The Best Food Distribution Software
With decades of experience helping businesses find software, we wrote this guide to showcase the best food distribution ERP systems that offer inventory control, supply chain management, and CRM functionality.
- Integrates with QuickBooks Online, ShipStation, and Shopify
- Affordable pricing for SMBs
- Mobile app for warehouse inventory management
- Infinite serialization levels for diverse requirements
- Integrated QC tests throughout product lifecycle
- Seamless regulatory compliance with ERP foundation
- Hundreds of third-party add-ons available
- Feature sets for multiple industries
- Highly customizable
To assist you in finding the best food distribution software for your business needs, we’ve used our software review methodology to test out and then rank the top food distribution systems available in the market today.
- DEACOM: Most Comprehensive Suite
- NetSuite: Best for Global Distributors
- Acctivate: Best for QuickBooks Users
- Food Connex: Best Cloud-Based ERP
- Aptean Food & Beverage: Best for Microsoft Users
- SYSPRO: Best Manufacturing ERP
- Katana: Best for Food Processing
- Datacor: Most Scalable Option
- Batchmaster ERP: Best Integration Options
1 SOS Inventory
Why We Chose It: SOS Inventory is our top pick because it specializes in inventory, order management, and manufacturing processes specific to food distributors. For example, the system handles lot number tracking and safety compliance, managing expiration dates for perishable items. It also uses the FIFO method to ensure older stock is utilized first and optimize turnover.
We also found SOS Inventory’s batch tracking tools worth mentioning. Businesses can assign unique lot or batch numbers to products for better quality control and recall management. Additionally, food distributors can generate reports and analytics based on batch data, providing insights into product lifecycles, inventory aging, and batch-specific performance.
SOS Inventory integrates with QuickBooks Online, directly linking invoicing and financial record-keeping to inventory activities. Finally, SOS Inventory includes meal-kitting capabilities and backorder management, ensuring timely fulfillment even when stock is low.
2 DEACOM - Most Comprehensive Suite
Why We Chose It: DEACOM functions as an ERP platform primarily aimed at batch process manufacturers and distributors. With a strong focus on the food and beverage industry, DEACOM offers features specifically molded to the demands of these sectors. Its design is characterized by a flexible architecture, allowing users to adjust the software according to their individual needs.
As an all-encompassing solution, it integrates inventory management, sales reporting, pricing, production management, and several other crucial functions. Given its cloud-based structure, DEACOM ensures users can manage their operations from any location with internet access, adding another layer of convenience to its suite.
Key features:
- End-to-end traceability for food items.
- Advanced warehouse management.
- Direct store delivery (DSD) capabilities.
3 NetSuite - Best for Global Distributors
Why We Chose It: We found NetSuite best for multinational companies sourcing and delivering food products to various global markets. One way NetSuite accomplishes this is through strong inventory and supply chain management.
NetSuite handles demand planning, procurement, and inventory optimization across geographies. It also helps maintain supplier relationships, including performance tracking, contract management, and collaboration tools like a vendor portal and integrated messaging.
Additionally, NetSuite supports compliance with local and international regulations, including food safety standards and import/export laws. It can help manage documentation, quality checks, and compliance reporting, helping food distributors expand their global presence effectively.
4 Acctivate - Best for QuickBooks Users
Why We Chose It: Acctivate is designed to work closely with QuickBooks, enhancing its inventory management capabilities without requiring users to abandon their existing financial software. These advanced inventory control features include lot and serial number tracking, expiry date management, and real-time stock-level updates.
Acctivate also syncs with online marketplaces and web stores, updating inventory counts and orders throughout the day to prevent lost sales. Popular platforms include BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, TrueCommerce, EDI Solutions, and authorize.net. Finally, it handles EDI communication for smooth transactions with trading partners, resulting in faster order processing.
5 Food Connex - Best Cloud-Based ERP
Why We Chose It: Food Connex is a cloud-based ERP platform tailored for food distribution, granting processors easy data access from any location with an internet connection. It incorporates a variety of tools, including real-time inventory management and sales reporting.
The software empowers users to adjust product pricing based on market trends and other determinants. CAI Software offers commendable customer support, contributing to its reputation in the software market.
Key features:
- Inventory management and tracking.
- Sales order processing and invoicing.
- Dynamic pricing and promotions management.
