Why NetSuite for Food and Beverage Companies?

Consumers expect two-day delivery at baseline. Nearly half of F&B executives can't even meet a 3.5-day window. Eighty-two percent of businesses struggle with shrink. And 69% of inbound shipments contain inaccuracies. Not occasionally. As a baseline.

That's not a technology problem -- it's an operations problem. But it's the kind of operations problem that technology is (or was?) supposed to solve.

So when Oracle pitches NetSuite as the answer to all of this, connecting your accounting, inventory, production, quality, and order management in one cloud database, it's worth taking seriously. But the gap between "NetSuite for F&B" as a sales presentation and "NetSuite for F&B" as a daily operating reality is wider than most companies expect.

So let's dig into it.

What NetSuite Actually Does Well

Lot-level inventory tracking. This is probably NetSuite's strongest F&B play. Every batch gets tracked with lot numbers, expiration dates, and full traceability. When you need to pull a recall, you're not digging through filing cabinets or calling warehouse managers on their cell phones. You can trace raw materials to finished products across plants, 3PLs, and customers. For food companies under FDA or FSMA oversight, it's more than just a nice-to-have.

That said, "lot traceability" in practice means your team has to actually enter lot data consistently. Every time. At every handoff point. The system supports it. Whether your warehouse staff at 6 AM on a Monday morning supports it is a different question.

Can NetSuite actually prevent you from shipping expired product? Yes, through FEFO (First Expired, First Out) picking logic. You'd be surprised how many food companies are still shipping newer product while older stock goes stale in the back of a warehouse. NetSuite can enforce the right pick order. But it requires proper warehouse management configuration. It doesn't just happen because you signed the contract, and most implementations tend to skip this part or bolt it on later.

If you're dealing with variable-weight products like meat, cheese, bulk ingredients etc.., catch-weight automation is where NetSuite quietly saves real money. It records batch cost & weight variations automatically, so your invoicing matches what actually shipped, not what the PO estimated. For some distributors, this alone can shave days off billing cycles.

MTC Coffee, a wholesale coffee bean distributor across Asia Pacific (and OnePacific client since 2017), went from financial reporting that took weeks to reporting that took days after consolidating five or six separate cloud apps and spreadsheets into NetSuite. The value there wasn't any single feature. It was multi-entity consolidation: getting subsidiaries, currencies, and countries into one place instead of reconciling across fragmented tools. And in a properly configured environment, a PO, batch ticket, or shipment posts once and updates everywhere: inventory, financials, order status, compliance records. No more re-keying data. No more wondering which spreadsheet has the latest numbers.

Where It Falls Short

Well, to start with, NetSuite is not exactly built for food and beverage. It's a general-purpose ERP with F&B features bolted on. That distinction matters more than Oracle would like you to think. Purpose-built F&B systems handle recipe management, co-products and by-products, and batch scaling natively. NetSuite handles them through Bill of Materials functionality, which works for simple cases but gets clunky fast.

If your production involves complex formulations, recipe versioning, or processes where one input yields multiple outputs (processing pork into cuts plus fat trimmings, for example), you'll need add-ons or custom development. The SuiteApp ecosystem helps here, but those carry their own license fees and aren't always obvious during the sales process.

Implementation is where most companies get hurt.

The uncomfortable truth: implementation typically costs two to three times the annual software license. A distributor licensing NetSuite for $50K a year might spend $100-150K on the initial project and data migration. And that's if it goes well.

The complexity isn't just technical. F&B companies migrating from QuickBooks, spreadsheets, or niche industry software face a painful stretch of data migration, system integration, and change management. High employee turnover in restaurants and food operations makes training especially brutal. If staff find the interface complicated (and some will), they revert to spreadsheets. Then you're paying for an ERP that nobody uses.

The cost compounds in ways you don't expect

NetSuite's pricing is modular: core platform, optional modules, number of users. Sounds clean. In practice, F&B companies often discover they need Advanced Inventory Management, Warehouse Management, Manufacturing, or other modules they didn't budget for. Users have reported that what started as a reasonable cost tripled within a year as they added functionality and users. And NetSuite contracts are typically multi-year with limited flexibility to scale down. If your business hits a rough patch, you're still paying full freight.

