Food & Beverage ERP Software | Best ERP for Food Manufacturers 2026
Compare ERP systems for food and beverage manufacturers. Recipe management, lot traceability, FSMA compliance, and shelf-life tracking solutions compared.
Food & Beverage ERP Software: The Definitive Buyer's Guide
Food and beverage manufacturing operates under some of the strictest regulatory requirements of any industry. A single recall can cost millions of dollars and permanently destroy brand trust that took decades to build. In 2023 alone, the FDA issued over 300 food recalls, and the average cost of a recall for a mid-size food manufacturer exceeded $10 million when you factor in destroyed product, legal fees, regulatory fines, and lost retail shelf space.
ERP is the critical system that ensures traceability from farm to fork, manages complex recipes with variable ingredients, and maintains FDA/FSMA compliance across every production run. But most generic ERP systems were designed for discrete manufacturing -- they handle widgets and assemblies, not recipes with variable yields, catch-weight items, and ingredients that expire.
This guide will help you understand what makes food and beverage ERP different, which vendors actually serve this industry well, and how to avoid the costly mistakes we see food manufacturers make during ERP selection.
Why Food & Beverage Manufacturers Need Specialized ERP
Generic ERP systems fail food manufacturers in predictable ways. The production order model assumes fixed inputs produce fixed outputs. The inventory system tracks items by count, not by weight, volume, or potency. The quality module handles inspection checklists but cannot manage HACCP plans, SQF audits, or FDA-mandated corrective actions.
Food and beverage manufacturing is process manufacturing at its core. You combine ingredients according to a formula, and the output quantity and quality can vary based on raw material characteristics, environmental conditions, and equipment performance. This is fundamentally different from assembling discrete parts, and your ERP must understand that difference at the data-model level -- not as a bolted-on afterthought.
The Regulatory Reality
Food manufacturers in the United States must comply with the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which shifted the regulatory framework from reactive contamination response to preventive controls. FSMA requires documented hazard analysis, preventive controls, supply chain verification, and the ability to trace products through your entire supply chain.
Beyond FSMA, many food manufacturers must also comply with HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), SQF (Safe Quality Food), BRC (British Retail Consortium), GFSI (Global Food Safety Initiative) benchmarked standards, and retailer-specific requirements. Each of these demands rigorous documentation, and your ERP is the system of record.
If a regulatory auditor or retail customer asks you to demonstrate a mock recall and you cannot trace a lot of finished product back to every raw material lot, supplier, and production step within four hours, you have a serious problem. The best food ERP systems can complete a mock recall trace in minutes.
Critical Pain Points That Drive ERP Selection
FSMA, HACCP, and SQF Compliance
Every food manufacturer needs an ERP that supports preventive controls documentation, hazard analysis records, environmental monitoring logs, and corrective action tracking. The system should generate the reports auditors expect to see, not force your quality team to manually compile data from spreadsheets before every audit.
Key compliance capabilities your ERP must support:
- Preventive controls plan documentation and revision management
- Hazard analysis records linked to production processes
- Environmental monitoring schedules and test result tracking
- Corrective action workflows with root cause documentation
- Supplier verification and approved supplier list management
- Audit-ready report generation for FDA, SQF, and BRC inspectors
Lot Traceability -- Forward and Backward
Traceability is non-negotiable. Your ERP must track every raw material lot from receiving through storage, production, and shipment.
Forward traceability answers the question: "This incoming lot of flour was contaminated -- which finished products did it go into, and where were they shipped?"
Backward traceability answers the reverse: "A customer reported an issue with this case of product -- which raw material lots and production runs were involved?"
The best food ERP systems support one-up/one-back traceability as a minimum and full chain traceability as a standard capability. They also integrate with warehouse management systems to track lot locations in real time.
The FDA's FSMA Section 204 (Food Traceability Rule) is raising the bar further for high-risk foods, requiring Key Data Elements (KDEs) at Critical Tracking Events (CTEs) throughout the supply chain. Your ERP must be prepared to capture and report this enhanced traceability data.
Recipe and Formula Management
Food manufacturing recipes are not static. Ingredient availability changes seasonally. Suppliers substitute equivalent materials. Customers request reformulations. Regulatory changes force ingredient replacements.
