Manufacturing ERP for Food & Beverage Importers
Food and beverage businesses — especially importers — face ERP requirements that go well beyond standard manufacturing: lot traceability, shelf life, landed cost, and recall readiness. Here's how Sage 100 handles each.
Food and beverage companies — particularly those importing ingredients or finished goods, which describes a large share of Southern California's food sector — have ERP requirements that go beyond what a typical manufacturer needs. Here's what matters most, and how Sage 100 addresses it.
Lot and Batch Traceability
Full lot traceability — from incoming raw material lot, through production batches, to outbound shipments — is non-negotiable for food businesses, both for regulatory compliance and for recall readiness. Sage 100's lot tracking allows you to trace any finished good lot back to every raw material lot used in its production, and forward to every customer shipment it went into.
Shelf Life and Expiration Management
Beyond tracking lots, food businesses need to manage expiration dates — both for incoming raw materials and outbound finished goods — and ideally enforce FEFO (first-expired, first-out) picking logic so older stock moves first. This needs to be built into warehouse picking workflows, not handled as a manual exception process.
Landed Cost for Imported Ingredients
For importers, the true cost of an ingredient isn't the vendor invoice price — it's that price plus freight, duties, customs fees, and any tariffs, allocated proportionally across the shipment. Without landed cost configured properly, recipe costing and finished goods margin calculations will be inaccurate, sometimes significantly so.
Recipe / Formula Costing
For food manufacturers, the bill of materials isn't just a parts list — it's a formula, often with yield percentages, scrap factors, and unit conversions between purchasing units (e.g., 50lb bags) and recipe units (e.g., grams or ounces). Sage 100's manufacturing modules support formula-based BOMs with these conversions built in.
Recall Readiness
If a recall ever happens — for your business or a supplier — you need to be able to answer "which customers received product containing this lot?" within minutes, not days. This is a direct output of properly configured lot tracking, but only if it's been set up correctly from the start and used consistently in daily operations, not just during audits.
Why This Matters for Southern California Food Businesses
Southern California's food and beverage sector includes a significant number of importers — businesses bringing in ingredients, packaging, or finished products through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. These businesses sit at the intersection of import/landed cost complexity and food-specific traceability requirements, which makes ERP configuration especially important to get right.
Related Services
This topic connects directly to our core service areas: Sage 100 Consulting, Sage 300 Consulting, ERP Implementation, Manufacturing ERP, and Wholesale Distribution ERP. If you're working through a similar challenge, contact us for a free consultation.
