How Tabanero Replaced Their Food and Beverage ERP for SQF Audits

Food and beverage manufacturers carry a load that other industries don't. Every ingredient has to be traceable. Every recipe has to be auditable. And every sale has to land cleanly across a handful of different stores and online channels at the same time.

Running a growing food brand on a legacy ERP solution like Microsoft Great Plains can feel like trying to ship a thousand cases of sauce out of a system designed in the 1980s. The compliance pressure is current, but the data isn't.

That's the situation Tabanero, a Florida-based sauce manufacturer, found themselves in. And it's why they made the move to Acumatica through Stellar One. Here's what changed, and what it means for any food and beverage manufacturer still wrestling with the same problems.

Why Legacy ERP Systems Fall Short for Food and Beverage Manufacturers

Great Plains wasn't designed for the realities of modern food manufacturing. At Tabanero, the plant team didn't use it at all. Production batches were captured manually and entered by accounting after the fact. Bank transactions were hand-keyed. EDI with Amazon was technically connected, but it was really just a scheduled download, not a live feed.

None of this is unusual for food and beverage manufacturers running on a legacy platform. According to recent research, 74 percent of businesses report increased productivity after replacing legacy ERP software, and manual data entry accounts for up to 30 percent of transactional errors in finance operations. When you're a food manufacturer trying to stay ahead of an SQF audit or a Walmart chargeback, that error rate is more than an inconvenience.

The bigger problem is what legacy ERP solution can't do at all. Bi-directional lot traceability. Mobile access for the production floor. Real-time inventory across multiple sales channels. These aren't nice-to-haves in food and beverage. They're the difference between a clean audit and a market withdrawal.

The Food Safety and Traceability Gap

Before moving to Acumatica, Tabanero couldn't say with confidence that they could trace a raw material lot forward to every customer it touched, or trace a finished product backward to every vendor ingredient that went into it. That's a direct risk to SQF certification, and it's exactly the kind of capability the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act expects food manufacturers to demonstrate on demand.

Food safety plans and corrective action documentation lived as separate documents outside of the ERP platform. There was no linked audit trail tying a corrective action back to the production event that triggered it. For a food manufacturer, that fragmentation is a compliance liability waiting to surface during an audit.

How Stellar One Solves the Food Manufacturing Compliance Problem

After implementing Acumatica through Stellar One, Tabanero  gained native lot tracking that supports forward and backward traceability from raw material receipt to customer shipment. HACCP and corrective action documentation can live inside the same system as production and inventory, with audit trails that connect compliance evidence to the production events that generated it.

The result has been measurable. Tabanero achieved a 98 out of 100 SQF audit score after their Acumatica go-live. That score doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen when your traceability data lives in three places and your corrective action log is a Word document on someone's desktop.

Acumatica also opens the door to systematic production loss tracking. Tabanero is now able to establish baselines for things like evaporation and product loss on mixers and pumps, which is information that was previously either estimated or invisible.

For food manufacturers losing an average of three to eight percent of production output to untracked yield variance, that visibility is real margin.

Multichannel EDI Without the Reconciliation Nightmare

Tabanero sells through Walmart, Amazon, and Shopify. In Great Plains, that meant disconnected workarounds for each channel, with manual reconciliation eating hours every week and the constant risk of a Walmart chargeback for an EDI compliance miss. Walmart supplier chargebacks for EDI failures can run from $1,500 to $5,000 per incident, and they add up quickly when you're juggling multiple trading partners.

With Stellar One, SPS Commerce connects all of Tabanero's trading partners natively. The Amazon Seller Central connector is in evaluation for full automation. Orders flow into one system instead of three, and the controller doesn't have to chase pending transactions across disconnected tools to find out what's posted and what's not.

A Single Source of Truth on the Plant Floor

One of the more telling changes at Tabanero happened in the warehouse. Before Stellar One, the ops team maintained a parallel inventory tracker in Microsoft Teams alongside Great Plains. That shadow system was a workaround that filled a gap the old ERP software couldn't fill. After Stellar One, the gap is gone. As Paul Bernstein , Tabanero's Controller, put it, "Acumatica is now the Bible."

That phrase matters more than it might seem. Shadow inventory in a food manufacturing environment doesn't just create reconciliation errors. It creates audit findings, purchasing duplication, and the kind of surprises that cost money. Eliminating it within months of go-live is the kind of outcome that comes from a system the floor team actually wants to use.

Acumatica's mobile and tablet access for warehouse and production floor staff played a real role here. Great Plains had no meaningful mobile capability. Acumatica gives floor workers, warehouse staff, and quality teams real-time data capture at the point of work, which is exactly what a food manufacturer needs when production is happening on its own clock.

What Food and Beverage Manufacturers Can Take From This

If you're running a growing food brand on a legacy ERP solution, none of what Tabanero went through is unusual. Lot traceability gaps, food safety documentation living outside the system, multichannel EDI held together with manual workarounds, and shadow inventory in Teams or Excel are some of the most common pain points in food and beverage manufacturing. The combination is what makes them dangerous.

The solution is a different ERP system. Tabanero didn't move to Stellar One because Great Plains was old. They moved because the realities of running a multichannel food manufacturer in 2026 demand a system that can trace a lot, capture data on the floor, sync with three sales channels, and pass an SQF audit without a paper chase. Stellar One was an integral part of Tabanero's ability to meet these demands.

If you want to see what that decision looks like from the inside, our team has helped dozens of food and beverage manufacturers move through it. The first step is usually a conversation about where your data lives, what your audit picture looks like, and whether your channels are actually talking to each other.

Frequently Asked Questions About ERP for Food and Beverage Manufacturers 

What is food traceability and why does it matter for ERP systems?

Food traceability is the ability to track a food product through every stage of the supply chain, both forward from raw material to customer and backward from finished product to vendor. For ERP systems, traceability means lot-level tracking is built into the same platform that manages inventory and production, so a recall, audit, or quality investigation can happen in minutes instead of days. It matters because FDA FSMA rules and certifications like SQF require it, and because the cost of a single food recall averages around $10 million.

How do food manufacturers ensure lot-level traceability?

Food manufacturers ensure lot-level traceability by capturing lot numbers at every step, from raw material receipt through production through shipment, inside a single connected system. Modern food and beverage ERP platforms like Acumatica do this natively, so a single click can show every customer that received a specific lot and every vendor ingredient that went into a finished product. Manual lot tracking through spreadsheets or paper records is still common, but it's slow, error-prone, and difficult to defend in an audit. 

What features should food and beverage manufacturers look for in an ERP solution? 

Food and beverage manufacturers should look for ERP platforms that offer bi-directional lot traceability, HACCP and CAPA documentation inside the system, flexible recipe and formula management, native multichannel EDI for retailers like Walmart, mobile and tablet access for the production floor, and the ability to track production loss and yield variance. Cloud-native platforms with strong manufacturing modules, like Acumatica, tend to fit growing food businesses better than legacy on-premise systems because they update automatically and scale without per-user licensing penalties.