Round Out Your Year With Our Top 10 Food and Beverage Blogs of 2023

As 2023 comes to a close, we reflect on what was yet another year of changes and challenges in the food and beverage industry. Even with rising inflation, higher material costs, changing consumer demands and ongoing labor shortages, business leaders remain optimistic—more than three quarters of participants in our recent study predicted that their companies’ revenue and profit growth over the past 12 months will eclipse 2022’s figures.

But as we move forward into 2024, it’s only right that food and beverage professionals like you seek out additional advantages, as the competition in this dynamic space gets fiercer by the day, with more and more brands jockeying for their share of the market. One resource that you can never have too much of is knowledge, especially the kind from which you can glean insight into how your organization can evolve and adapt to be better prepared for whatever comes your way.

Throughout the year, we’ve published many compelling posts covering the trends and technology of the modern food and beverage world. Quite a few have been popular, but some were valued especially highly by readers for touching on resonant topics and exploring strategies and solutions that can produce considerable benefits for businesses.

So before you count down to midnight and replace your old calendar, be sure to check out these top 10 blogs of 2023, ranging widely in subject but each with information and guidance that you can leverage to excel in your role and drive improvement of your operations. Consider this your chance to catch up on what you missed, engage with the content and imagine how to apply your newfound know-how.

The 4 Biggest Food Supply Chain Issues and How Purpose-Built Software Helps You Overcome Them

Whether your organization specializes in growing, processing, manufacturing or distributing food and beverage products—or some combination thereof—your supply chain is a vital pipeline for both inbound raw materials and outbound finished goods. The past few years have brought a fair share of disruptions to the networks that connect trading partners, exposing a need for greater resilience.

That’s why you should read up on the most significant supply chain issues and how to overcome them through the use of systems built specifically for your industry.

How Food Traceability Software Fulfills Critical Business Needs

Speaking of the supply chain, one of the elements that makes the management of it so challenging in the food and beverage industry is the critical need for full, bi-directional traceability. It’s vital for food safety—you can’t do a recall without it—and regulations around the world are growing more demanding in terms of what’s expected from companies like yours.

Learn how purpose-built software can facilitate the establishment of material and product traceability from farm to fork with features for lot management, license plating, product specifications and more.

ERP Systems for Food Manufacturers: The Key Features for Maximizing ROI

Partnering with a software provider and implementing a system like enterprise resource planning (ERP) is an investment of not just money, but also time and effort. While these solutions can be transformative for food and beverage organizations that deploy them, you’ll still want to know how you can maximize your return and reap all the benefits ERP offers.

Check out the key features of ERP software built specifically for food and beverage businesses that contribute most to ROI to understand how they work and what value they provide.

Building a Business Case for Food & Beverage ERP: Software That Shores Up 7 Major Pain Points

Of course, before you can think about realizing your return on a food and beverage ERP, your organization will need to have a clear business case for the system. After all, you know all too well what your challenges are, but you’ve got to ensure that any system you consider has features to tackle them and can thereby minimize the obstacles you face.

To help you on this front, we identified seven major pain points and explained how an advanced, industry-specific ERP like Aptean Food & Beverage ERP can mitigate their impacts.

Can Reformulation Stop Ingredient Costs Eating Into Food Brands’ Profit Margins?

It’s no secret that raw material prices are up more or less across the board, and the resultant elevated sourcing costs are cutting into food and beverage companies’ profit margins. In some cases, the price increases are being caused by shortages, while in others it’s simply a matter of higher input costs for suppliers—but regardless of the underlying reasons, this trend demands attention.

If your organization is struggling with this challenge, explore the possibilities of reformulating products for affordability using a food and beverage-specific product lifecycle management (PLM) system.

4 Ways Industry-Specific Solutions Can Help Drive More Sustainable Food Manufacturing

Considering our study indicated that 84% of food and beverage businesses make at least a “significant effort” to be sustainable, we can say with certainty that getting leaner and greener is more than just a passing fad. Whether it’s consumers demanding that the brands they support do right by the planet or governments handing down nationwide mandates to curb emissions, the matter is imperative.