Demand planning has real limits

NetSuite's standard planning works for steady-state operations, but F&B demand is anything but steady. Seasonal swings, promotional spikes, supply disruptions. During COVID, one major food distributor found that NetSuite's planning tools couldn't keep up with the volatility at all. Their team ended up exporting data to Excel and manually reconciling forecasts for each product line. They eventually added a specialized planning add-on and saw inventory value drop 23% and turnover increase 62%. But that meant recognizing the gap and spending more money to fill it.

Standard support won't save you

Oracle's basic NetSuite support has a reputation for slow, scripted responses that don't resolve complex issues on any reasonable timeline. When your inventory allocation is broken and shipments are halting, a ticket queue isn't good enough. Premium support costs extra. Most F&B companies end up leaning on their implementation partner for ongoing help, which makes partner quality a long-term operational dependency, not just an implementation concern.

Then there's...

The Integration Problem

Integration is where the "one system" promise meets friction.

NetSuite doesn't include a POS system. If you're running restaurants, your Toast or Square or Micros needs to feed data into NetSuite through APIs or third-party connectors. Without that integration, you're either double-entering transactions or batch-updating sales data manually. Before one quick-service restaurant chain got their POS properly integrated, they had no centralized view of stock, frequent overstocking and stockouts, and high ingredient wastage across outlets. After integration, ingredient waste dropped 25%. But getting there was the hard part.

Same goes for EDI. Food distributors working with major retailers need electronic data interchange, and NetSuite handles it through third-party integrations that can be finicky. Sundia Corporation, a specialty food company, struggled to manage split purchase orders from the same customer until they built custom workflows to handle it.

eCommerce channels, marketplace feeds, 3PL systems, logistics platforms. Each integration is its own mini-project with its own timeline and budget. The promise of "one system" is real, but getting there requires connecting everything first. And until that's done, you're still living in the fragmented world NetSuite was supposed to replace.

When It Makes Sense (and When It Doesn't)

NetSuite isn't for everyone. If you're running a single location or a small regional distributor doing under $5M in revenue, it's probably overkill. The implementation cost, learning curve, and ongoing complexity will outweigh the benefits. One experienced ERP consultant put it bluntly: stay on QuickBooks until it's genuinely bursting at the seams.

But for growing F&B companies hitting the ceiling of their current systems, NetSuite solves real problems:

• You're running multiple locations and can't see inventory across them in real time
• Financial close takes weeks because data lives in five different places
• You're expanding internationally and need multi-currency, multi-subsidiary consolidation while compliance and traceability are becoming audit nightmares
• Order volume has outgrown spreadsheets and standalone tools

Empire Sushi, with 178 locations across Malaysia, needed to triple its transaction processing capacity after going public. MTC Coffee, importing from Brazil, Indonesia, and Ethiopia, needed to consolidate operations across Hong Kong and Australia. Bakehouse, one of Hong Kong's best-known artisan bakeries, is going through the same transition right now as they scale wholesale operations. These are the kinds of inflection points where NetSuite earns its cost.

The Partner Variable

One thing doesn't get said enough in these conversations: the implementation partner matters as much as the software.

A bad partner will recreate native NetSuite functionality instead of using it, ignore F&B nuances, and leave you with a fragile system that breaks every time Oracle pushes an update (which happens twice a year). A good partner understands that food companies have constraints generic ERP consultants don't think about: perishable inventory, variable weights, seasonal supply chains, regulatory compliance, high-turnover workforces.

Having taken clients like Empire Sushi and Bakehouse through their NetSuite implementations, one thing stands out: the companies that budget honestly for integration work and go in with realistic expectations tend to be the ones still happy with the decision a year later.

The difference between a NetSuite implementation that transforms operations and one that becomes an expensive liability usually isn't the software. It's who configured it and whether they understood your business.

NetSuite can work for food and beverage companies. It handles lot tracking, financial consolidation, and multi-channel order management better than most alternatives at its price point. The FEFO, catch-weight, and traceability features address genuine pain points that generic ERPs ignore entirely. But it requires significant upfront investment, careful configuration, proper integrations, and a partner who's actually done this in food and beverage before.

The companies that struggle? They usually bought the pitch, skipped the hard questions about integration and training, and found out what "implementation costs" actually means about six months too late.