Acumatica Customer A Priori Specialty Foods’ Secret Ingredient for Success

From cheesemonger to obsessed craft chocolate connoisseur to artisanal product importer, Matt Caputo knows high-quality, hand-made products when he sees—and tastes—them. He and his wife, Yelena, founded A Priori Specialty Foods in 2006, a Salt Lake City-based business that offers meticulously vetted, Old World-style products, including tinned fish, bitters, cheese, salumi, and craft chocolate.

“We have since become the largest distributor of craft chocolate bars in the world,” Matt says.

The business—which started with Caputo’s specialty foods deli and market where they sold products wholesale over the counter—has grown into a manufacturing, importing, distribution, food service, and e-commerce powerhouse. They serve four Tony Caputo’s retail food markets as well as other specialty food retailers, national brands, chefs, bars, and restaurants.

But its diversification, while signaling success, brought a few challenges.

“Because we were operating a few different companies out of one QuickBooks’ log in, it meant that we were having to do a lot of separating of our own data because there wasn’t any built-in functionality to let our businesses operate separately but within the umbrella of our enterprise,” says Director of Sales Adri Pachelli.

What they needed—and wanted—was an integrated system that could work with multiple entities, and what they found was Acumatica.

How A Priori Specialty Foods Operated Prior to Acumatica

Before finding and implementing Acumatica and Acumatica Distribution Management Edition, the A Priori Specialty Foods team became experts at working around QuickBooks’ limitations. They used spreadsheets and guesswork to dictate their decision making, including those revolving around inventory management.

“Our receiving team had no way of knowing our inventory in real time, so we spent a lot of big guessing what we might need in six months,” says Adri.

Mason Kolendrianos, Director of Procurement, agrees. “We would do our best to plan, but we were always kind of a little bit behind the curve.”

Customer questions would go unanswered because the team was spending time gathering and analyzing data manually, so A Priori Specialty Foods decided it needed to take a different path. They searched for an ERP solution that could simplify and automate their increasingly complex processes, and Acumatica—with its affordable pricing, personalization capabilities, and modular architecture that allowed adding applications when needed—was it.

“[We] finally honed in on Acumatica to navigate all of those different processes for us and offer us an integrated solution,” says Yelena.

How A Priori Specialty Foods Benefitted from Implementing Acumatica

With the help of Gary Jensen of Acumatica Gold Partner WAC Solution Partners, A Priori Specialty implemented Acumatica’s ERP software for distribution and began customizing the solution. Gary made it a priority to understand the business’s needs, ensuring Acumatica is tailored for their unique requirements.

“We collaborate [with Gary] and kind of build something from scratch in a lot of areas,” says Mason.

This ability to customize Acumatica so easily and to operate on a single, connected, distribution platform has led to the kind of benefits many small and midsized businesses (SMBs) only dream of. They’ve:

• Gained end-to-end visibility
• Improved inventory management, allowing for faster turns
• Reduced shipping times while increasing daily throughput using Acumatica’s warehouse management. “Our shipping team has seen an explosion in productivity. We’re probably seeing a 30 to 40% increase in shipments that we’re able to put out the door every day,” says Adri Pachelli.
• Improved shipping processes and order accuracy
• Streamlined processes, saving the national fulfillment team 3.5 hours a week and the sales team some 6 hours a week. “Efficiency has just gone up tremendously, and that has been key to our growth, that’s been key to profitability,” says Mason Kolendrianos.
• Reduced labor costs
• Increased intercompany transaction tracking efficiency
• Trimmed the time to close annual books from two months to less than two days
• Automated shipping, lowering frustration, errors, and the cost of replacements
• Expanded their dealer network with the ability to access historical data and track success
• Achieved a 30% savings in time spent processing price changes
• Improved communication and productivity with inventory visibility, eliminating multiple status phone calls daily

If that’s not enough, Gary says Acumatica’s flexible licensing allows their internal and external sales team members to easily log into and place orders. “They can do a lot with a very minimal local staff. They also built a fairly sophisticated way of looking at seasonality of product, so they know what they need to buy when because in a food business, things change [regularly].”

How A Priori Specialty Foods Plans to Use Acumatica for a Growing Future

For the A Priori Specialty Foods team, having reliable data, increased efficiency, and the ability to make Acumatica work for them (and not the other way around) has been key to helping the business grow and be profitable. Now, Adri says they have time to focus on serving their customers, being experts in their field, connecting with their vendors, and “being able to dream up what comes next.”

What that next is includes expanding with Acumatica’s online portal and wholesale distribution platform so customers can place their orders via their website, which will allow the team to immediately print pick lists and fulfill the orders quickly and accurately. It’s a bright future that’s being subsidized by Acumatica’s comprehensive cloud ERP solution.

“I can’t stress enough [about] capacity. As a growing company, there has just been so many cool things with automation and schedulers empowering our teams to be more efficient in their pick, pack process and just handle the growth,” Mason says.

As for Matt, he says his owning a thriving business is possible because of Acumatica. “I started as a cheesemonger and decided to become a distributor. Acumatica was definitely part and parcel to giving us the faith that…we can do this.”

They can, and they have—and so can any SMB ready to implement Acumatica’s modern ERP solution with its seamlessly integrated modules, including Acumatica Distribution Edition and Acumatica Manufacturing Management Edition. To learn more, check out our Distribution ERP Checklist and Acumatica Manufacturing Pricing Calculator as well as this QuickBooks vs. Acumatica comparison chart.

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