What do PepsiCo Inc., Tyson Foods, Mars and Nestle all have in common? They’re giants who likely use food ERP, or ERP software dedicated to food and beverage manufacturing, to streamline how they produce their numerous food products.

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We pulled out all the stops to compile this in-depth food and beverage ERP guide.

This article maps out benefits, essential features, relevant trends and the best ERP for food and beverage.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Primary Benefits
• Key Features
• Notable Trends
• Software Selection Tips
• Best Food and Beverage ERP Software
  • SYSPRO
  • BatchMaster
  • Inecta
  • Dynamics 365 ERP
  • Oracle Fusion Cloud
• Final Thoughts

Overview

Food ERP software is a solution that optimizes how you craft food and beverages like alcohol, fruit juice, bottled water, sodas and more by monitoring and streamlining operations. This system ensures all ingredients are properly measured and implemented in each batch, tracks batches, maintains inventory items and verifies product quality.

Primary Benefits

Food ERP can assist with growing food and beverage complexities and innovation pressures seamlessly with quality assurance, intuitive inventory management, traceability and compliance adherence.

Enhance Safety and Compliance

Food safety and compliance upkeep protects customers and solidifies your company’s reputation. If you ship rotting or decaying food, have rodent or pest problems in warehouses or have unsanitary conditions, it’s probable cause for an immediate shutdown of your business.

This system can ensure you take the proper measures, such as adding the appropriate food labels, maintaining shelf life standards, including allergy signs and mandating all employees wear face masks, gloves and hairnets when working with food. You must stand well with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Initiate Company Transparency

Know where raw ingredients come from and their nutritional values easily. Track every stop your finished product makes within your supply chain with practical traceability tools to evaluate suppliers fairly and ensure customers receive their goods promptly.

Let’s say, for example, you manufacture organic strawberry soda. Knowing where you import your strawberries, sugars and other ingredients is critical. You must also track shipments that go out on trucks to ascertain if they make it to the ideal destinations or if there are any unnecessary stops along the way.

You can also leverage food ERP software to enhance company-wide visibility and communication among colleagues, stakeholders, managers and more. Vital people receive notifications if you need to update batches or halt specific protocols. This centralization keeps everyone on the same page.

Strengthen Quality Evaluations

You wouldn’t deliver low-quality chocolates or flowers to your partner or mother, would you? Why would you think of giving your clientele low-quality foods and ingredients? Quality features assess and ensure merchandise meets standard and local compliances regularly. If errors arise, you can quickly rectify or start a new batch before shipping out of your warehouse doors to your supply chain.

You may also invest in a standalone enterprise quality management software (EQMS) with multiple features such as:

• Risk and Compliance Management
• Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA)
• Audit Management
• Supplier Management
• Training Management
• And more!

Obtain In-depth Inventory Supervision

Maintaining your inventory is vital in any manufacturing industry. You can keep tabs on available ingredients to make specific food and beverage products. For example, if you specialize in manufacturing pre-made burgers, it’s best to know the required amount of ground beef, toppings and seasonings for a 100-burger batch (i.e., tomatoes, black pepper, flour and eggs for buns and more).

Whether you purchase inventory management add-ons or separate software, you’ll swiftly find what you need, set minimum and maximum stock quantities to avoid stockouts or overstock and detect spoiling items.

Enhance Productivity

Thanks to centralization, higher quality assessments, automation and thorough inventory monitoring, you can boost manufacturing and shipping protocols quicker for more on-time deliveries. Automation tools reduce human errors and ensure you relay information to the right people across your company and supply chain.

Make Well-informed Decisions

Pinpoint and rectify production obstacles with real-time data. You can also make better business choices and allocate changes to all involved parties in seconds instead of days.

For example, your chocolate factory may have missed its productivity goals for two consecutive months. The ERP for food and beverage practices can pull data to determine if you need to fire employees or hire new ones. Evaluate processes or machines for modifications or maintenance. Real-time data ensures you’re making the right choices.

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Key Features

Only some solutions are alike, but food and beverage ERP systems share similar features. The idea is to find a solution that aligns with your company’s needs. These features are popular but may not suit your objectives.

• Inventory Management: Maintain and easily find everything in your inventory with real-time information.
• Recipe and Formula Management: Create and manage several recipes and formulas to know how much of a specific raw ingredient is needed to complete the product.
• Reporting/Analytics: Measure and evaluate essential KPIs, draft vital reports and make more well-informed business decisions.
• Lot and Batch Tracking/Traceability: Track all products and batches across your production floor and supply chain with ease and real-time data to catch and rectify bottlenecks.
• Compliance: Align practices and quality assessments with the FDA and other regulatory standards to ensure your facility and products are on par and safe for the public.
• Financial Management: Merge this system with accounting tools to develop accurate reports and transparency for expenses, profits and other monetary KPIs.
• Quality Control: Establish quality standards and audits to detect errors and faulty products before they leave specific facilities and all production stages.
• Allergen Management: Thanks to formula and recipe management and traceability tools, you can ensure careful management of ingredients like peanuts, dairy, gluten and other food allergens. To reduce contamination, use separate storage, production, packing and sanitation methods when handling these items.

