How Food Product Development Software Streamlines Each Process Stage

85% of leading consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies see product lifecycle management (PLM) as a crucial part of their digital transformation. That makes sense—after all, if you want your business to stand out in a competitive market, you need an optimized, data-driven approach to the product development process.    

For another compelling statistic, consider that a survey found that 84% of consumers expect the businesses they buy from to be innovative in nature. If your company is still using paper-based methods, you may find it difficult to maintain such a reputation and your appeal to consumers. 

An industry-specific food and beverage product lifecycle management (PLM) system can work wonders on this front, streamlining every step of the new product development (NPD) process. With such a solution, you can tailor your products around consumer needs, like the demand for healthy foods or sustainable packaging. But that’s just one example. 

From recipe formulation to allergen management, food-specific PLM software provides a centralized platform that keeps all your teams on the same page. It plays a crucial role in reducing time to market by up to 75%, helping to ensure compliance and innovation in NPD—significant advantages if you want to stay competitive in the food and beverage industry.  

In this blog we’ll step through exactly how purpose-built PLM software transforms each stage of product development, empowering you to deliver innovative, consistently high-quality products while reducing costs.  

Stage 1: Research and Conceptualization

Research and conceptualization are the building blocks of successful product development. This stage establishes the direction for all subsequent phases as you identify market needs and determine how your offering can effectively meet those needs. A food PLM system enables collection of information and transformation of concepts into actionable plans, accelerating your creative process.  

Let’s discover how food product development software can assist in organizing your market research, creating your product brief and streamlining the conceptualization process. 

Identifying Market Needs 

For successful product development, you must identify industry trends, relevant regulations and consumer demands, and ensure that everyone has access to this information when they need it. With a comprehensive food and beverage PLM system, you can optimize how your team records, shares and analyzes market research and regulatory information. Electronic document management (EDM) functionality ensures easy access for ideation and conceptualization, and cloud hosting facilitates collaboration no matter where your staff are.  

Having all your market research data centralized in a PLM system eliminates silos, reduces errors and speeds up decision-making. This means you can quickly act on trends, like the demand for healthier food and beverage options and sustainable packaging, giving your brand a competitive edge. 

No matter if you're in five markets or 50, everyone stays aligned, boosting cohesion and streamlining your go-to-market strategy. By integrating consumer preferences, health guidelines and regulatory requirements into product planning with the help of an industry-specific food PLM, you can optimize the chances of your products succeeding before they launch. 

Creating a Product Brief 

The product brief translates market research into a clear, actionable plan that drives product development, aligning your team on what matters most—your product's success. It defines the scope, goals, target audience and unique selling proposition (USP) of your offerings. Your product brief must take into account ingredient sourcing, allergen management and regulatory compliance.  

A food and beverage PLM’s EDM functionality allows for storing and sharing product ideas so that your team stays aligned to create comprehensive product briefs. Plus, the system also offers system-wide commenting features that streamline collaboration, enabling real-time feedback and updates that keep everyone informed as the brief evolves. This helps you factor in critical elements early, like avoiding cross-contamination for allergen-free products or maintaining kosher and halal certifications. If any changes arise, everyone is updated with real-time edits.  

What’s more, business modules of advanced PLM systems allow you to assess each product idea within the broader context of your portfolio. You can identify which products have the most impact by evaluating factors like market potential, growth opportunities and resource needs. 

Stage 2: Planning and Design 

At this stage, your initial concept evolves beyond a mere idea. Now, the focus is on turning the product brief into a concrete design, covering everything from recipe development to packaging and procurement planning. PLM software (sometimes called product formulation software in food and beverage contexts) can elevate your efforts to manage this process, facilitating seamless collaboration across teams to align the product with your business goals. 

Formulation 

This step involves defining your product’s recipe, including ingredients and their proportions, as well as technical specifications. By offering specialized functionalities built for this purpose, food PLM software helps you iterate upon and perfect complex formulations according to requirements. 

The advanced formulation tools of PLM solutions help you streamline the creation of recipes, automatically generating ingredient lists, nutritional values, allergen information and cost calculations. These features also support various adjustments, from tweaking recipes to meet cost or dietary requirements to ensuring food industry regulatory compliance. 