Your ERP must support:
- Recipe versioning with full change history
- Ingredient substitution rules with cost impact analysis
- Scalable batch sizing with automatic yield adjustment
- Yield calculations that account for moisture loss, evaporation, and other process variables
- Co-products and by-products with cost allocation
- Theoretical versus actual yield variance tracking
When you process a raw material, you often get multiple outputs, and your ERP needs to allocate costs and track lots for each one. A poultry processor, for example, produces breast meat, thigh meat, wings, giblets, and rendered product from a single bird -- each with different lot tracking, pricing, and shelf-life requirements.
Shelf-Life and Expiration Date Management
Perishable inventory management is fundamentally different from managing durable goods. Your ERP must:
- Enforce FEFO (First Expired, First Out) picking logic
- Generate alerts for approaching expiration dates
- Calculate remaining shelf life at the time of shipment
- Support customer-specific shelf-life requirements
- Validate minimum remaining shelf life during order allocation
- Handle reprocessing and shelf-life extension scenarios
Many retailers require a minimum percentage of remaining shelf life at the time of delivery -- typically 60-75% -- and your ERP must validate this during order allocation. If a product has a 90-day shelf life and the retailer requires 75% remaining shelf life, you cannot ship product that is more than 22 days old. Your ERP must enforce this automatically.
Catch-Weight and Variable-Unit Handling
Many food products are sold by weight but counted by piece, or vice versa. A case of chicken breasts has a nominal weight, but the actual weight varies from case to case.
Your ERP must support:
- Dual units of measure (count and weight simultaneously)
- Catch-weight pricing and invoicing based on actual weight
- Variable-weight labeling at receiving, production, and shipment
- Inventory valuation in both count and weight units
- Tolerance management for acceptable weight variance
This is a fundamental data model requirement -- systems that do not support catch weight natively will require expensive customizations that break during upgrades.
Allergen Management and Labeling Compliance
The Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act (FALCPA) and similar international regulations require accurate allergen declarations on every label. The FASTER Act of 2021 added sesame as the ninth major allergen in the U.S., and international requirements vary by country.
Your ERP must:
- Track allergens at the ingredient level
- Roll up allergen declarations automatically through recipes
- Update allergen declarations when recipes change
- Support production sequencing to minimize cross-contamination risk
- Document cleaning validation between allergen-containing production runs
- Generate compliant labels for U.S., EU, and other markets
Co-Packing and Private Label Manufacturing
Many food manufacturers produce for multiple brands, including their own brand and private-label products for retail customers. Each customer may have different recipe specifications, packaging requirements, labeling formats, and quality standards.
Your ERP must support:
- Customer-specific formulas and packaging BOMs
- Customer-specific labeling configurations
- Customer-specific quality requirements and inspection protocols
- Cost tracking by customer/contract
- Production scheduling that respects customer-specific constraints
- Separate inventory tracking for customer-owned materials
Seasonal Demand and Production Planning
Food and beverage demand is highly seasonal. Ice cream sales spike in summer. Soup sales spike in winter. Holiday-specific products have narrow production windows.
Your ERP must support demand forecasting that accounts for:
- Historical seasonality patterns
- Promotional lifts and trade spending impact
- New product introductions and cannibalization effects
- Weather-driven demand variability
- Retailer-specific promotional calendars
Production planning must balance equipment capacity, ingredient availability, and shelf-life constraints simultaneously. You cannot build four months of inventory for a product with a 60-day shelf life -- your ERP must understand this constraint and plan production accordingly.
Yield and Waste Tracking
Food manufacturing inherently produces waste -- trim, scrap, rework, and off-spec product. Your ERP must track yield variance at the batch level, categorize waste by type (planned vs. unplanned, reclaimable vs. non-reclaimable), and provide visibility into yield trends over time. This data is essential for continuous improvement, cost management, and sustainability reporting. The best systems can identify when yield drops below expected thresholds and trigger alerts for investigation.
Build your ERP requirements list
Use our requirements wizard to define what you need from an ERP system — then compare vendors based on your criteria.
ERP Vendors for Small and Mid-Size Food Manufacturers
Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage
Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage is purpose-built for process manufacturing with deep capabilities in recipe management, lot traceability, and regulatory compliance. It is one of the few ERP systems designed from the ground up for food and beverage rather than adapted from a discrete manufacturing foundation. Strengths include native catch-weight support, multi-level formula management with yield tracking, and built-in quality management that supports HACCP, SQF, and BRC documentation. Infor also provides pre-built integrations with plant-floor systems through its Infor OS platform. Best suited for mid-size food processors with $20M-$500M in revenue who need deep industry functionality without the cost and complexity of a Tier 1 system.