Luckily, technology can help you do your part and stay compliant with regulations, and we highlighted four specific ways that solutions developed for food and beverage companies can support sustainability.

The Top 6 Challenges in Food Warehouse Management and How Purpose-Built Software Solves Them

With a huge variety of ingredients, finished products, employees and equipment—some of which at any given time are in motion—the warehouse of a food and beverage business can become quite chaotic if it’s not managed properly. Maintaining traceability, optimizing inventory levels, minimizing waste and segregating allergens are just a few of the efforts that your organization must prioritize.

It sounds like a lot to handle, but you can get the high-level visibility and specialized features you need for effective warehouse management by utilizing an ERP dedicated to the food and beverage industry.

DeIorio’s Migrates to Cloud-Based Aptean Food & Beverage ERP for Greater System Reliability and Utility

Valued Aptean customer DeIorio’s, well known for its frozen baked goods and pizza dough, recently migrated to a cloud-based implementation of Aptean Food & Beverage ERP, and the business is already reaping the benefits. The shift enabled additional features for planning and purchasing, which has improved inventory control and facilitated the application of real-time data insights.

Read DeIorio's story in full and hear from a company representative in a series of video clips to understand how transformative the move to the cloud can be.

6 Cost-Saving Tactics for Lean Food Production

This isn’t the first time increased costs and how to mitigate their financial impact on your organization has come up in this post, but that’s fitting considering how top-of-mind it is for food and beverage businesses. The concept of “lean” production has long existed, but it has no formal definition, nor a set of truly universal principles on which to create your strategy, as that’s dependent on your industry.

But we’ve got your back with six key cost-saving strategies for lean food and beverage manufacturing that, with the help of an industry-specific ERP system, you can employ to offset elevated expenses.

How Food Manufacturing ERP Software Improves Data Visibility and Boosts Results

As time goes on, companies across all industries are continuing to realize the paramount importance of data, finding new ways to gather, analyze and use it to their advantage. The food and beverage world is filled with essentially infinite data, from country of origin information and lot codes to item counts and nutritional facts—and there’s also a limitless amount of data to be collected about consumers, too.

Operating in this data-first environment requires having the digital solutions to maintain and provide visibility into your organization’s invaluable information, and ERP is ideal for those purposes.

Explore More With Aptean

As we pointed out in the introduction to this piece, there are plenty more interesting and relevant blog posts available in our Insights Center. If you’re looking for something more visual or deeper coverage of specific topics, take a look at this small sample of our other offerings here to pique your interest.

Infographics

• Maximize Efficiency by Automating Processes With Aptean Food & Beverage ERP

• 4 Ways ERP Software Helps Your Contract Manufacturing Business Excel

• Leveraging Technology to Overcome Workforce Shortages in the Food and Beverage Industry

Whitepapers

• Effectively Managing Supply and Demand in the Fresh Produce Sector

• Help Mitigate Risks, Save Money and Increase Revenue With Food and Beverage ERP Software

• Outsourcing Food Production: How To Mitigate Risks and Build Stronger Partner Relationships

We’re proud to share compelling content like all of the aforementioned assets as part of our role of thought leader in the food and beverage software space. We remain committed to the industry, as well as our other target markets, and develop software that’s tailored to the specific needs of each based on our collective decades of experience and in-depth understanding of business solutions.

And it’s not just ERP and PLM that we do—Aptean has a complete suite of systems to take your operations to the next level, including overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), enterprise asset management (EAM) and route optimization solutions. By choosing us, you can work with one vendor and one support team, simplifying your partnership network and promoting a seamless experience.

We also offer nearly all of our systems via cloud-based deployments on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, which can afford your organization greater scalability, enhanced flexibility, stronger cybersecurity, improved data protection and broader accessibility. That’s just another reason why food and beverage businesses around the world turn to us for their solution needs.

If you’re ready to learn more about our food and beverage software and how it can help your company, contact us today. You can also reach out to request a personalized demo.