Effective Inventory Management for Food, and Beverage Businesses
At the end of the day, inventory is the last work people in the F&B industry have to do. It must be updated every single day, week and month, or any given period of time. “It is not about just having the right numbers, it is also how you make sense of them”.
Why is wine and food inventory management crucial for the F&B industry?
The majority of products in this industry are perishable, including fresh produce or dairy. Therefore, the batch and expiry date management component of EMERGE is essential. Another category is wine and packaged or canned products, which often have different specific BBE/BE (Best Before Date) dates. Simply put, products in the F&B industry all have specific shelf lives and need to be managed effectively to deliver the best return.
Overstocking and stockouts are two headaches for managers in any F&B company. Overstocking can cost a lot of money due to spoilage or expired products which can only be thrown away. While you can consider donating products that are about to expire to local food banks, such products still cause financial losses. On the other hand, stockouts can lead to lost sales as you simultaneously sacrifice customer satisfaction.
Whether you’re a chain restaurant or a distributor in the food and wine field, a robust inventory management software is essential for your operations. A food inventory management system can have many positive effects on your entire operation, especially in tracking and monitoring products.
Inaccuracies in food inventory management and the answer to increasing the overall efficiency of your F&B operation
While not common, some managers still rely on gut feelings for inventory management. As mentioned earlier, it is not just about the numbers; it goes beyond surface-level considerations when dealing with inventory. Most importantly, managers need accurate data in real time to operate and make decisions. Beverage and food distribution software is the solution for this.
Manual inventory management in F&B businesses often leads to serious problems like miscalculated internal orders and transfers into different branches. Stocktaking can be done manually by hand, but it typically requires at least three people, particularly with tracking a wide range of products such as perishables, non-perishables, and wines of varying ages. Mistakes are inevitable.
EMERGE is a food and beverage distribution software that offers solutions for errors in stocktaking and inventory control, equipped with ideal features for monitoring and managing. You now do not have to worry about managing large amounts of data; inventory checks should be conducted with food and beverage distribution software. Data needs to be stored and analyzed intently, focusing on key metrics like Inventory Turnover Ratio (ITR) and Days Sales of Inventory (DSI), rather than merely being recorded in an Excel file that is scanned and skimmed over.
Food and beverage distribution software is the answer to help businesses track stock levels, monitor sales trends, and generate accurate reports. I am talking about EMERGE
Features of our food and beverage inventory management software
Aside from the usual benefits of centralized records at your fingertips, role-based user management, and an extensive product catalog, we have built-in features that make it easier to manage your inventory of food and beverage products. EMERGE has technologies like barcode scanners and IoT (through our public API integrations),... Enable real-time visibility of inventory, streamlining operations and improving inventory accuracy.
In addition to managing products by category, brand, or types for perishables and non-perishables products, or managing wine by brand and year, the food and beverage distribution software allows you to categorize your products using variants. This is especially important for many products, such as milk, juice, and packaged foods, which come in various sizes compared to regular products. As a distributor, you often have more products than you think, so variants serve as a useful tool to help you manage your inventory more easily and simply.
- The matrix table shows the stock of these variants, which you can use to see the performance of each variant and make any further decisions.
- You can track the stock of each variant separately.
- For items like dairy, fruits, and vegetables, managing by variants helps ensure the freshest options are always available.
This is an efficient way to manage variant orders.
Due to the short shelf life nature of products in this industry, batch management has become very important in food inventory management in F&B companies. For wines, they have different production years, which are related to the quality and final taste. For canned or packaged foods, they must be sold 6 or 12 months before they expire. Assigning specific batches to each product group makes it easy for you to manage product quality as well as proactively adjust the incoming and outgoing products accordingly.
- You can choose the batch you want to sell when creating a shipment or when you create a packing list for your staff.
- Batch management allows you to prioritize the sale of older batches or the batches you need to sell, which can minimize spoilage or expired products.
- EMERGE can help you set default to always selecting the earliest outgoing batch to be sent out in your next order.
- You can track the quality of the products and monitor them based on the assigned batch. This is especially valuable for wines and canned foods. In unexpected situations such as product contamination or even a product recall, batch management allows you to quickly identify and recall products that have been sold, or yet to be sold, minimizing risk to consumers and protecting brand reputation.
F&B distribution software also operates on a FIFO (First In, First Out) basis, making it ideal for restaurants or F&B distributors.
