August 28th, 2024

Centric PLM for Food & Beverage Experiencing Strong Market Adoption

Centric PLM for food manufacturers, brand and grocers showing strong growth on the heels of new innovations and team expansion

CAMPBELL, Calif., August 29, 2024– Centric Software® is pleased to announce the latest round of enhancements to Centric PLM™ for Food & Beverage and Grocery. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, formulate, develop, procure, manufacture and sell consumer goods products in food & beverage, grocery, cosmetics & personal care, fashion and multi-category retail to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Since Centric Software launched into the food, beverage and grocery space, hundreds of market-driven enhancements, innovations and best practices have been incorporated into Centric PLM and Centric Visual Boards™. Centric’s seamless product concept-to-launch solutions provide compelling ROI to the food and multi-category retail industry such as grocery, by reducing time to market, optimizing costs and improving compliance, traceability and sustainability.

The most recent updates involve compliance management with multi-level impact analysis of ingredients in products. Now, users can find both the presence and percentage of a particular ingredient in every level of the formula of a product, summarized in a convenient report. Following this logic, and at the request of Centric food & beverage customers, a ‘flat ingredient list’ feature adds up the total amount of each ingredient (including sub-ingredients) in a product. Finally, the creation of multiple new products and sub-products has been optimized.

“These updates are fantastic because they streamline compliance management, making it easier to track ingredient impact and optimize product creation. The new features offer deeper insights and greater efficiency, ensuring users can manage complex formulas with ease,” says Centric Software Principal Product Manager, Dr. Jerry Farkas.

The continual addition of industry experts to its ranks across the globe is evidence of Centric Software’s commitment to the food & beverage space. Drawing from their diverse backgrounds and experience, the food & beverage team is highly skilled in product development best practices, kept sharp through ongoing training and exposure to the latest industry trends and innovations.

Centric has developed partnerships and integrations with several entities including: Genesis R&D Food software; Adobe, SOLIDWORKS and Rhino for packaging and artwork approvals; 80+ ERPs; Slack and MS Teams to boost communication; USDA Food Data Central giving access to 300,000 foods; integrations to GDSN.

A collaboration with FoodChain ID connects users to 220 global food and chemical regulatory libraries and databases. Bizcaps Software, the provider of the electronic Product Information Form (PIF) is also a partner—Australian and New Zealand food companies can now send and receive PIFs directly from within Centric PLM, eliminating manual creation and entering of PIF data by pulling real-time information already housed in PLM.

Centric is a silver member of GS1 US and a GS1 member in China and Germany as well. GS1, the organization responsible for barcodes, is introducing a new standard: the 2D code. Consumers can scan for the information they want like allergens, country of origin and ESG data.

Centric PLM for food & beverage has garnered numerous industry accolades—a triple winner of the Just Food Excellence Awards in 2023 and a repeat triple win in 2024 for categories covering: Business Expansion, Innovation, Product Launches and R&D. Add to that, a double win from Just Drinks Excellence Awards. Centric has also been recognized by Business Awards UK for Excellence in Food Technology and by Frost & Sullivan over multiple years. Centric Software is a Red Herring 100 Global winner for Vision, Drive and Innovation and has achieved a Silver Ecovadis rating.

The most meaningful praise, however, comes from actual customers; companies like French retailer Carrefour, Italian spirits giant Montenegro, leading compound seasonings supplier Chengdu SNS Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (SNS), Europe’s largest potato products producer Aviko and ingredient supplier Ajinomoto Brazil.

“We are delighted with the market adoption of Centric PLM for food & beverage,” says Centric Software CEO, Chris Groves. “Our customers’ trust in us speaks to our modern functionality, consumer goods focus, user-friendliness and agile approach to end-to-end new product commercialization.”

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Centric Software® (https://www.centricsoftware.com/)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides the market-leading AI-enabled Product Lifecycle Management platform for food & beverage manufacturers, grocery and multi-category retailers. As experts in all fast-moving consumer goods, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to design, develop, source, buy, make, package, assort and sell products. Centric solutions optimize the product portfolio, harmonize product offers and streamline product development by speeding time to market and innovation while enhancing quality control and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Centric PLM™ features integrated industry best practices and innovative, AI-enabled capabilities tailored specifically for food and beverage manufacturers, retailers and service providers. Seamlessly manage the overall product lifecycle, from initial concept and formula development to packaging, quality, supplier collaboration, nutritional labeling, production, SKU rationalization and beyond. Results include up to a 50% improvement in productivity and a 60% decrease in time to market.
Centric Visual Boards™ are a visually oriented top-down/bottom-up product portfolio optimization tool. Real-time data and imagery from multiple business systems are brought into a singular accessible workspace, creating a new, visual way of working for all teams to ensure robust, well-balanced global/regional product offers, dramatically decreasing assortment development cycle time.

Centric Software maintains a 100% go-live rate and has received awards for excellence from Just Food, Just Drinks, Business Awards UK, Frost & Sullivan and many other regional accolades. Centric Software is proud to provide the best solutions, backed by the best team and to partner with the best customers.