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Notable Trends

The food and beverage industry offers multiple trends to consider implementing with a new ERP. You’ll go crazy if you invest in every fad in every food and beverage consumer report. The best way to approach trends is to learn all you can about them and see if they’re suitable for profit or just fancy decoration. We’ll cover diverse themes, from accessibility and labor fees.

Convenience and Accessibility

As unfortunate as it is, some people prefer not to cook or prepare meals. They either don’t have the time or would instead not go through the hassle of cooking. Convenient and accessible foods like ready-made meals from Blue Apron or takeout at the drive-thru or via Uber Eats, DoorDash and takeout can rectify this problem.

If you produce ready-made foods like TV dinners, Hot Pockets, frozen pizzas and more, you’ll always have a solid client base, even if they like to cook. Sometimes, people may not have time or want to cook something after getting off work.

Food Labeling

Consumers want to know all the nutritional facts and data about their food before they purchase it. People also call for larger text and nutrient data for larger serving sizes and the whole container. A food ERP can help you create informative labels and safer packaging.

Food manufacturers must label products that use genetically modified organisms (GMOs), allergens or other ingredients to keep everyone in the loop about what they consume in their food.

Labor Expenses

With calls for higher minimum wages, health insurance and other benefits, labor costs are rising, and businesses need more than their luck and wits to stay on top of everything. Whether it’s food, an integrated or standalone HR software, you can manage training, hourly labor, overtime, licensing and certifications and more. You’ll also garner more data to make better-informed decisions when allocating promotions, rewards or pink slips.

Grand View Research foresees that the HR management market will hit $56.15 billion by 2030.

Local Sourcing

As the COVID-19 pandemic slowly deteriorates, the global supply chain network still lags. Local sourcing is a strategy all companies should consider. This method means sourcing merchandise and ingredients from manufacturers in your home country.

Local sourcing offers several advantages, including more flexibility, expedited product distributions, saving money and helping the environment.

High Cloud Demand

It’s no surprise that people are moving to cloud solutions. Cloud ERP enables you to access its modules via the internet on any mobile device. You also receive real-time information from any location instead of waiting until you return to your office desktop or servers.

Cloud systems also offer more security measures to protect critical data. Some security tactics include:

• Two-step or Multi-factor Authentication: Implement security questions, fingerprint or retina scanning, additional security codes and more when logging into your system. Passwords alone aren’t enough to thwart cybercriminals.
• Data Encryption: Leverage this tool to conceal vital data and reports in unreadable codes. The only way to unscramble the information is with an encryption key. Even if hackers steal your files, they’d have difficulty deciphering the codes.
• User-access Permissions: Granting permissions for specific users guarantees only the right people will see sensitive company data.

Report Linker predicts the global cloud computing market will reach $923.46 billion in 2027.

Healthier Eating and Immunity Demand

People are concerned about healthier eating habits and foods that align with their immune systems with suitable antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. Some ERP for food and beverage industries could help ensure all the right vitamins and minerals are implemented during production while maintaining standard compliances and quality benchmarks.

Strategyr forecasts that the global health and wellness foods market will reach $1.1 trillion by 2027.

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Software Selection Tips

So you’re thinking about purchasing food and beverage ERP? Some consultants offer 12, 15, 20 or 30 software selection tips and steps. SelectHub offers a nine-step methodology called Lean Selection that helps you find the right enterprise software for any company size or industry. Here’s a brief rundown of our process:

1. Establish: Determine why you need new software.
2. Collaborate: Compile internal software selection team of department leaders, stakeholders, colleagues and more.
3. Define: Draft a list of desired ERP requirements with your selection committee.
4. Distribute: Compare and contrast several vendors and software providers. Generate a shortlist of potential vendors.
5. Justify: Take an internal survey with your team: Do you need a new system or add-on modules for your current ERP or to end the selection journey?
6. Prove: Ask vendors to demonstrate specific requirements via demos, use cases or proofs-of-concept (POCs).
7. Rank: Organize potential software providers according to their demo scores and TCOs. You should have at least two to three vendors that can work for your business.
8. Negotiate: Converse with your top-picked vendor from the previous step about terms and agreements. Seek legal counsel if necessary. If you and this software supplier can’t reach a compromise, move on to the following software company on your list and repeat this step.
9. Sign: Review and sign the contract with your ideal provider and establish an implementation strategy.

