Does your business system give you the confidence to sell a plant-based alternative?

With Christmas in the rear-view mirror, the retailers have turned their attention to ‘Veganuary’, amid predictions that 2019 will be the year plant-based food becomes truly mainstream.

Rich Hardy, head of campaigns at Veganuary, said that on Sunday 30th December alone 14,000 people pledged to go vegan for the first month of 2019 – a rate of one every six seconds. In total, Veganuary anticipates that around 300,000 people will pledge to adopt a plant-based diet this month.

The multiples have responded by launching a host of new vegan products to cater to the growing market. Specifically, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Iceland have added vegan pizzas to their own-label ranges. Widely in the public eye, were Greggs who unveiled their first vegan sausage roll complete with a bespoke Quorn filling.

Interested in potentially developing your own plant-based alternative?

With the rise of veganism, it’s undeniable that increasing the number of ‘plant-based alternatives’ in store is within the consciousness of the retailers. As a food supplier, a well-executed ‘plant-based alternative’ NPD venture could lead you to both an environmental and financial win.

Before you even get the wheels in motion, you will need to measure the feasibility of the costs involved in launching a new plant-based product and analysing the potential impact to your profit margin.

Dynamics Food, powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (formerly Dynamics NAV) can enable you to evaluate the potential costs involved and is the perfect place for your team to manage and centralize your new plant-based design brief. With a slick business system at the helm, you can confidently manage each stage of the NPD process all whilst always keeping the retailer informed.

It’s essential that you can manage the feedback you’re receiving in testing on different variants, to enable you to make an informed decision on the product you should go to market with. Dynamics Food is perfect for storing and sharing all this feedback, to ensure that your new plant-based alternative product is both meat-free and tasty!

Gain confidence in your allergen information with a full audit trail

If you’re set to launch a meat-free alternative you may want to avoid the fire which Marks & Spencers had to face after their brand-new range of vegan products contained labels stating they may not be suitable for milk and egg allergy sufferers which essentially made them not vegan.

If your NPD is a success, you will need to accurately and confidently provide potential customers with peace of mind. Within Dynamics Food, you can directly create a report with the details and layout you want on the label, before then printing them on a label printer to detail the allergen information.

With end-to-end integration and the ideal solution for managing your inventory, Dynamics Food will provide you with a full audit trail and full farm-to-fork traceability for rapid and simple management of product recalls if necessary and the confidence to accurately print the correct allergen information on your plant-based alternative in the first place.