ERP for the Food & Beverage Industry: When Standard Systems Aren’t Enough
Food & Beverage
Web Development
5 min read
If you work in the food & beverage industry, your business usually doesn’t break on big strategy. It breaks on small, everyday things that any ERP for the food and beverage has to tame: production planning in one spreadsheet, purchasing in another, a warehouse that runs on WhatsApp, and a sales forecast that lives in someone’s head.
For a while, it “kind of works”.
Then you add a new product line, sign a major retailer, open a few HoReCa locations, or face a serious audit. At that point, Excel, basic accounting tools and a generic ERP start to show their limits. That’s when you don’t just need software with an ERP label - you need a system that actually understands how the domain operates.
Why food & beverage breaks generic ERP systems
On a slide, "produce → store → sell" looks simple. In reality, F&B brings its own rules that quickly expose gaps in a standard ERP:
Shelf life and batches. You don’t just track "1000 units in stock". You track which batch, with which expiry date, at which location.
Traceability. You must see where each batch came from, how it was processed, and which customers and channels received it - not as a side report, but as a core capability.
Quality and certifications. HACCP, ISO, local regulations and customer standards all add checks, holds and extra documentation.
Returns, write-offs and rework. Damaged goods, overproduction, regrading, reprocessing - if your ERP only sees "minus from warehouse", you’re blind to the real impact.
- Promotions and discounts. Retail and HoReCa promos change both demand and margin. If your setup can’t see the true cost by batch and channel, planning becomes guesswork.
This is where a generic manufacturing ERP or a lightly adapted food and beverage template starts to creak. The industry specifics bend it out of shape.
What a food & beverage ERP really needs to cover
A modern food and beverage ERP solution has to go beyond basic production and finance. As a minimum, a solid F&B ERP should support:
Recipes and BOM logic. Multiple recipe versions, substitutions, allergens, and their impact on cost and margin.
Production planning. Lines, shifts, seasonality, promos, raw material constraints - the everyday reality of any serious food production ERP.
Warehouse and logistics. FEFO/FIFO, temperature zones, batch and lot tracking, cross-docking, cold chain control.
Cost and profitability. A good ERP system for food manufacturers calculates cost by batch, product, channel and customer, not just monthly averages.
Compliance and reporting. Audit trails, traceability reports, withdrawals and certifications without last-minute spreadsheet marathons.
That’s the baseline. Real businesses usually need more.
Where standard ERP stops and custom work starts
Even a strong ERP platform aimed at F&B won’t automatically reflect how your company works. Typical pressure points:
Semi-finished products and private label. One plant serving your own brands plus multiple private label contracts, each with its own specs, pricing and levels.
Multi-channel operations. Retail, horeca, e-commerce, perhaps your own stores - different price lists, promotions and delivery models, but one shared inventory reality.
Multi-country or multi-entity setups. Different legal entities, tax rules, currencies and assortments, often sharing production and stock.
In these areas, companies usually extend their core ERP solutions with custom workflows, add-on modules and integrations, or live with painful workarounds.
How launchOptions approaches ERP for F&B
We don’t come in with "throw everything out and start again". Most food manufacturers already have an ERP core, plus WMS, TMS, POS and eCommerce tools. Our job is to turn that into a coherent ecosystem.
Typical ways we help:
Building custom web features around the ERP core. Lightweight applications for technologists, planners, warehouse teams or finance, so they don’t have to fight a generic interface for every task. This is where our web development services usually come in.
Enhancing the ERP you already use. Adding or refining functions for recipes and specs, batch tracking, QA workflows, planning, or more usable role-based interfaces.
- Integrating the landscape. Connecting ERP with WMS, TMS, POS, eCommerce and delivery platforms so data is entered once and reused, instead of being re-typed across modules.
The result is less about "one perfect food and beverage ERP" and more about a practical, maintainable setup that fits how your business actually runs.
Starting an ERP initiative without panic
A few principles that keep ERP projects in F&B sane:
Pilot, then roll out. Start with one plant, brand or region. Validate the approach, adjust, and only then scale. Big-bang migrations look impressive in slides, not in operations.
Listen to real users. Planners, technologists, warehouse leads and finance each see a different part of reality. Ignoring them usually leads to shadow Excel and custom reports later.
- Don’t automate chaos. If nobody can clearly explain how a process works today, cleaning it up is step one. Encoding a broken process into your ERP platform only makes it harder to fix later.
At launchOptions, we often start with a focused audit of the existing ERP landscape: how production, inventory, sales and finance connect today, where standard functionality is enough, and where it makes sense to add custom logic, integrations or lightweight tools around the core. From there, we help companies decide what to keep, what to simplify and what to redesign.
If you’re exploring your next steps, you can also look at our solutions for the food & beverage industry - they outline the kinds of challenges we typically work with and how we translate them into practical, long-term improvements rather than another full-scale, all-at-once project.