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Best Food and Beverage ERP Software

After reviewing food ERP’s perks, essential modules and relevant trends, it’s time to examine some solution examples. We’ve found some of the best food ERP software that streamlines operations.

SYSPRO

This food and beverage ERP is a cloud and on-premise program that simplifies compliance and regulation adherence, traceability, packaging and batch management. It balances supply and demand to make better estimates and enhances transparency to strengthen production.

An example of SYSPRO’s database.

Top Benefits

Access Numerous Resources

Access a global network of more than 1,600 partner resources across 60 regions for training, support, marketing advantages and channel revenue to avoid unnecessary confusion or downtime.

Centralize Operations

Manage data on the Microsoft.NET SQL database and merge third-party accessories for consolidated workflows.

Streamline Production

Implement BOM management, inventory tracking, reporting, project management and more to simplify and monitor production protocols. You can also find and resolve obstacles to boost efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Supervise Protocols

Initiate numerous product reviews with abnormal chemical processes and chronicle inspection results to either receive, cut or modify quantities for better quality control.

Execute Precise Manufacturing

Verify that all products receive consistent production methods, the necessary formulas and engineering requirements to keep everything unified and on a consistent schedule.

Primary Features

Order Management

Conduct automatic order-to-delivery practices, receive production visibility and perform order processing and fulfillment.

Lot Traceability and Serial Tracking

Track products from original facilities to final destinations with in-depth tracking and worksite management. Catch and resolve product imperfections.

Sales Analysis and Optimal Pricing

Determine profits based on product sales trends and consumer revenue.

Lean Inventory Management

Leverage customizations and prompt KPI supervision through inventory investment and service insights.

Workflow and Approval

Govern product design practices and confirm new and edited products pass tests and approval regulations score with flying colors before shipping to customers.

Limitations

Although this food ERP brings many benefits and modules to the table, it does possess a few limitations. These drawbacks include the following:

• Lacking a user-friendly interface.
• Lacking equipped forms for purchase orders, invoices and more.
• Difficult custom reporting.

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BatchMaster

BatchMaster is a simple ERP for food and beverage operations. Built upon SAP Business One’s platform, it has diverse modules for bookkeeping, inventory, recipe management and quality management.

A preview of BatchMaster’s KPI tools.

Top Benefits

Make Effective Business Choices

Develop drilled-down what-if analyses to supervise and document production expenses to determine customer demand and make effective business decisions.

Enhance Task Planning

Scale and plan all batch jobs to increase scheduling precision. Reserve ingredients for specific batches and draft serial numbers for completed goods for better resource allocation.

Leverage Numerous Inventory Tactics

Manage ripe and expired stock items with FIFO, LIFO, FEFO and other stocking methodologies for better upkeep and to reduce accidental spoiled ingredient usage.

Maintain Production Methods

Utilize and manage virtually-infinite formula variants for particular merchandise customizations to experiment with diverse flavors and tastes that consumers will love.

Centralize Expenses

Monitor and note all purchasing operation fees, such as freight, insurance and shipment, for better consolidation.

Primary Features

Purchase Order

Create material and service purchase orders to print, mail, fax or email suppliers. Transform sales orders into purchase orders to confirm adequate warehouse material quantities for shipping dates.

Opportunity Management

Record all sales opportunities, including lead identification via discoveries, proposals, closings and other details. You can also input sources, deal sizes, closing dates, competitors and additional information.

Tax Engine

Address complicated tax requirements via a smooth UI.

Business Partner Management

Govern emails, profiles, sales reports and other data for clients, resellers and providers. Utilize business partner operation dashboards for strengthened transparency on sales, buying patterns and history.

Service Calls

Construct and record service calls for patrons, goods, amenities, problem types and more. Store service calls history and obtain late activity notifications.

Limitations

At the time of this review, we found no limitations or drawbacks for this solution.

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Inecta

This food ERP software offers a centralized interface with modules for food, seafood and produce. It’s available for cloud and on-premise deployment and serves all company sizes.

An example of Inecta’s interface.

Top Benefits

Simplify Food Transportation

Supervise, store and distribute foods across warehouses and greenhouses for simpler movements.

Serve Customers With Diets or Allergies

Design an intricate framework for tracing all ingredients, mainly when serving clients with diets, allergies or other food sensitivities, to remain inclusive and avoid lawsuits.

Maintain All Seafood Types

Understand how to arrange, dice, clean, gauge and pack seafood effectively for all vendors and marketplaces to ensure high-quality products and vendor relationships.

Verify Compliance Adherence

Define inbound goods, work in progress and final product regulations to meet standard and regional rules to dodge hefty fees or business shutdowns.

Facilitate Leaner Harvest Protocols

Detect and record crop lifecycles with sowing and harvest visibility tools to better understand how to gather ripe produce at the right time.