6 Aptean Food & Beverage - Best for Microsoft Users
Why We Chose It: Aptean’s Food and Beverage ERP is is a tailored solution for the food manufacturing and distribution industry, offering a comprehensive set of features for managing operations from raw material intake to final product delivery. It is built on the Microsoft Business Central cloud platform, ensuring accessibility, scalability, and integration with other Microsoft products.
We found this ERP solution is particularly beneficial for its focused approach to the food industry, providing tools for improved forecasting, planning, budgeting, full product recall and traceability, and connecting various departments and processes into a single platform.
7 SYSPRO - Best Manufacturing ERP
Why We Chose It: SYSPRO is a tailored ERP solution specifically designed for the food and beverage sector, addressing its unique challenges. With features that cater to quality control, compliance, and inventory, its software meets the intricate needs of food and beverage manufacturers and distributors.
SYSPRO encompasses a breadth of functions, from traceability and recall management to customizability. Its all-encompassing solution covers inventory, sales reporting, and warehouse management.
8 Katana - Best for Food Processing
Why We Chose It: Katana is designed with manufacturing at its core, making it well-suited for distributors involved in food production or processing. We found the software adept at handling complex workflows, including recipe and batch management. In fact, Katana auto-updates inventory levels as sales orders are fulfilled or production batches are completed.
We also found Katana useful for creating detailed recipes and tracking perishable goods. The ERP allows food manufacturers to monitor each item throughout the supply chain. Katana’s traceability tools can also pinpoint products’ origins and enable swift corrective measures in case of quality issues. Ultimately, we found Katana best for process manufacturers evolving beyond manual data entry and spreadsheets for more accurate food traceability.
9 Datacor - Most Scalable Option
Why We Chose It: Datacor offers a scalable solution for food distribution, with an ERP platform tailored to process manufacturers and distributors. Its flexible architecture permits customization, addressing the specific requirements of individual food distributors and processors.
As an integrated solution, Datacor provides an array of functionalities such as inventory management, sales reporting, production management, and lot traceability. Being cloud-based, it ensures users can access and manage their operations from any location with internet connectivity.
10 Batchmaster ERP - Best Integration Options
Why We Chose It: Batchmaster ERP is an ERP platform tailored for process manufacturers and distributors in the food and beverage sector. Its design allows customization to cater to the distinct needs of individual distributors and processors.
Alongside offering a myriad of features such as inventory management, sales reporting, and lot traceability, Batchmaster ERP stands out with its integrated solutions. These span across aspects like recipe and packaging management, costing, quality, and compliance, ensuring a cohesive approach to food distribution. Given its multifaceted features, Batchmaster ERP emerges as a notable choice for those seeking integrated solutions in food distribution software.
What is Food Distribution Software?
Food distribution software is a type of program designed to streamline and manage the processes involved in distributing food products, such as inventory management, order processing, logistics, and supply chain coordination.
The food distribution industry is unique. Not only do you have the same challenges of maintaining stock, managing transportation, and running an efficient business, but it’s also a highly regulated industry. USDA regulations and policies add a significant layer of complexity, especially for distributors of perishable goods.
In order to stay competitive in a crowded market, food distributors generally require a comprehensive ERP system to help lessen the costs associated with operational and accounting challenges. A well-integrated system supplying accurate real-time info is key, which is why industry-specific food distribution software is the best option.
Food Distribution Software Features
There are a handful of key components included in a software system for food distributors:
| Core Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Core financials (AP, AR, GL) | Tracks revenues and expenses. Includes accounts payable, accounts receivable, and a general ledger. |
| Inventory control | Keeps track of all information about the items your company builds, buys, stores or sells. Records inventory as current assets on the balance sheet. Tracks the cost of goods sold on your income statement. |
| Order entry | Coordinates the business processes and document workflow to deliver goods and services to customers. |
| CRM | Provides features designed for supporting sales, marketing, and service activities. Includes contact management, conversation history, lead tracking, order histories, quote/invoice creation, and call center integration. |
| Payroll | Manages employee compensation: wage calculation, ACH deposits, check printing, and compensation tax reports. |
| Supply chain management | Manages end-to-end processes from procurement to delivery; helps coordinate with suppliers and ensures timely fulfillment of customer orders. |
| Reporting | Provides real-time insights and analytics through customizable dashboards and reporting; includes inventory, sales, supplier, compliance, and waste/expiry reports. |
Additionally, more advanced systems will include functionality for:
| Advanced Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| EDI communication | Exchanges business documents in a standard electronic format between business partners. |
| Fleet management | Tracks fleet assets from an accounting standpoint; can utilize GPS hardware to track the location of each vehicle in a fleet. |
| Warehouse management | Includes inventory control, facility management, receiving, shipping, and labor management. |
| eCommerce | Provides you with the means to market your product or service globally. |
Benefits of Food Distribution Software
There are many advantages to implementing distribution software in the food and beverage industry. Learn about some of the most popular, user-friendly features:
Managing the Supply Chain
Getting your product from the supplier, processed and then to the customer can be complex. To help simplify this complexity, distributors are utilizing supply chain management (SCM) software.
