How We Help UK Food & Beverage Businesses Win This Season

The festive rush isn’t forgiving. UK food and beverage (F&B) businesses face a perfect storm of peaking demand, tight margins, exacting retailers, and zero-tolerance traceability rules. The winners are those who can see demand early, plan production precisely, move stock fast, and prove quality instantly.

That’s exactly where Aptean’s Food & Beverage ERP (built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central) implemented by Dynavics comes in. It’s the proven path to tighter control, faster decisions, and fewer festive headaches.

Why now?

At this time of year demand concentrates, volatility rises, and service failures get remembered in January, which impact customer experience in the coming year.

• The UK F&B industry is an economic heavyweight employing nearly 500,000 people
• Retail’s “golden quarter” still moves the needle: December 2024 retail sales rose 3.2% YoY (food +3.3% across 2024), even in a tough year.
• Hospitality regained momentum: late-December 2024 saw +2.7% YoY sales growth, while pub groups reported double-digit festive weeks.
• Shopper preferences spike in niches: “free-from” bakery sales jump ~15% in the four weeks pre-Christmas.

How our solutions help

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: One truth
  Business Central unifies finance, sales, operations, warehousing and manufacturing, so that planners see the same stock, costs and capacity that finance sees. Microsoft reports >45,000 Business Central customers and keeps shipping AI-driven improvements (Copilot/agents) every release wave, to further enhance business operations in the F&B space.
• Aptean Food & Beverage ERP: Built-in logic
  Aptean adds the food-specific muscle: catch weights, shelf-life and allergens, quality holds, full forward/backward traceability, recipe and yield management, promotions/pricing for retail, and more, all on Business Central.
• Dynavics: Your no-nonsense implementation partner
  Dynavics is a long-established and award winning Microsoft partner, and we focus on Business Central and specific industry sector add-ons that make a meaningful difference to UK business. In December 2024, we formally partnered with Aptean to bring a best-of-both solution to UK F&B, combining Microsoft’s ERP backbone with Aptean’s extensive food dept, implemented by a team that knows UK retail calendars and compliance; in fact many of our team have long working careers in the retail, hospitality and manufacturing space, so we know your industry inside out.

Five festive pain points solved

• Forecasting and order spikes
  See retailer call-offs and web orders in one ledger; plan production with actual constraints (people, lines, allergens) and MRP that reflects real availability.
• Shelf-life, allergens, and recalls
  Aptean’s lot-level traceability, QA, and allergen data ride inside every transaction; instant forward/backward trace reports reduce recall exposure when the pressure is on.
• Promotions and short-dated stock
  Manage promos by channel; FEFO in the warehouse prevents write-offs; dashboards flag near-expiry batches before the big shutdown.
• Shop-floor control and yields
  Capture actuals (waste, rework, yields) against recipes; see cost-to-serve by SKU/customer while you still have time to react.
• Retail compliance and chargebacks
  ASN/EDI, labelling, and pack standards embedded; document audits are click-through, not detective work.

What YOU care about

• Cost and productivity
  FDF data shows the sector’s productivity gap, and energy/raw-material pressures. We tackle it with automation in purchasing, production, and warehouse; AI features in BC reduce manual entry and speed reconciliations.
• Growth and exports
  UK food and drink exports rose ~7% in H1 2025 (volumes still below 2023), so margin discipline and service reliability are non-negotiable. Traceability and accurate landed cost matter when you expand beyond the EU.
• Risk and resilience
  The regulator spotlight is bright. FSA’s 2025 review underscores system trust and safety; we shorten audit time and strengthen batch-level proof.

What a festive-ready rollout with Dynavics looks like

• Rapid discovery focused on peak weeks
  We map critical flows (promo demand, allergen-segregated production, FEFO picking) first.
• Data you can trust
  Master data sprints for items, lots, allergens, customers and retailer rules.
• Operational go-lives staged by value
  Start with visibility (inventory, lots, expiry), then add planning and shop-floor capture, then advanced promos/EDI.
• Measured outcomes
  We track with you:
  – OTIF ↑ and chargebacks ↓
  – Aged & short-dated stock ↓
  – Stock accuracy and traceability report time
  – Labour per case/tonne ↓

See us in Poland this week!

Some of the team are at Directions EMEA in Poznań, 4–6 November 2025, the leading Dynamics 365 Business Central partner event, to deepen market insight and share solution lessons. If you’re attending, come and talk festive readiness with us over a drink, simply complete the form and we will meet you: Let’s meet!