Barcodes are a must in the F&B industry. It is used to identify products and speed up processes of buying and selling. But what exactly can do in the F&B business space?
- Our beverage and food distribution software can assist in printing barcodes for your products. For example, fresh products such as vegetables, flowers, or meat will be packaged in bags, and boxes and then barcoded.
- EMERGE has optimized printing for A4 size paper as well as traditional barcode labels (1.46″ x 1.02″, 4” x 6”).
- EMERGE provides 4 common barcode types that you can use in your F&B company: EAN-8, EAN-13, CODE-128, and UPC.
- Just scan when you create a sales order or when you need to pick up a product from the warehouse.
Sometimes, for wines of a brand, the design and appearance may be the same. In these cases, you need to scan and select the right product. Working with large volumes of products in short periods can also create errors, using barcodes and scanners not only speeds up the process but also ensures accuracy overall.
As someone who takes stock out seriously for F&B distributors and restaurants, we wanted to create something that could alleviate the shortage. When you don’t have enough products or ingredients to deliver”, your customers will be unhappy and might switch to another supplier or restaurant. And in this 80% service industry, having products available is a plus for your brand reputation. In food and beverage distribution software, there are order reminder features that can help you ensure your inventory is always at a safe level.
- If you have too much on your plate and sometimes forget to purchase, the order reminder feature is your fall back!
- Based on the sales orders you currently have as well as the reorder levels you have set for each product before, EMERGE will remind you and automatically create purchase order samples with the right quantity you need.
- Having a software to calculate the right quantity of products and suppliers, you can greatly optimize your work process to just a few steps. This will save you a lot of time and drastically improve your cash flow.
Having software that can compare with the current data in your warehouse and give you the right number of purchase orders you need is a time-saving solution. From now on, after stocktaking, this purchasing process will seem much easier for F&B distributors and firms.
The key to making profits in the F&B industry is daily stocktake to adjust the purchase quantity and reorder points to set the optimal stock levels. Beverage and food distribution software provides you with complete and accurate reports, in which you have the right data processed. Data from quotation to sales, and delivery to invoicing is statistically collected in real time and made into reports.
- The reports provided by the software ensure accuracy and transparency, reduce human errors, and prevent fraud in the company.
- You can easily determine the seasonal sales volume of the product with the sales report. From there, adjust purchase orders and inventory levels accordingly, ensuring the highest demand from customers is met.
- Having valuable insights from the Product Sales report and Product Trend Report also helps you make easier and more flexible decisions when placing orders with suppliers, creating consistent supplier relationships over the long term.
In short, the biggest significance of using software in food inventory management is to reduce human work in important data, which is important to all leaders, accurate data.
In the F&B distribution industry, an order often includes many different products in large quantities because customers usually only buy from one trusted supplier. This can be time-consuming and can cause errors for the F&B distributor if the customer wants to change/add/remove products or quantities. Therefore, the solution is to use EMERGE Cart, an online B2B shopping platform for customers to choose and place orders themselves, instead of relying on quotes and sales reps.
- You can easily invite your clients to EMERGE Cart. Each client will have their own individual login and have suitable customizations, pricing, product offerings, shipping parameters & more.
- Create a custom product catalog for regular customers. They browse the catalog with a familiar shopping cart and add items to their orders.
- When customers check out, their order is automatically added to the EMERGE as a sales order, saving time and eliminating order-taking mistakes.
- Integrate Stripe payment and allow your clients to checkout via a credit card. Otherwise, you can bill them after receiving your order.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Do you have a solution to track when my food expiry is due?
Yes EMERGE has a product batch & expiry management to manage your food & beverage inventory management.
A new batch with expiry details can be set up when a purchase is incoming, as well as selecting the relative batch during sales outgoing. We also have an automated emailing system to notify you when the expiry is nearing to prevent your product from expiring
- Can I buy/sell individual products & also boxes (different units of measurement [UOM])?
Yes, in EMERGE, you can set up the product as your base UOM and also additional UOM (eg: 1 bottle or box of 6 or 12). We’re able to go into decimal places as well so long as there is the relationship between base UOM and additional UOM.
- Do you have a production module for my F&B production?
Yes, you can create raw materials & produce final products and track all their inventory accordingly.
- Can I flow batch information from my raw materials to the final product during production?
Yes, during production of your F&B products, there might be details that you need to follow from raw materials to final product during production and we suggest using “batch” details to record this.