SAP Business One (with BatchMaster or Food Add-ons)
SAP Business One is a solid general-purpose ERP for small businesses, but it requires add-on solutions like BatchMaster to deliver food-specific capabilities. BatchMaster adds recipe/formula management, lot traceability, quality control, regulatory compliance, and nutritional analysis to the SAP Business One foundation. This combination works well for small food manufacturers with $5M-$50M in revenue who want the stability and ecosystem of SAP with industry-specific extensions. The trade-off is that you are managing two vendors and two update cycles, which adds complexity to long-term maintenance.
Oracle NetSuite (with Food & Beverage SuiteApps)
NetSuite provides a strong cloud-native ERP foundation with financial management, inventory, and order management. Food-specific capabilities come through SuiteApps from partners like Wherefour, RFSmart, and others that add recipe management, lot traceability, and quality management. NetSuite is a good fit for fast-growing food brands, direct-to-consumer food companies, and organizations that need strong e-commerce integration alongside their manufacturing operations. Its weakness is that the core platform was not built for process manufacturing, so food-specific workflows can feel layered on rather than native.
Sage X3
Sage X3 offers strong process manufacturing capabilities with built-in support for formula management, lot traceability, and quality control. It handles multi-site operations well and supports the complex cost accounting that food manufacturers need, including joint and by-product costing. Sage X3 is a good fit for mid-size food manufacturers with $25M-$250M in revenue, particularly those with international operations, as it handles multi-currency, multi-language, and multi-legislation requirements effectively.
SYSPRO
SYSPRO provides food manufacturing modules with recipe management, lot traceability, and quality management. It is positioned as a mid-market solution with a lower total cost of ownership than larger platforms. SYSPRO works well for food manufacturers with $10M-$100M in revenue who need solid process manufacturing support without the overhead of a larger system. Its user interface is straightforward and it has a reputation for faster implementations than competitors.
Aptean Food & Beverage ERP (formerly CSB-System)
Aptean Food & Beverage ERP is purpose-built for the food industry with decades of specialization. It handles complex scenarios including slaughter and deboning, dairy processing, and baked goods manufacturing with specific data models for each sub-vertical. This is the choice for food manufacturers who want a vendor that lives and breathes their industry. The trade-off is a smaller ecosystem of implementation partners compared to SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft.
ERP Vendors for Large and Enterprise Food Manufacturers
SAP S/4HANA
SAP S/4HANA is the dominant ERP platform among the world's largest food and beverage companies. Nestle, PepsiCo, Danone, Mondelez, and dozens of other global food manufacturers run on SAP. The platform provides comprehensive process manufacturing support, global supply chain management, and the scalability to handle billions of dollars in throughput. SAP's industry solution for food and beverage includes recipe management, batch management, quality management, and environmental health and safety. The investment is substantial -- typically $2M-$20M+ for implementation -- but for companies operating at global scale with complex regulatory requirements across multiple countries, SAP provides unmatched breadth and depth.
Infor M3
Infor M3 serves multinational food processors who need deep food industry functionality with strong support for international operations. It handles complex supply chains with multiple processing stages, co-products and by-products, and the cost accounting challenges unique to food manufacturing. Infor M3 is particularly strong in meat, dairy, and seafood processing where yield variability and catch-weight handling are critical. Companies in the $200M-$5B revenue range who want purpose-built food functionality without the cost and complexity of SAP often choose Infor M3.
Oracle ERP Cloud
Oracle ERP Cloud provides enterprise-grade financial management, procurement, and supply chain management with process manufacturing capabilities. It is a strong choice for large food manufacturers that prioritize financial controls, global consolidation, and advanced analytics. Oracle's strength is in its unified data model and embedded AI/ML capabilities for demand forecasting and supply chain optimization. It is best suited for companies above $500M in revenue who can invest in the configuration effort needed to tailor the platform to food-specific workflows.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 (with Food Industry Accelerators)
Microsoft Dynamics 365, with food industry accelerators from partners like Aptean, To-Increase, and others, provides a flexible platform for large food manufacturers. The platform's strength is its integration with the broader Microsoft ecosystem -- Power BI for analytics, Azure IoT for plant floor integration, and Teams for collaboration. Dynamics 365 is a strong choice for food manufacturers who want a modern cloud platform with the flexibility to customize and extend through the Power Platform. Budget $500K-$5M for a full implementation including industry accelerators.
