it's time to follow up with people who already want to buy. Itria builds the system that does it for them: it collects buyers' enquiries from email, WhatsApp and the website, replies in the sender's language and prepares the paperwork, and every message is approved by a person before it goes out.
The hours don't disappear all at once. They go twenty minutes at a time.
This is the day almost every exporter we've spoken to describes. It isn't disorganisation: it's what happens when a business grows faster than the tools it uses.
The email that came in at 23:10
A German buyer wrote the night before asking about availability and pack sizes. The enquiry has been sitting there for nine hours, and for him it's already mid-morning.
The system sorts the enquiry the moment it arrives and drafts a reply from information you've already approved, even at 23:10. Inbox AIThe price list, by hand again
The latest price list is a PDF. It has to be translated, adapted for the customer and pasted into an email. The same job as last week, for another country.
The draft comes out already in the recipient's language, and is always reviewed by a person before it's sent. Multilingual DraftThe order paperwork
Order confirmation, delivery note, invoice: data that's already in a PDF gets retyped by hand into the business software, with all the risk of error that brings.
Documents are read and turned into structured data, with nothing retyped. Data IngestionThe buyer who never reordered
They bought in March, were happy, and haven't been heard from since. Nobody followed up because nobody had a list of the customers who'd gone quiet.
The history sits in one place, and a sequence gets back in touch with anyone who hasn't ordered for a set period. Buyer Pipeline & RecoveryThe grant you hear about by chance
A colleague mentions an export incentive. It closed the week before. Nobody was keeping an eye out because it was nobody's job.
Grants and incentives for the sector are flagged as soon as they come up. Grants MatcherNone of these is a crisis. Added up over twenty working days, they become the reason the next market never gets opened: it isn't a lack of will, it's a lack of hours.
Each of these moments, from the first reply to a buyer through to the shipping documents, is broken down step by step in the hands-on export guide for small food producers.
Not our opinion. Published research, with the source alongside.
of small Italian manufacturers already export: but it's the smallest firms that face the highest red tape and admin costs to stay in foreign markets.
SACE · Piccole, medie e più competitiveof customers prefer to buy with information in their own language; 40% never buy from a website in a language other than their own.
CSA Research · Can’t Read, Won’t Buy, 8,709 respondents, 29 countriesis how much more likely you are to reach someone who got in touch if you reply within five minutes rather than thirty. That's exactly the gap a foreign buyer's enquiry falls into.
InsideSales.com/MIT study · Lead Response Management Study, 2007working days a year: the time the average European business spends chasing late payments. Hours taken away from customers and spent on reminders.
Intrum · European Payment ReportThe pieces that pay for themselves first in this sector.
They're not all built at once. You start with one, the one costing you most today, and only add the next if the first has paid off.
Qualifying and reactivating buyers
Every contact sorted by priority and status, with the full history in one place. A sequence gets back in touch with buyers who haven't ordered for a set period, and tracks the replies and the orders won back.
Drafts in the recipient's language
Offers, confirmations and correspondence going abroad are drafted in the recipient's language, and always reviewed by a person before they're sent.
Documents that enter themselves
Orders, delivery notes and invoices in PDF, including foreign-language ones, are read and turned into structured data, with nothing retyped into the business software.
Incentives flagged as soon as they're out
Grants and incentives relevant to the sector and to going international are spotted and flagged as they come up, instead of depending on one person's memory.
Not a concept: prototypes already built and stress-tested.
We built it around the real needs of an Apulian winery with international guests and B2B exports, and stress-tested it before the first conversation had even taken place. Anonymised, exactly as it is.
Built for an Apulian winery, to tackle margin lost to OTAs and export enquiries with no process behind them.
It wasn't a visibility problem: the problem was the margin handed over to booking platforms, and tasting and export enquiries that never got a structured reply.
| Guest enquiry | Today, by hand | With the system |
|---|---|---|
| Stay enquiry from a foreign guest | replied to late, or never | instant, in their language |
| Booking enquiry via an OTA | 15-20% of margin handed over | nudged towards booking direct |
| Tasting or experience enquiry | when there's time | offered at the right moment |
| Export or B2B enquiry | no process | qualified and routed |
The Multilingual Concierge
Replies in Italian, English or German in under 3 seconds, nudges guests towards booking direct, and suggests the experience.
The Export Bridge
Qualifies every B2B enquiry from abroad and routes it to the sales office, with a priority.
Reputation
A draft reply in the language of the review, courteous, never defensive, within a few hours.
How it's calculated, on your numbers
We work out the result together, on your numbers, before any quote: a recovered margin printed here would apply to a business that doesn't exist.
The first step here
A buyer nobody calls back today. Thirty days to show it can be fixed.
In food export, the piece that pays for itself first is almost always the same one: reactivating customers who have already bought. You don't need to find new markets to prove it: you just need to stop losing the ones you already have.
We choose the metric for this sector together before we start: average time to first reply to a buyer, or the number of dormant buyers actually contacted. It's the yardstick you'll judge us by.
If the piece has earned back more than it cost, we look at the next one. If it hasn't, we stop there: no automatic renewal, no penalty, and the system stays yours.
The objections we hear every single time.
Will our buyers notice there's a system on the other end?
They see a quick, accurate reply in their own language, signed by someone at the company. The system's job is to prepare: the draft, the context, the history. Nothing goes out to a buyer until a person has approved it: that's a design constraint, not a sales pitch.
Where an automated assistant replies directly, it says so: that's required by the EU AI Act, and for us it's also a choice. The details are in AI transparency.
We only have twenty buyers. Is automation worth it?
It's often more worthwhile here than in a business with two thousand contacts. With twenty buyers, each one is worth a lot, and losing one to a slow reply is a big hit in proportion. The job isn't handling volume: it's making sure none of the twenty is left without a reply or a follow-up.
The opposite case, where we'd tell you not to bother, is this: if you have five buyers and speak to all of them every week, you don't have a process problem.
Price lists and availability change all the time. Won't the system get things wrong?
A system working from out-of-date data is worse than no system at all, which is why the first technical question we ask is: where does the definitive price list live, and who keeps it up to date? The system reads from there. If that source doesn't exist yet in a reliable form, the first piece is building it, not building the auto-responder.
On information that changes fast, such as availability of a batch or delivery times, the default rule is that the system doesn't improvise: it hands over to a person.
Other questions, such as cost, data and the time involved, are answered on the Method page.
How many hours this week went on things that keep repeating?
The diagnostic is twenty questions and five minutes. It gives you a score across five areas of operations and the three changes that should come first in your situation. No need to talk to anyone.
Start with the diagnostic (in Italian)