To help you choose the right solution for your business, we found and ranked the best fresh produce software in the market today.
- Food Connex: Best Overall
- Visual Produce: Specialized Feature Set
- Produce Pro: Best for Medium to Large Enterprises
- Acctivate: Best for QuickBooks Integration
- Aptean Food & Beverage ERP: Strong Quality Control
- FreshByte Software: Best for Distribution and Wholesale
1 Food Connex - Best Overall
Why We Chose It: Food Connex is our top pick for its intuitive feature set for managing perishable food inventory. The software excels in real-time stock management, allowing immediate access to inventory data, critical in the perishable goods sector. Its advanced lot control and tracking ensure thorough traceability and quality control. Food Connex’s order management system simplifies the order entry process, offering capabilities like historical order information and intuitive prompts for creating orders. Its mobile order entry feature enhances customer service by enabling consumer orders from anywhere, anytime. Additionally, its integration with QuickBooks streamlines financial management and operational continuity.
2 Visual Produce - Specialized Feature Set
Why We Chose It: Visual Produce was designed specifically for the fresh produce industry. We picked it for its specialized features like enhanced slotting, order fulfillment, staging areas, product picking and receiving, and QA inspection. Its capabilities cover all aspects of fresh produce management, from initial orders to delivery. Functionalities include produce traceability, sales and purchase orders, inventory control, and financial management tools. Visual Produce also supports payroll, fresh pack processing, mobile order entry and delivery tracking, warehouse management, and more.
3 Produce Pro - Best for Medium to Large Enterprises
Why We Chose It: We went with Produce Pro because it supports complex operations for large food service companies, terminal markets, wholesalers, and distributors. Its core features include accounting, shipping and receiving, routing and delivery, and manufacturing and processing. It can also handle sales order processing, purchasing, inventory control, picking, and lot tracking/traceability. However, Produce Pro provides additional solutions for enterprise-level businesses. It offers warehouse management, mobile apps, analytics, eCommerce and web ordering, document imaging, EDI support, and disaster recovery solutions.
4 Acctivate - Best for QuickBooks Integration
Why We Chose It: Acctivate is best for businesses seeking to enhance their capabilities within the QuickBooks environment. It suits small to mid-sized distributors, manufacturers, and online retailers. Acctivate’s seamless integration with QuickBooks ensures businesses can manage complex inventory and order processing without abandoning their familiar accounting platform. Its features include real-time inventory management, multi-channel sales handling, and comprehensive business insights, making it an efficient ERP alternative. The software’s ability to handle substantial business volumes and its flexibility to support unlimited staff, locally or globally, makes it an ideal choice for growing businesses.
5 Aptean Food & Beverage ERP - Strong Quality Control
Why We Chose It: Aptean Food & Beverage ERP is our top pick for businesses in need of stringent regulatory compliance and quality control. With features focused on detailed traceability, quality assurance, and compliance management, Aptean is invaluable for maintaining high product integrity and safety standards. Additionally, its real-time analytics and reporting tools provide valuable insights, aiding in informed decision-making and operational efficiency. Aptean’s ability to integrate with various systems enhances workflow continuity across different business areas. The software’s scalability makes it suitable for both medium and large enterprises looking to uphold strict quality and regulatory standards while streamlining their operations and fostering growth.
6 FreshByte Software - Best for Distribution and Wholesale
Why We Chose It: FreshByte Software is the best fit for businesses in the distribution and wholesale sector, particularly those dealing with perishable goods. Its features include inventory management, sales, purchasing, and accounting. FreshByte’s strength lies in its ability to handle the intricacies of perishable goods management, such as lot tracking, expiration date tracking, and quality control. Its approach to managing the entire distribution process, from procurement to sales, combined with strong support and training services, makes FreshByte Software an ideal choice for businesses in the fresh produce industry.
What Is Fresh Produce Software?
Fresh produce software is a type of food distribution software tailored for the fresh fruit and vegetable sector. It integrates various functions like inventory management, quality control, sales, and logistics, focusing on real-time perishable food inventory management and traceability. This software aids in handling complex costs and operations in the produce industry, including production, transportation, and handling fees.
Fresh produce software offers modules for inventory, accounting, buying, selling, processing, packing, growing, brokerage, and more, ensuring efficient supply chain management and quick response in recall situations. Fresh produce software caters to industry growers, packers, shippers, wholesalers, and distributors. Users handling meat or grains should visit our best food distribution software roundup instead.
Features of Fresh Produce Software
- Traceability: Record the origin of a product, ingredient, or component. Best used for identifying defective or contaminated produce. Ensure you can create PTI-compliant labels for fresh produce
- Inventory Management: Monitor your real-time inventory produce stock levels. Improve your inventory control processes via barcode scanning, FIFO, picking locations, and stock adjustments and transfers. More advanced produce ERP systems will include a warehouse management module.
- Accounting: Track financial transactions to record profit and loss and better improve business finances and overall cash flow. Manage produce pricing, forecasting, and planning.
- Supply Chain Management: Handles your shipping and receiving, routing and delivery, sales order processing, purchase order management, and picking processes.
- EDI: Facilitates the exchange of business documents from one computer to another in a standard electronic format between trading partners.
Benefits of Fresh Produce Software
The top benefits of software for the fresh produce industry include:
Stay Compliant and Prepared for Audits Via Automated Traceability
Software for the produce industry will be able to monitor production and operations in real-time, providing a full view of all stock movement in your inventory. This is crucial for an industry with strict traceability requirements. This is accomplished by tracking variations in produce variety, grade, brand/mark, size, color, and origin.
A strong traceability tool will also track all-important delivery data. This starts with your sales shipments by logging where orders are being placed from, any documentation that comes with the said shipment, and proof of delivery receipts attached to invoices.
Produce traceability software will also record staff actions that occur on your production or shipping floor. This includes line status, who was working that day, what orders came in, what was stocked, and any downtime that may have occurred. For example, know how long a product may have been outside of your inventory before it was loaded onto a truck can help determine if there were any spoilage or expiration issues to be concerned about.
Organize Information During Recall Events
Keeping track of where your ingredients came from and where they were distributed allows you to quickly notify affected customers if specific batches of products were contaminated and need to be recalled. In the unfortunate circumstance that a product recall occurs, you’ll want to make sure your company’s quality control department is prepared for the worst.
Your business will want to be quick and efficient in identifying any suspect produce. If a health emergency has occurred with produce, you’ll want to be efficient in finding and identifying any contaminated stock in your inventory or in any shipments.
Recalls can be caused by a number of factors. This includes contamination, allergens, spoilage, or improper storage and labeling. These issues can be identified by a vendor, during production, or by a customer. In any scenario, you’ll also want to efficiently notify buyers, traders, and customers in order to meet safety compliance set forth by most governing bodies.
Some fresh produce software will allow a business to run a mock recall program. This lets your staff test their response to product traceability issues as well as any recall code requirements stipulated by food safety certification programs.
Fresh Produce Software Pricing Guide
The cost of fresh produce software will start between $100-$299/user/month. Subscription-based pricing models are generally found for cloud-based (online) software solutions. Setup fees for implementation and training are estimated to cost around what 1-year of service will cost. For example, if you sign up for a solution at $100/user/month for 5 users, your monthly cost will be $500/month, or $6,000/year. A software provider may charge anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 for the initial setup in this scenario, depending on the services rendered.
For purchased solutions, fresh produce software will start at around $5,000/one-time and go up from there. Most businesses can expect locally-installed (on-premise) options to have licensing, implementation, and training fees rolled together for their initial costs. Services such as support and data-migration will usually be billed at a separate rate.