JustFood by Aptean
JustFood is an enterprise-grade ERP built exclusively for the food and beverage industry. Built on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform but heavily modified for food manufacturing, it provides native support for recipe management, lot traceability, catch weight, quality management, and regulatory compliance. JustFood is a focused choice for food manufacturers in the $100M-$2B range who want deep industry functionality on a Microsoft technology foundation.
Essential Capabilities Checklist
When evaluating ERP systems for food and beverage manufacturing, ensure every vendor can demonstrate these capabilities with live data, not slide decks:
Recipe and Formula Management
- Multi-level recipe/formula definitions with versioning
- Ingredient substitution rules with cost impact analysis
- Scalable batch sizing with automatic yield calculation
- Co-product and by-product definitions with cost allocation
- Nutritional analysis and label generation from recipe data
- Customer-specific recipe variants for private label
Lot Traceability
- Full forward and backward lot traceability
- One-up/one-back and full-chain traceability
- Mock recall execution in under 30 minutes
- Integration with supplier lot information
- Lot status management (hold, release, quarantine, reject)
- Lot genealogy visualization
Regulatory Compliance
- FSMA preventive controls documentation
- HACCP plan management and monitoring
- SQF, BRC, and GFSI audit support
- Corrective and preventive action (CAPA) tracking
- Environmental monitoring program support
- Supplier verification program management
Shelf-Life and Expiration Management
- FEFO (First Expired, First Out) inventory allocation
- Customer-specific minimum shelf-life requirements
- Expiration date alerts and automated disposition
- Best-before and use-by date calculation from production date
- Shelf-life extension tracking for reprocessed items
Catch-Weight and Dual Units
- Native dual unit of measure support
- Catch-weight receiving, production, and shipment
- Variable-weight label generation
- Catch-weight pricing and invoicing
- Tolerance management for weight variance
Quality Management
- Incoming material inspection and testing
- In-process quality checks with automatic hold
- Certificate of analysis (COA) generation
- Hold and release workflows with approval routing
- Statistical process control (SPC) integration
- Non-conformance tracking with root cause analysis
Allergen and Labeling
- Ingredient-level allergen tracking
- Automatic allergen roll-up through recipes
- Production sequencing for allergen control
- Label generation with regulatory compliance validation
- Nutritional panel calculation and formatting
- Country-specific labeling requirement support
Implementation Considerations Specific to Food Manufacturing
Data Migration for Recipes and Formulas
Migrating recipes from legacy systems, spreadsheets, or paper records is one of the most time-consuming aspects of a food ERP implementation. You are not just migrating data -- you are standardizing recipes that may have been recorded inconsistently across plants, shifts, and decades. Budget significant time for recipe rationalization and validation. Every migrated recipe should be test-produced in the new system before go-live.
Plant Floor Integration
Food manufacturing ERP must integrate with plant floor systems -- PLCs, SCADA systems, scales, label printers, and quality testing instruments. These integrations are where many food ERP projects run over budget. Define your plant floor integration requirements in detail during vendor selection, and require vendors to demonstrate integration with your specific equipment. Do not accept "we can integrate with anything" as an answer -- demand to see it working.
Mock Recall Testing During Validation
Before you go live on a new food ERP system, conduct a full mock recall. Select a finished product lot and trace it backward to every raw material lot and supplier. Then select a raw material lot and trace it forward to every finished product lot and customer shipment. If you cannot complete both traces accurately in under four hours, you are not ready to go live. Many food manufacturers make mock recall testing a formal acceptance criterion in their implementation contract.
Validation for Regulated Environments
If your products are regulated by the FDA (dietary supplements, infant formula, medical foods), your ERP system may need to be validated under 21 CFR Part 11 for electronic records and electronic signatures. This adds significant time and cost to the implementation. Ensure your vendor has experience with Part 11 validation and can provide Installation Qualification (IQ), Operational Qualification (OQ), and Performance Qualification (PQ) documentation.