This means you can adjust sodium levels, modify recipes for vegan diets or adapt them according to local preferences, all while maintaining cost efficiency. What’s more, the system can also flag allergens, helping you accurately track them and meet food safety regulations, and check for mismatches between the product brief and the formulation to ensure alignment.   

Manufacturing Process Management 

Your next step is coordinating your manufacturing process management, which involves planning and defining each step required to produce the final product. It covers precise measurements, cooking times, temperatures and the specific equipment needed at each stage. When comparing PLM systems, look out for those with a dedicated manufacturing process management module to help you organize and optimize these steps, ensuring consistency and efficiency on the production line. 

Using manufacturing process management features, your team carefully designs and documents each production step. They can add details like specific ingredients and measurements, allowing your other teams to track the overuse and shortage of raw materials—preventing errors, enhancing efficiency and ensuring consistent product quality.  

This functionality also empowers you with customizations, including component allocation, equipment setting and changing cooking time as well as temperature if required. This level of control and visibility that the best food PLM software offers supports production accuracy, ensuring that each step aligns with your efficiency, quality and consistency goals, making it easier to maintain high standards throughout production. 

Stage 3: Development and Testing

After the planning and design phase comes development and testing, where your product’s final form begins to come into shape. At this phase, your organization can use PLM to verify that the product performs as intended and meets all quality and safety standards. From managing prototypes to ensuring rigorous quality control across all development phases, the software provides robust support during this stage. 

Prototyping 

Prototyping allows you to test flavor profiles and other aspects both qualitative and quantitative to assess consumer appeal. Food product development software speeds up this stage by enabling the creation and tracking of multiple product iterations. 

By utilizing a product development module within PLM software, your teams can document the specifications and test results of each prototype, facilitating comparison and analysis. This way, only the best version moves to production, reducing the risk of expensive mistakes.  

As a PLM system enhances collaboration and communication across your teams, you can invite feedback from all stakeholders and minimize the risk of costly redesigns. With updated data on ingredients and material costs, you can make well-informed decisions regarding product packaging and even formulation. This allows you to focus on profitability without compromising quality.  

And that’s not all. By using the supplier portal within your PLM to coordinate with your external partners, you can keep them in the loop, reducing prototyping delays. This also helps you ensure that every ingredient meets the quality and safety benchmarks you desire. 

Quality Control 

As you know, quality control is non-negotiable in the food and beverage industry because consumer safety and customer satisfaction are everything. Food-specific PLM software offers comprehensive quality control tools to manage every aspect of product testing and facilitate compliance with food safety standards. 

And when it’s time to tweak your formula, impact analysis tools make sure your adjustments improve quality without introducing new risks. With this level of insight, you can move forward confidently, knowing the quality and safety of your product aren’t compromised. 

In addition, the best PLM systems offer sampling, analysis and non-conformance management features. With the help of this functionality, you can track issues with your product samples, including raw materials and packaging, ensuring they’re resolved before impacting production. This structured approach ensures that each issue is logged, analyzed and corrected to improve your next product development—boosting continuous improvement in your innovation process. 

Stage 4: Production 

Production takes the finalized prototype and transforms it into the finished product. At this stage, maintaining efficiency, quality and compliance is critical. A PLM system helps streamline workflows, manage supply chains and meet regulatory standards. By leveraging food PLM software, your organization can optimize production processes, reduce waste and maintain full traceability from raw materials to finished products.  

Production Workflow 

Time is money—you know this better than anyone. Your production workflow needs to move efficiently, as any delay could be costly. That’s why you should invest in the right PLM system, as the software helps establish optimized production workflows, allowing for more efficient production processes.  

To that point, the core functionality of PLM software helps assign responsibilities and deadlines to corresponding teams. This helps you track each production stage, ensuring seamless transitions and preventing errors from picking of raw materials to final packaging, so you can deliver on time and within budget. 

Furthermore, a product development module within food PLM software codifies and standardizes manufacturing processes so you can standardize cooking temperatures, time requirements and ingredient specifications. 

