Why an off-the-shelf CRM does not fit a food manufacturer
A typical food manufacturer with its own chain of stores sells through several channels at once: branded outlets, its own online store, marketplaces and wholesale customers. Each channel has its own rules and its own data. A marketplace requires a feed with categories and attributes, a wholesale customer wants to see invoices and outstanding balances, the courier service needs a shipping label, and accounting lives in 1C or BAS. Without a single system, the team moves data between dashboards by hand, drowns in spreadsheets and messengers, and errors only surface when a buyer cancels an order.
Food production also has technical pitfalls that ordinary e-commerce does not. Products are sold by weight, while marketplaces expect a price per unit. The actual weight at picking differs from the ordered weight, and the invoice has to reflect that. The range is large and constantly changing, and every new item has to pass through several departments before it reaches the accounting system.
Off-the-shelf CRMs work well with a single store but poorly with several marketplaces and accounting systems at once. That is why we build the system around the company's actual process rather than forcing the process into a template.
Our approach, step by step
- Process review. Who does what today, where data is copied by hand, where orders and time get lost.
- A first working version. We assemble a minimal system the team can use right away, not in six months, reusing proven modules: roles, notifications, workflow stages.
- Integrations. We connect your own store, marketplaces, the courier service, 1C/BAS and Bitrix24, and set up scheduled synchronization.
- Roles and security. We enforce access rights at the database level so that even an interface bug cannot expose another user's data, and we set up daily backups.
- Modular growth. After launch we add new features as the business needs them: operator analytics, new channels, data exchange with the accounting system.
Typical problems we solve
- Orders from different channels in different dashboards, with managers switching between them all day.
- Wrong stock levels in feeds: an empty value is treated as in stock, and buyers order products that are not there.
- Manually filling in attributes for hundreds of products to meet marketplace requirements.
- Prices for sold-by-weight products that end up either loss-making or inflated on the marketplace.
- An Excel template for new products passed between departments, with accounting then retyping the data into BAS.
- Wholesale customers asking about invoices and balances in messengers, while managers spend time on reconciliations.
Results from our projects for a food manufacturer
For a food manufacturer we have worked with since 2024, we developed a CRM for marketplaces and orders. One panel brings together orders, stock, prices and Nova Poshta shipping labels from the company's WooCommerce store and the MauDau and Rozetka marketplaces. Within a few months the system grew to 18 screens, 74 API routes and 5 scheduled automations, with 6 roles and separated access rights. Attributes and translations for product cards are prepared from XLSX files using the Claude API, and orders and products are passed to Bitrix and 1C by item codes. Management can see operator activity against the shift schedule and cancellation reasons grouped by responsible party.
On the same foundation we built a B2B CRM with a wholesale customer portal: 19 screens for the team and 9 for customers, with the first working version of all modules ready in about 3 hours. Customers see their own orders, invoices and balances, picking takes actual weight into account, sessions are tied to the password version, and the system keeps 30 daily backups.
For new product onboarding, we replaced an Excel template with a service where 5 departments fill in the product card in parallel, the CFO approves it, and accounting exports a 65-column BAS technical sheet with one click. The service covers 168 1C categories across 4 levels, and development took 6 days.
When the company entered a marketplace, we prepared a feed of 426 products, filled in the package weight for 204 products automatically, and set prices for sold-by-weight items using a formula: price per kilogram multiplied by the minimum weight. The feed check revealed that 97 of 422 products were shown as in stock with nothing available, and we fixed that logic.
For the same brand's marketing team, we built a marketing plan platform with an Instagram feed preview and daily reminders.
Timelines and deliverables
A first working version is ready within days or weeks depending on scope, after which the system grows module by module. You get a system built around your process, integrations with sales channels and the accounting system, roles and permissions for each department, backups and ongoing support. Because we handle both marketing and development, feeds, stock and prices are built correctly for every channel from the start.
Who it is for
- food manufacturers with a chain of branded stores and online sales;
- companies selling on several marketplaces at once;
- manufacturers with wholesale customers who need a B2B portal;
- teams whose accounting runs in 1C/BAS while day-to-day operations are still in spreadsheets and messengers.