Typical Cost Ranges
Small Manufacturers ($5M-$50M Revenue)
- Software licensing: $30K-$100K per year (cloud subscription) or $50K-$200K perpetual
- Implementation services: $50K-$200K
- Total first-year cost: $80K-$300K
- Timeline: 4-9 months
Mid-Size Manufacturers ($50M-$500M Revenue)
- Software licensing: $100K-$400K per year
- Implementation services: $200K-$1M
- Total first-year cost: $300K-$1.5M
- Timeline: 9-18 months
Enterprise Manufacturers ($500M+ Revenue)
- Software licensing: $400K-$2M+ per year
- Implementation services: $1M-$5M+
- Total first-year cost: $1.5M-$7M+
- Timeline: 18-36 months
These ranges include software licensing, implementation consulting, data migration, training, and initial customization. They do not include ongoing annual maintenance, internal staff costs, or hardware (for on-premise deployments). Plant floor integration can add 10-30% to implementation costs depending on the complexity of your production environment.
How to Evaluate Food ERP Vendors
Step 1: Define Your Sub-Vertical Requirements
Food and beverage is not a single industry. A bakery has different ERP needs than a meat processor, a beverage manufacturer, or a snack food company. Before you begin vendor evaluation, document which sub-vertical-specific capabilities you need:
- Meat and poultry: Catch-weight, yield tracking, USDA/FSIS compliance, primal/sub-primal cut management
- Dairy: Milk balancing, fluid and cultured processing, shelf-life sensitivity, seasonal supply variability
- Bakery and snacks: Allergen sequencing, multi-stage production, rework management, packaging variety
- Beverages: Liquid handling and blending, container management, deposit tracking, formula potency
- Produce: Grading and sorting, field-to-fork traceability, rapid spoilage management
- Frozen foods: Cold chain management, blast freezing scheduling, temperature monitoring integration
Step 2: Prepare Evaluation Scenarios
Do not rely on vendor-controlled product demonstrations. Prepare real-world scenarios from your own operations and ask vendors to demonstrate their system handling those exact scenarios. Essential scenarios include:
- Create a recipe with 8-10 ingredients, scale it from lab batch to production batch, and show yield calculation
- Receive a raw material lot, produce finished goods, ship to two different customers, then trace backward from a customer complaint to identify all affected lots
- Execute a mock recall within 30 minutes
- Demonstrate allergen tracking through a recipe change
- Process a catch-weight receiving transaction and show how the system handles weight variance
Step 3: Check References in Your Sub-Vertical
Ask each vendor for three references from companies in your specific sub-vertical, of similar size, who have been live for at least 12 months. Speak to these references directly and ask about their implementation experience, the quality of ongoing vendor support, and any capabilities that did not work as demonstrated during the sales process.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes food ERP different from generic manufacturing ERP?
Food ERP is built around process manufacturing rather than discrete manufacturing. The key differences include:
- Recipe/formula management instead of traditional bills of material
- Lot traceability for recall readiness, not just serial number tracking
- Shelf-life and expiration tracking with FEFO inventory logic
- Catch-weight and variable units as native data model capabilities
- Regulatory compliance (FSMA, HACCP, SQF) built into quality workflows
In discrete manufacturing, you assemble fixed components into a product with predictable output. In process manufacturing, you combine ingredients according to a formula, and the yield, quality, and characteristics of the output can vary.
A generic ERP can be customized to handle some of these requirements, but those customizations tend to be fragile, expensive to maintain, and break during system upgrades.
How do I evaluate ERP lot traceability capabilities?
Ask each vendor to demonstrate a mock recall using their demo data:
- Give them a finished product lot number
- Ask them to show you every raw material lot that went into it
- Ask them to show every supplier who provided those materials
- Ask them to show every customer who received that finished product
- Then reverse it -- give them a raw material lot number and ask them to show you every finished product it touched
Time how long it takes. The best systems can complete this in under 10 minutes. If a vendor needs more than an hour, or cannot do it from the standard system without custom reports, they do not have adequate traceability for food manufacturing.
Is cloud ERP safe for food manufacturing?
Yes. Cloud ERP is now the standard deployment model for food manufacturers of all sizes. Major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) provide security, availability, and disaster recovery capabilities that exceed what most food manufacturers can achieve with on-premise infrastructure.
Cloud deployment also ensures you are always on the latest software version, which is important for maintaining regulatory compliance as requirements evolve.
The one consideration is plant floor connectivity -- if your manufacturing facility has limited or unreliable internet connectivity, you may need edge computing solutions to buffer data between the plant floor and the cloud ERP.
