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The food and beverage industry provides more options to consumers than ever before. That means there’s never been more competition for manufacturers. According to Research and Markets, the global value of the Food and Beverage (F&B) industry reached a whopping $6.9 trillion in 2024. By current estimates, it will grow to more than $9.4 trillion by 2030.
There’s a lot of money to be made in the market, but this massive opportunity for F&B manufacturers is also a curse. The urgency to create new products and release them to market has reached a breakneck pace—even as food safety and labeling regulations tighten around the world, demanding greater care in sourcing, quality, and transparency.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software is a lifeline for companies struggling to keep up with the speed of today’s market. An F&B manufacturer’s PLM system can track a new food or beverage offering from the conception phase to the packaging, marketing, and eventual retiring of the item—the entire product lifecycle—in one location.
These platforms can help manufacturers meet compliance, create more transparency, and manage the massive amounts of data demanded by consumers and regulators. It can even help streamline one of the biggest challenges for manufacturers: bringing new concepts to market.
More than 20,000 new F&B products were introduced to consumers in 2020. Each product underwent intense development, testing, marketing, and inspection to ensure regulatory compliance before hitting store shelves. An effective PLM platform will serve as an all-in-one solution for manufacturers to navigate each stage of the lifecycle, accelerating the time to market.
The growing complexity of product attributes and regulations translate to a growing volume of product data. F&B manufacturers’ PLM software digitize all product data and store it in a single system, eliminating data silos. This gives every user access to the complete history of a product’s development, including recipes and formulas, ingredient sources, test reports, and more. Each department can organically build on what came before, without information getting lost or overlooked.
In the past, research and development teams had to manually test every single ingredient combination and formula and carefully adjust variables until they reached the desired outcome. With food and beverage manufacturers’ PLM solutions, users can easily run virtual simulations on base recipes and their variations to improve a formula in a fraction of the time. When they conduct final testing is in a real kitchen or laboratory, the recipe can already be close to perfection, only needing a few tweaks that simulations couldn’t address.
In addition to centralized data management, F&B manufacturers’ PLM software can house end-to-end workflows. Each department can map out tasks in the form of checklists for clarity and visibility about who needs to do what and by when.
When each task is completed, automations can alert the next user in the workflow that it’s time to make their contribution. Best of all, any supporting documents needed for their leg of the journey are readily available in the system, without the need to hunt it down or send an email request.
Every regulatory agency, distributor, retailer, and other third party needs detailed product information in certain formats and submitted through specific channels. Doing this manually can be almost as time consuming as testing recipes. Since PLM systems digitize all product data, users can develop form templates for each third party they need to submit information to and send it at the push of a button.
A PLM system is one of the most important tools F&B companies can have in their arsenal—but they are not created equally. Revalize brings together the widest array of capabilities in the market into one comprehensive, end-to-end platform, and offers a specialized solution tailored to the needs of F&B manufacturers.
Want to experience the impact our solution can have on your idea-to-cash pipeline? Reach out to schedule a product demonstration.
