If you own and operate a food and beverage manufacturing company, it’s virtually impossible to imagine an element more vital to your business than product recipes. Other essential aspects to running your food production plant undeniably exist, like operational efficiency and profitability. But at the end of the day, your brand is staked and waged in your final products and the original formulas behind them. Your goods play a similarly important role in how customers identify with your brand and how much profit your organization drives annually.
With that in mind, how comfortable are you with your approach to managing and administering your food production plant? Does it seem like you’re stuck in the past and overly dependent on paper-based tracking methods and documentation procedures? Is your organization still heavily reliant upon written records, and are your plant floor managers basing decisions on instinct instead of process data? If so, this might be an opportune time to reevaluate your current strategies and production methods. The team at EZSoft can help you immediately start developing an action plan for ensuring your company stays competitive with your well-automated counterparts.
Consider starting your digital transformation initiative with a dedicated recipe management system. This automated tool is among the most dependable resources for perfecting your recipes and generating the consistent product outcomes that your valued customers have come to expect. The following article discusses the primary advantages of a recipe management system and a few best practices to help maximize the benefits of this unique automated software solution for the food and beverage industry.
What are the main advantages of a food recipe management system?
A purpose-built automated recipe management system carries several significant benefits that your business will almost instantly realize after implementation. Manual methods for formula development are resource-intensive, invite issues like operator error, and are becoming quickly outmoded among industrial-scale food producers. With the right recipe management software, you can unlock several benefits that put you squarely ahead of your competitors. With that mentioned, let’s take a closer look at how:
1. Recipe management systems help safeguard your confidential recipes
Your recipes represent sensitive, proprietary information your business depends upon for success. You scarcely want them to fall into the wrong hands. Unauthorized access to your recipes may result in the leaking of your most valued business secrets. However, when you deploy an automated recipe management solution, these systems let you codify and store your recipe information securely and prevent anyone from accessing them without your consent.
2. Automated recipe management ensures product consistency
You’re probably already aware that product accuracy is crucial to sustaining brand loyalty. Depending on the goods you offer, it’s not only taste that matters. Size, texture, and color all play considerable roles in representing your brand to an increasingly discerning public. Upon adopting a dependable recipe management platform, you virtually eliminate the prospects of operator error, and each of your product formulas will render the exact same way with every batch cycle.
3. Product development
Recipe management software provides you with a powerful set of tools that help you devise new recipes while you experiment with and revise existing formulas. This benefit helps your product development team refresh your lineup of goods and keep your brand current with the latest industry trends.
4. Concise stock keeping and improved inventory management
Professional recipe management software from EZSoft provides more visibility and control over your inventory, ensuring that you never reach critically low stock levels or lack essential ingredients and other necessary food manufacturing materials. The system gives you precise ingredient consumption levels, updating them in real-time. Better inventory management helps to ensure you never worry about poor estimations or recording inaccurate stock levels in manual operating procedures.
5. Guaranteed regulatory compliance
With the rise of food contamination incidents, food and beverage industry regulators are keener on enforcement now more than ever. And you don’t want to leave anything to chance. Recalls can impact your brand in ways you probably wouldn’t care to imagine. Recipe management systems help provide routine alerts for allergens and assist in calculating the nutritional content of your goods. These solutions similarly give you streamlined access to the historical information required for auditing purposes.
Suggested best practices for using professional recipe management software
After implementing your advanced recipe management system, there are a few best practices to help ensure the optimal function of the solution. Let’s examine a few of them below:
- Proper ingredient handling – the complicated supply chain may require you to consider replacing an existing ingredient with an alternate one. If you must change out an ingredient because it’s unavailable, ensure that it doesn’t contain any unexpected allergens. If it does, remember to relabel the food product accordingly.
- Avoid or reduce manual data entry procedures – Whenever your operators manually enter recipe information into the system, it exposes the formula to potential human error. This problem is only exacerbated when operators are required to enter the information all the time. Keep manual data entry to a minimum and develop a carefully monitored procedure for those times when it is unavoidable.
- Comprehensive training – Adequate training for every staff member who uses the recipe management software is critical. Ensure they understand all the steps and why the established methods are necessary.
Leading industrial automation companies near me
EZSoft is a full-service process control system integrator in Malvern, Pennsylvania. We engineer robust recipe management software and system controls for the food and beverage industry. For more on how our systems and strategies can deliver the solutions that meet the needs of your complex food manufacturing plant, complete our online request for contact form or call us now at (484) 568-5040.