Primary Features

Seafood Trader

Leverage straightforward, repetitive tasks and track products during all supply chain stages.

Aquaculture

Manage all fish production procedures from hatching to harvesting. Maintained product standing orders while aligning with regulations.

Fishery/Vessels

Justify onboard products with distributed vessel costs.

Cost Control

Address manufacturing issues without overloading information thanks to full company, department and feature visibility. Material planning also boosts inventory precision to simplify demand ordering.

Production Planning

Schedule, organize and perform ideal production processes. Administer resources in one centralized system to meet merchandise necessities and diminish raw goods overstocking.

Limitations

Although Inecta brings a lot to the table, it has one drawback. This limitation is:

• Limited availability in North and South America, Europe and Asia.

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Dynamics 365 ERP

This food and beverage ERP is a suite of business applications that aids you in running every business facet and boosting results with AI-powered perceptions. It caters to businesses of all sizes and offers on-premise and cloud deployment options.

According to SelectHub’s analytical data, 80% of this system’s functional requirements have out-of-the-box support. Features include sales insights, virtual agents, fraud protection, finance insights and product visualization.

A preview of Dynamics 365 ERP’s financial module.

Top Benefits

Boost Win Rates and Conversions

Filter favorite clients with advanced model lead scoring to enhance lead conversion rates and customer retention.

Strengthen Response Times

Leverage coworker meeting introductions, emails and prospective client collaboration tools to boost response times and client preservation.

Consolidate Information

Integrate this ERP for food and beverage practices with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to centralize relationship processes and boost relationship management.

Increase Productivity

Simplify workflows and strengthen efficiency with mobile applications like Outlook, SharePoint and Excel.

Enhance Evaluations

Execute improved analyses and pipeline tracing with real-time visualizations and snapshots for better insights.

Primary Features

Sales Insights

Receive seller-generated estimates with AI to diminish bias and errors. Implement the mobile assistant for proactive insights and conversation transcriptions.

Customer Insights

Access an intuitive customer database to offer tailored support in a centralized showcase. Merge this system with Power BI to make custom reports.

Virtual Agent

Automate support issues with chatbots and merge with Power Virtual Agents via pre-set connectors.

Fraud Protection

Safeguard eCommerce business, strengthen shopping experiences and reach higher revenue pinnacles. Adaptive AP inclusions leverage machine learning to help fraud management and maximize functionalities.

Product Visualize

Plant 3D product images into customer environments, allowing time to explore and annotate as necessary in this mixed reality realm.

Limitations

This food ERP software offers several advantages and modules to streamline production. However, this solution has a few drawbacks. These limitations include the following:

• A steep learning curve.
• A high TCO.
• An intricate implementation process.

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Oracle Fusion Cloud

This food and beverage ERP is a suite of procurement, project management, accounting, risk management and other tools that scale for user, site, transaction and market expansion support. According to our data, 86% of this platform’s functional requirements have out-of-the-box support. It serves mid-sized and enterprise-level organizations.

An example of Oracle Fusion Cloud’s analytical tools.

Top Benefits

Implement Better Company Decisions

Implement AI and machine learning technologies for better data gathering, strategy executions and planning to make well-informed choices.

Expedite Routine Tasks

Accelerate repetitive protocols, such as closing books, allocating reports and distributing compliance statements to save time and boost productivity across the board.

Boost Efficiency

Enhance reporting task productivity with automation that streamlines generation and distribution, enabling you to focus on sourcing, supply growth, purchasing analyses, contract negotiations and supplier development.

Save Money

Access blockchain applications that erase intermediaries, cut fees and boost speed for better procedure traceability and visibility.

Primary Features

Ledger and Analytics

Connect with, review and evaluate real-time account balances with any parameter. The mobile version also offers self-service reporting.

Agile Accounting

Draft transactional accounting general ledgers and sub-ledgers. Automatically align with new accounting policy compliances and export notes to general ledgers.

Procure To Pay

Leverage invoice matching and payments for automatic requests. Pinpoint required goods and services to elucidate shopping. Push negotiated conditions and pricing to boost savings.

Audit Controls

Supervise master data changes and find security risks and breaches. Expedite deployment by configuring more than 200 pre-established controls.

Task Management

Work together with others on all task types and connect via annotated files and task discussions. Utilize simple clicks to provide project progress details.

Limitations

This food ERP software has several benefits and features. It also has a few limitations, such as:

• Lengthy response times.
• Lacking compatibility with Chrome browsers.
• A long and challenging scalability process.

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Final Thoughts

Find a food ERP that aligns with your company’s goals and capabilities. This industry balances market trends and food safety regulation adherence. The ideal system will manage all facets. For ERP software types, review our comparison report.

How has ERP helped your food and beverage practices? Let us know in the comments section below!