Overview
Your food database plays a small but essential role in the management of your business. It provides a single source of the truth concerning the products you sell, in terms of their ingredients, nutritional data, allergens and pricing. It will typically start life as a spreadsheet, which is easy to create but hard to manage, and impossible to integrate with the other systems that need the data it contains.
When searching for a dedicated food database, you may find searching for ‘product lifecycle management’ (PLM) software yields more results.
Critical functions
Your food system needs to hold and make available the following details about your products:
Availability (e.g. in-store, certain branches only, online)
Cost, margin, tax and selling price (or selling prices, if they vary by location)
Ingredients, nutritional data and allergens
Version control, audit and access permissions are critical to ensure only approved changes are made.
Important integrations
Your food database needs to push information to the following systems:
Your website and/or mobile app, to show ingredients, allergens and nutrition data to your customers
Your inventory management system, to keep product and supplier records up-to-date
Your kitchen production system, to avoid manually rekeying data between the two system
Users
The food database typically has two distinct use cases, and therefore users:
New product development (NPD) team, who will use it to create and cost recipes
Technical team, who will use it to establish, record and disseminate ingredients, nutritional information and allergens to systems that need to consume it
Because of the critically important nature of the data in the food database, access should be strictly limited and changes easily audited.
