FoodMaven

Business Intelligence Allowed Fast Pivot During Pandemic

Once Acumatica was up and running, FoodMaven had the deep visibility into every aspect of the business it desired because data was now all in one system. Having visibility into that real-time data was very important when the pandemic hit, and sales dropped 40 percent.

It allowed the company to quickly pivot and begin selling its impact food to consumers, bridging a huge gap that happened when meat distributors began to shut down. Meat and other food supplies became limited and restaurants, food service and hotel orders dropped.

“We started thinking about who might want to buy these products, which we can sell for 20 to 30 to 40 percent off,” Lems says. “We wondered whether consumers would be interested in buying a 50-pound bag of traditional flour or 40-pounds of frozen chicken breast. We quickly carved out new area in Acumatica and whipped up a web page to see if anyone was interested in 12 items to start.”

Very quickly, orders poured in, so much so that FoodMaven will evaluate plans to permanently add B2C sales in addition to its B2B sales. Some 700 consumers placed orders in the first week, and those customers, along with its acquisition of Jana Food Services in Dallas, Texas in March, allowed them to recover its lost revenue.

“Acumatica is a technology enabler, not a blocker,” Lems says.

Lems says shipping starts each day with a meeting to analyze the data in Acumatica. “It all starts with an Acumatica screen,” he explains. “We look at today’s orders, inventory issues, and dive into the Acumatica tool to talk about them. It’s a touchpoint across the organization – sales, accounting, finance, supply, operations – we all look at Acumatica to see what needs attention to ensure our success and our customers’ success.”

Having a single record for everything going on in the business is a huge benefit, he says. “We have a saying, ‘If it didn’t happen in Acumatica, it didn’t happen.’”

Acquisition Integrated Smoothly, Securely

FoodMaven expanded into Texas during the beginning of the Pandemic, acquiring Jana Foods, a largely halal meat distributor in Dallas. They quickly added Jana’s 12 users to Acumatica, its integration partner helped with some minor accounting issues, and Acumatica was up and running within a month. “That smooth process gives us confidence that, as we move forward into other cities, Acumatica is going to grow with us,” Lems says.

Because Acumatica is cloud based, FoodMaven didn’t have to make a large infrastructure investment when it purchased Jana Foods. Acumatica and Amazon Web Services keeps the company’s data secure, no matter what the location, and backups happen automatically.  “If there is an intrusion or bad actors, Acumatica is there to help us,” Lems says. “We have redundancy, everything is backed up, and security is never a question.”

Platform for Rapid Growth

That peace of mind gives FoodMaven a solid foundation upon which to fulfill its mission of redistributing high-quality local, oversupplied and imperfect foods, and selling it in new ways, which became very evident during the Pandemic food shortages.

“Acumatica is a very flexible and affordable system for a growing company,” Lems says. “It supports scale in a way that allows you to enable growth rather than get in the way of it. Its API is flexible and, for small to mid-sized companies with an eye to getting much bigger, Acumatica is going to get you very far.”