Packaging and Compliance Verification 

Before your operations transition to large-scale manufacturing of your new products, packaging must be finalized and regulatory compliance confirmed. With centralized data, a PLM system helps your production team verify these elements, preventing last-minute disruptions.  

The packaging module of a food PLM solution automates the generation of essential components like nutrition labels, ingredient lists and allergen declarations. This helps to ensure accuracy and transparency while also increasing efficiency. 

Meanwhile, the dedicated compliance module of a food PLM system screens every product against industry regulations to catch issues early. Automated alerts flag concerns so you can make quick adjustments, ensuring your product is ready for market. 

Stage 5: Launch and Post-Launch 

The final stage of the development process is the launch, where your product is introduced to the market. A PLM system continues to add value here and beyond. Post-launch activities, including gathering consumer feedback, rectifying product shortcomings, managing updates and creating variants, are essential for long-term success. Food product development software facilitates these activities for you by providing purpose-built tools. 

Customer Experience 

Ensuring customer satisfaction is critical when launching a new product. That’s where a food PLM's customer complaint and non-conformance management features shine. These tools allow your organization to track complaints, identify root causes and address manufacturing processes or materials issues—ensuring a high-quality product reaches the market. 

PLM software can also be used in conjunction with other food software solutions like enterprise resource planning software (ERP), transportation management systems (TMS) and warehouse management systems (WMS). This will help track production schedules, inventory and shipments, ensuring your products hit the right shelves at the right time and preventing expensive delays and stockouts.  

What’s more, integrating business intelligence (BI) with your PLM system enables sales and marketing monitoring, product profitability analysis and demand forecasting. This gives your team the actionable insights to make data-driven decisions that optimize your product’s market introduction and long-term success while also managing your product portfolio and driving product innovations. 

Ongoing Iteration 

Launching your product is just the beginning. To stay ahead, you need PLM to keep innovating and adapting to changing customer needs and industry trends. To that end, a food PLM system lets you duplicate recipes for use as a template for new flavors or serving size variations. 

Imagine taking a successful product and creating multiple new versions without starting from scratch. Plus, with the help of formulation tools within PLM software, you can change ingredients across a whole line of products in one go. For example, if you're producing multiple flavors of a beverage product, your team can update all of them at once, making changes like replacing sweeteners with just a few clicks. 

And when you're ready to launch a variant of an existing product, a PLM’s packaging capabilities can make it simple. Instead of redesigning everything, you can tweak existing packaging to fit your new product. This speeds up the process and ensures everything stays compliant with regulations. 

Why Choose Aptean’s Food Product Development Software?

As we’ve detailed here, a PLM system tailored specifically for food and beverage businesses helps you enhance efficiency, ensure regulatory compliance and accelerate time-to-market in the NPD process. From managing procurement to production processes, a specialized food PLM solution is essential for staying relevant as a brand and competitive in the dynamic food and beverage industry. 

Therefore, when it comes to choosing a solution for your business, picking the right one is critical. Enter Aptean. Backed by experts with decades of experience in your industry, Aptean's food and beverage PLM offers advanced features that help you deliver better products, faster. It provides robust support for recipe formulation, allergen management and compliance with regulatory standards. And by acting as a single source of truth, our PLM also ensures that all stakeholders can access the latest information—reducing miscommunication, fostering collaboration and improving decision-making. 

What’s more, our PLM system integrates seamlessly with Aptean Food & Beverage ERP, allowing you to transfer new product information from the former to the latter for a smooth transition to regular production. And with cloud deployments, you can enjoy better scalability, enhanced cybersecurity and improved accessibility, ensuring your system can adapt as your business grows and evolves while complementing your existing software systems. 

When you choose Aptean as your food software provider, you gain a partner dedicated to mutual long-term success. Our outstanding track record and industry recognition are evidence that we deliver tailored solutions that maximize your ROI. 

Ready to drive innovation and streamline your product development process? Contact us now to discover how our PLM can transform your business today, or schedule a personalized demo to experience the impact firsthand.