The ERP system that helps food and beverage businesses run smarter. Manage stock, production, quality, compliance and finance through one connected platform.
Food and beverage businesses deal with fast-moving demand, strict safety requirements and rising production costs. When systems don't talk to each other, it becomes harder to stay efficient and profitable. Dynamics 365 Business Central unifies stock, production, finance and supply chain operations in one place, so you can adapt to change with confidence.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is an all-in-one ERP platform that brings together finance, operations, stock, sales, purchasing and production. It removes the need for multiple disconnected systems and helps you stay compliant, cut waste and make better decisions. If you want to see how a modern ERP built for the food and beverage industry can transform operations, keep reading.
Food and beverage operations rely on accuracy, speed and traceability. An ERP designed for this sector helps teams stay agile while reducing cost and waste.
Business Central connects finance, production, purchasing, stock and sales in one system. This gives teams complete visibility of the supply chain from raw ingredients to finished goods, helping you avoid errors and improve collaboration.
With real-time dashboards, forecasting tools and built-in analytics, Business Central helps teams make informed decisions. You can spot shortages earlier, understand margins and adjust production based on demand.
Food and beverage markets move quickly. Business Central scales with your operations as you add new product lines, expand production or move into new markets. You can deploy in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid setup.
By automating manual tasks and streamlining supply chain processes, food and beverage businesses can reduce operational costs. This enables leaders to reinvest in innovation, equipment or growth.
Food and beverage businesses must follow strict safety and labelling standards. Business Central supports traceability, quality checks and compliance reporting to help you meet industry regulations with less manual work.
Data taken from a survey we commissioned in December 2024. Click here to view
of businesses are utilising an ERP
businesses are dissatisfied with their current ERP
of businesses say using an ERP has contributed to achieving business outcomes
Food and beverage production has unique challenges. You need accurate recipes, efficient production lines, and complete traceability from supplier to customer. Dynamics 365 Business Central offers specialised tools that simplify these processes, helping your team work faster and reduce errors. Its flexible features support every part of your operation, from planning and sourcing to quality control and fulfilment.
Create and maintain recipes with precision. Business Central helps teams manage ingredients, monitor variances and maintain consistent product quality.
In the food and beverage industry, efficiency and quality are essential. Business Central is the ideal ERP for F&B businesses because it simplifies operations, supports compliance and helps you respond to changes in demand with ease.
Plan production based on real-time demand trends. This helps reduce overproduction, limit waste and avoid stock shortages.
Create accurate production schedules and adjust them quickly as ingredients or demand change. This leads to smoother operations and fewer delays.
Manage supplier contracts, performance and deliveries. This helps ensure quality ingredients arrive on time and at the right price.
Record quality checks, monitor batch data and maintain audit trails. Business Central helps businesses show regulators that processes are followed correctly.
Use built-in analytics to understand performance across departments, client segments and service lines. This helps you make confident decisions and adapt your strategy as conditions change.
Monitor costs across ingredients, labour, production and logistics. With this visibility, leaders can improve pricing strategies and protect margins.
Get a better understanding of the benefits of using a CRM system - allowing businesses like yours to overcome fragmented systems and disconnected workflows. Don't just read about them either, our report provides you with actionable insights and practical recommendations so that you can begin to make data-led decisions.
Download report
Most trials drop you into a generic demo company that looks nothing like the way you actually work. Ours doesn't. We configure your free trial around your business and the use case you care about, so you and your team can test real scenarios with data and processes you recognise.
It starts with a short questionnaire about your industry, your current systems and what you want to prove out. Once that's back with us, your tailored trial can usually be made available within a few working days. Prefer a guided walkthrough first? A standard demo is still on the table - just tell us which you'd like.
Complete a short questionnaire covering your industry, processes and the things you most want to test.
We set up a Business Central environment around your use case, so you're not clicking through a generic demo company.
Your tailored trial is typically ready within a few working days of the questionnaire coming back to us.
These are the problems that come up again and again when we talk to food and beverage businesses about their systems. If two or three of them sound familiar, the issue is usually structural rather than a matter of trying harder with the current setup.
A recall means tracing forward from a raw material batch to every customer who received it, and backwards from a finished pack to its ingredients. If any part of that chain is on paper, the trace takes days you don't have.
Stock rotation, order allocation and production sequencing all have to respect best-before dates. A system that treats stock as interchangeable units will pick the wrong batch.
Actual yield differs from recipe yield on every run. Without capturing it, waste is only discovered as an unexplained stock variance at period end.
Supplying supermarkets brings EDI ordering, specific labelling, penalty regimes for short delivery and audit requirements that a general system won't handle out of the box.
Three situations that reflect the patterns we see most often in food and beverage. Each one describes a type of business, the problem it started with and what changed once Business Central was set up around it.
These are anonymised, illustrative scenarios built from common patterns in the sector. They aren't customer stories, and no figures here are attributed to any individual organisation.
Chilled foods producer, single site, retail and foodservice customers
Illustrative scenarioCraft drinks producer scaling into national distribution
Illustrative scenarioBakery supplying multiple supermarket accounts
Illustrative scenarioLicensing is published and predictable. Implementation isn't, because it depends on what you ask the system to do. Here's the licence position, then the things that genuinely move the number in this sector.
£6.20per user / month
Read, approve, enter time and expenses. No full transactional access
£61.50per user / month
Finance, sales, purchasing, projects, basic stock and warehousing
£84.60per user / month
Everything in Essentials plus manufacturing and service management
Microsoft UK list prices, per user per month on an annual subscription, correct at the time of writing. Check the current figure on Microsoft's pricing page.
Food and beverage manufacturers need Business Central Premium, since production, bills of material and routings all sit in the Premium plan rather than Essentials. Lot and expiry tracking is included, but sector requirements such as catch weight, EDI, quality management and full recall reporting are usually met with a specialist food add-on built on Business Central, which is a separate licence cost per user or per site.
Assume the add-on and the EDI connections are a real part of the budget rather than a rounding error. A food implementation that only licences core Business Central will hit its limits during testing, which is the expensive time to find out.
In the food and beverage industry, efficiency and quality are essential. Business Central is the ideal ERP for F&B businesses because it simplifies operations, supports compliance and helps you respond to changes in demand with ease. To learn more about Business Central, or to see how an ERP for food and beverage can help your team, get in touch via this short form.
It is a modern ERP system that helps food and beverage companies manage production, quality, stock, finance and compliance in one connected platform.
It supports batch tracking, quality checks, audit trails and documentation that help you meet food safety standards, including traceability requirements.
Yes. It allows businesses to manage recipes, monitor ingredient usage, handle substitutions and maintain consistent product quality.
Yes. Real-time stock visibility, expiry tracking and demand forecasting help reduce waste and improve planning.
Business Central works for both. It supports production planning for manufacturers and order fulfilment, warehouse management and logistics for distributors.
It provides oversight from supplier deliveries to finished product distribution, helping teams avoid shortages and maintain production flow.
Yes. You can track allergens across ingredients, recipes and finished goods to support accurate labelling and compliance.
Business Central includes forecasting tools that help predict seasonal peaks and adjust stock and production accordingly.
It can be cloud, on-premises or hybrid. Cloud is the most common option because it reduces hardware costs and keeps the system updated.
It centralises financial data, automates routine tasks and provides real-time reporting so finance leaders can manage costs, track margins and support growth plans more effectively.
Looking at Business Central beyond food and beverage? See the full Dynamics 365 Business Central overview for features, pricing considerations and how implementation works, or read our guide to choosing a Business Central partner.