How long does a food ERP implementation take?
Realistic timelines by organization size:
- Small manufacturers with simpler operations: 4-9 months
- Mid-size manufacturers with multiple product lines: 9-18 months
- Large enterprises with multiple plants and complex supply chains: 18-36 months
These timelines assume dedicated internal resources, experienced implementation partners, and realistic scope management. The most common causes of timeline overruns in food ERP projects are scope creep during recipe migration and unanticipated complexity in plant floor integration.
Should we choose a food-specific ERP or a general ERP with food add-ons?
This depends on how central food manufacturing is to your business.
Choose a food-specific ERP (Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, Aptean Food & Beverage ERP, JustFood) if food production is your core operation and you need deep functionality for recipe management, lot traceability, catch weight, and regulatory compliance. These systems deliver better out-of-the-box functionality with less customization.
Choose a general ERP with food add-ons (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics) if food manufacturing is one part of a diversified business that also includes distribution, retail, or services. These platforms provide better coverage across all your business units, even if the food-specific functionality requires more configuration.
How does ERP help with FDA/FSMA compliance?
FSMA requires food manufacturers to implement preventive controls, maintain detailed records, and demonstrate traceability throughout their supply chain. ERP supports FSMA compliance by:
- Documenting hazard analysis and preventive controls
- Tracking corrective actions when deviations occur
- Maintaining supplier verification records
- Executing lot traceability for recall situations
- Generating the reports and records that FDA inspectors expect to review
- Managing environmental monitoring programs
An ERP system does not make you FSMA-compliant on its own -- you still need proper procedures, trained personnel, and a food safety culture -- but it provides the information infrastructure that makes sustained compliance achievable.
What is catch-weight handling and why does it matter?
Catch weight refers to the actual weight of an item that is sold by weight but handled by count. For example, a case of chicken breasts has a standard weight of 40 pounds, but the actual weight of any given case may range from 38 to 42 pounds. You ship by the case (count), but you invoice by the pound (weight).
Your ERP must:
- Track both the count unit and the weight unit simultaneously
- Calculate pricing based on actual weight at the point of sale
- Manage inventory in both units
- Handle the variance between standard and actual weight in cost accounting
Systems that do not support catch weight natively require extensive customization that is difficult to maintain and prone to errors.
How do we handle co-packing and private label in ERP?
Co-packing and private label manufacturing require your ERP to support customer-specific recipe variants, packaging configurations, and label specifications while maintaining efficient master data management.
The best approach is to use a base recipe with customer-specific overlays for packaging and labeling rather than creating entirely separate items for each customer. Your ERP should also support customer-specific quality requirements, pricing structures, and reporting.
When evaluating vendors, ask them to demonstrate how they handle a scenario where you produce the same base product for three different customers with different labels, different packaging sizes, and different quality specifications.
What should we look for in an implementation partner?
For food ERP implementations, insist on an implementation partner with verified food and beverage industry experience:
- Ask for references from food manufacturers of similar size and complexity
- Verify the partner understands food industry terminology and regulatory requirements
- Confirm experience with recipe migration, plant floor integration, and mock recall validation
- Ask how many food manufacturing ERP implementations they completed in the past three years
- Request permission to speak with those clients directly
An experienced food industry partner can cut your implementation timeline by 20-30% compared to a generalist.
Can ERP handle organic, non-GMO, and clean-label certifications?
Yes, but the depth of support varies significantly by vendor. At a minimum, your ERP should:
- Track certification status at the ingredient, supplier, and finished product level
- Enforce segregation rules to prevent cross-contamination between certified and non-certified products
- Track chain-of-custody documentation for organic certification
- Generate the audit trail required by certifying bodies (USDA Organic, Non-GMO Project, etc.)
If certifications are central to your product positioning, make this a weighted evaluation criterion and require vendors to demonstrate certification tracking during their product demo.
Next Steps: Build Your Food ERP Requirements
The most effective way to evaluate food and beverage ERP systems is to start with a detailed requirements document that captures your specific needs across recipe management, traceability, quality, compliance, and operations.
Our ERP Functional Requirements tool helps you build a comprehensive requirements document tailored to food and beverage manufacturing. You can prioritize capabilities, compare vendor responses side by side, and ensure no critical requirement is overlooked during evaluation.
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