Supply chain management has a number of important benefits:
- Eliminate delays that lead to decreased customer satisfaction
- Identify the vendors providing the most attractive rates
- Maintain just-in-time inventory and save on warehousing costs
- Avoid shortages and back-orders that lead to lost business
- Optimize warehousing requiring less space or fewer facilities
- Provide real-time updates to customers on order provisioning status
- Utilize historical data to feed future projections and forecasting
- Decrease turnaround time
Most food distributors have a quick turnaround time from when an order is received to the time it is shipped to the customer. Anticipating demand is especially important when mistakes in demand prediction can nullify the value you can recoup from perishable products. A solid SCM program will help you identify what came in first, how long it has been on the shelf, and when it needs to be sold.
Supply chain software systems feature several modules, including purchasing, vendor management, demand planning, sales forecasting, receiving, warehouse management, and shipping & delivery optimization. These help provide a comprehensive management system for the challenge of getting your goods from the supplier to the customer at the lowest cost.
Financial Management in Food Distribution
In the food distribution arena, the product has to change hands quickly. You may order fresh product on Monday, receive it on Tuesday, and ship to your customer that Tuesday afternoon. An integrated solution between your supply chain and accounting modules will help you easily coordinate these transactions. Efficiently and accurately tracking revenues and expenses, assets, and liabilities allows for a clear, real-time financial picture.
Additional modules incorporated into a distribution-oriented financial management system include general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, reporting, and budgeting.
Maintain and Strengthen Relationships with Customers
Rarely is strong customer relationship management (CRM) software more important than in the distribution industry. In any kind of distribution environment, most of your sales are composed of a core customer group. CRM functionality provides a tool to position yourself as the company to meet your customers’ needs.
CRM software also can help you acquire new customers. Features that allow you to database and market to prospects based on company size, years in business, key contacts, and product focus allow you to target your value proposition to your prospects’ needs effectively.
Managing Inventory for Regulatory Compliance
When buying and selling produce, your company’s reputation is on the line. The stakes are higher when spoilage and recalls loom as potential threats. In fact, very often your inventory traceability requirements will be informed not only by the dictates of running a profitable business but also by regulatory mandates.
Segmenting your product inventory lots with lot number tracking is a basic but very important safeguard. The ability to isolate down to batches or lots is a great start for ensuring you can identify the affected products.
Depending on your product set, you may have a much larger inventory management challenge. Any distributor must associate quantity, supplier, product descriptions, and cost with a given inventory item. You may need additional flexibility to add custom inventory fields. You need to not only track the farm where a food product originated but also the chemicals used in the grow, when it was harvested, and where it was shipped. Depending on your particular food line, you may have very different custom inventory tracking requirements.
A requirement for food traceability software is not the only challenge requiring strong lot tracking in food distribution. Volume discounts, customer-specific pricing levels, and promotional pricing campaigns are common needs. Carefully inspecting capabilities for supporting multiple price lists and flexible price calculation is an important part of inventory control and order entry evaluation.
Determining the level of automation required to achieve your inventory counts is another important decision. A barcode or RFID lot tracking system will require the least manual labor, as items are scanned automatically within proximity of a reader. Wholesale food distributors with a smaller amount of high-value items may prefer to track manually with part numbers.
Software Installation Considerations
Finding the right program is an important step, but it must also be deployed properly to ensure you receive the value you’ve invested. Food distribution software can be deployed in several ways, such as on-site or on the cloud. Each has its own benefits, such as cloud-based software being easier to access remotely. Consider which is the best fit for your operation.
You also need to determine any customization needs. A beverage distributor will have very different needs from a wholesale food service. Integrating directly with your other systems may be easier if you just need a few specific modules, such as order management. Or you could add inventory and CRM functionality. These customizations can increase the total costs.
If you’re ready to uncover your top food distribution software options, we’re ready to help with our free software search service.
