Food and beverage making is one of the steadier employers in the Finger Lakes. The New York State Department of Labor’s regional economist reports that food and beverage manufacturers (NAICS 311 and 312) employed just under 10,000 people in 2023, up 20.0% over the decade, and that dairy products manufacturing alone grew 57% to 1,200 jobs between 2013 and 2023. The same report counts beverage manufacturing at 2,700 jobs and fruit, vegetable and specialty foods at 2,300, and puts the sector’s contribution to the region’s gross regional product at $1.6 billion in 2023.
Growth like that puts pressure on back-office systems. A spreadsheet that tracked one product line at one site stops working when there are three lines, two coolers and a distributor who wants lot numbers on every pallet. Here are the questions a producer should settle before looking at any ERP software.
What has to be traceable
Start with the product list, not the software list. Which of your products can be traced by batch today, and to what level? A brewery tracking tank batches has a different job from a cheese maker tracking lots of milk from specific farms through a make, an aging room and a shipment.
Write down the three moments that matter for each product: when raw materials arrive, when they are transformed into something you sell, and when the finished product leaves. Those are the points where a lot number has to be captured, scanned or typed, and the ERP should make that capture quick enough that people actually do it.
Why 2028 is closer than it looks
The FDA’s food traceability rule requires businesses that make, process, pack or hold foods on its Food Traceability List to keep lot-level records and to hand them over within 24 hours of a request. During an outbreak or recall the agency can ask for an electronic sortable spreadsheet in the same window. The original compliance date was January 20, 2026. The FDA proposed moving it by 30 months to July 20, 2028, and Congress then directed the agency not to enforce the rule before that date. The FDA page, current as of November 4, 2026, also scheduled a public meeting for November 6 on lot-level tracking and possible compliance flexibilities, so the details may still move.
Whether the rule touches you depends on the product. The FDA’s own worked examples include soft cheese, fresh-cut produce and shell eggs. A producer with covered products should check the list at fda.gov before any software purchase, because the covered foods decide how detailed the records must be. If any of them apply, the Food Manufacturing ERP you pick has to capture a traceability lot code and the right data at receiving, transformation and shipping, and it has to produce those records quickly. Some retail and distributor buyers already ask for the same information in their supplier terms.
Two paths, and a third
Smaller producers tend to weigh a food-specific system against a configurable general platform. A food-specific package arrives with lot, expiry and recall features already designed. A general platform needs more configuration but can cover accounting, purchasing and production in one place. Odoo is one example on the second path, and its inventory app supports lot and serial tracking; the page on Odoo for Food and Beverage is there for readers who want a closer look.
There is a third path for plants that already run an ERP and like it. A food distributor running Fishbowl worked with GrayCyan to keep its system and add scan-based receiving connected to its purchase orders. Lot numbers captured at receipt now link forward to every outbound shipment, a lot can be traced in minutes, the distributor has a complete traceability record at every critical tracking event, and manual data entry fell 85%. The tools around the ERP carried the traceability work.
Questions to ask any vendor
- Where in the process does the lot number get created, and who scans it?
- Can you list every finished lot that used a given supplier lot, and the reverse, in under an hour?
- How does the system handle best-by dates when two lots of the same product expire in a different order than they arrived?
- Can it keep ambient, refrigerated and frozen stock in separate locations and block a wrong putaway?
- What does it cost to change a lot-tracking rule after stock exists?
A vendor who answers these with a live demo on your own sample data is worth a second meeting.
About the Contributor
Nishkam Batta, Editor-in-Chief, HonestAI Magazine | AI Consultant, GrayCyan AI Solutions
Nish leads an applied AI company helping manufacturing and related companies automate operations with human-in-the-loop AI that integrates into ERPs, WMS, CRMs, and other enterprise tools, with an emphasis on explainable AI, clear audit trails, and measurable outcomes. His team builds agentic ERP systems that execute multi-step tasks inside approved guardrails so humans keep accountability, approvals, and override control.
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