For food and beverage manufacturers, consistency is king in recipe management.
Recipe adherence and accuracy provides consistency across batches and locations. Texture, taste, smell and color consistency are important for building and maintaining customer loyalty.
For large-scale manufacturers, recipe control means coordination between warehouse and factory floor. It means accurate inventory management and picking functionality, both of which are best managed using an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. It is one of the most critical challenges raised by process manufacturers.
Having the right technological solution ensures that all areas of manufacturing are sharing the same data and interpreting information and analysis accurately. There’s no better area than recipe management to see the capabilities of an ERP solution on display.
Here is a look at some of the most common recipe control ERP features found in a solution built for the food and beverage industry:
- Recipe storage
Recipes, and versions, need to be stored and accessible with easy-to-use functions for version management and duplication.
- Tracking and Costing
Your recipe management function, when integrated with purchasing tools, can ensure that your company is lowering per-unit costs.
- Measurement Conversion
Units of measure conversions need to be available at each level, including purchasing, manufacturing, storage, inventory, sales and shipping.
- Proportion Management
Often complex calculations are necessary to manage the scaling of recipes to different batches.
- Shelf-Life Management
Your company can help reduce waste by managing shelf life and expiration dates for raw ingredients, ensuring that recipes are designed and executed to maximize inventory usage.
- Formulation
You need tools to help manage the formulations for intermediate and finished products.
- Yield Management
Your recipe management system should support the comparison of actual yields to standard yields.
- Quality Control
Your food ERP system should be able to store and track quality measures for each recipe and finished good.
- Inventory Substitution
When ingredients are not available on site, your recipe management solution can help determine if there are cost-controllable alternatives within your inventory.
- Labelling
Your labeling needs to reflect accurate ingredients, nutritional information and allergen information.
- Compliance
Tracking ingredients at the batch level allows for better compliance with regulatory mandates.
- Monitoring
For allergen management and kosher and other religious requirements, ingredients, processes and finished products need to be managed carefully and in strict adherence to proper procedures.
- Track and Trace
If there is an issue or recall, track and trace functionality allows for faster response times and resolution of customer issues.
- Archiving
Your recipe management allows for the archiving for years, if not decades, of recipes, ingredients usage and batch management, which is particularly useful for recalls and allergen alerts.
- Security
Keeping your recipes and ingredients safe requires access controls and protections for proprietary information stored in your ERP solution.
FoodBusiness ERP is a single system to manage production and operations, finance, food safety, compliance, quality, traceability and more. It is purpose-built for the food industry and includes out-of-the-box functionality for food and beverage manufacturers. To learn how FoodBusiness ERP can give you control over your recipe management and more, reach out to us. We’d love to chat.