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The Excel alternative for food and drink brands

Last updated: 16 October 2026

Pesto replaces the spreadsheets that run orders, stock, batch codes, recipe costs and supplier POs in a food or drink business with one connected system. Orders arrive and match to your customers' codes, stock moves by batch and use-by, costs come from real lot prices and invoices go to Xero. Keep Excel for analysis, not for running the business.

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Is it wrong to run a food business on spreadsheets?

There's nothing wrong with spreadsheets, until there is.

Excel is free, flexible and everyone on your team already knows it. When you've got one product, three customers and a kitchen, a spreadsheet is the right tool. Most food and drink brands start there. SMEs make up 97% of UK food and drink manufacturing (FDF, 2026), and they don't have the operations teams the big manufacturers have, so the spreadsheet ends up doing a lot of the work.

The trouble starts when the spreadsheet stops being a record and becomes the system. Spreadsheets don't stop you typing the wrong number, don't tell you when someone else changed a formula, and don't know that the batch you just sold expired yesterday.

Researchers have checked. Field audits found errors in 94% of the spreadsheets studied (Panko, 2015). A study of 50 operational workbooks found errors in 86% to 94% of them (Powell, Baker and Lawson, 2009). Those errors don't announce themselves. They show up as a short delivery, a wrong invoice or a margin that was never really there.

What is the shadow-spreadsheet problem?

Most growing food brands don't have one spreadsheet. They have an order tracker, a stock sheet, a costing model and a supplier planner, plus a personal copy on someone's laptop that's "the one that's actually right".

That gives you three or four sources of truth, and none of them is right. Stock says one thing, the order tracker says another, and the costing model still uses last year's butter price. Someone spends Monday morning reconciling them by hand.

**Lucy Barks**
Head of Supply Chain, Bold Bean Co

It also eats time. UK SME owners spend about 11 hours a week on admin, nearly twice the time they spend on sales (Amex and Small Business Saturday UK SME Business Barometer, July 2026).

What are the signs you've outgrown spreadsheets?

Someone spends a good chunk of Monday retyping POs from PDFs and emails.
You keep a lookup table of each retailer's codes for your products.
You've shipped short because the stock sheet was wrong.
You can't say which customers received a given batch without opening three files.
Your recipe costs use ingredient prices from months ago.
Invoices go out days after dispatch, and sometimes not at all.
Only one person really understands the spreadsheet, and they're going on holiday.
You're thinking about hiring someone mainly to do data entry.

If three or more of those ring true, the spreadsheet is now costing you more than it saves.

What does Pesto do differently from a spreadsheet?

Pesto keeps orders, stock, recipes, suppliers and invoices in one system, so a change in one place shows up everywhere else.

Orders

Pesto reads POs from PDF, Excel, email, EDI and Shopify, matches each line to the customer's own product code and checks the price. → Order management

Stock

Every lot carries a batch code, use-by and cost. Pesto picks by FEFO and traces any lot back to its materials and forward to its customers. → Inventory

Costs

Bills of materials with wastage %, and production runs costed at the actual price of each lot used. → COGS & margins

Invoices

Xero invoices from what you actually dispatched, raised automatically if you want.

Every BOM change saves as a locked version with a reason, and every stock movement sits in a lot ledger. You can see who changed what, and when.

Spreadsheets vs inventory software: how do they compare?

	Spreadsheets	Pesto
Getting started	Already on your laptop	Set up with our team over a few weeks
Flexibility for one-off analysis	Excellent	CSV exports to take into Excel
Learning curve	Everyone knows Excel	New system to learn
Reading POs from PDFs and emails	Manual retyping	Reads them, you review and approve
Customers' own product codes	Lookup tables	Matched automatically, learned once
Price checks against agreed prices	Manual	Flags every mismatch
Batch codes, use-by and FEFO	Manual	Built in
Traceability for audits and recalls	Across several files	Finished lot to material lots, and on to customers
Recipe cost from actual ingredient prices	Manual updates	Production runs at actual lot cost
One version of the truth	Several copies	One system
Change history	Limited	Lot ledger and locked BOM versions

When are spreadsheets the better choice?

Stay on spreadsheets if:

You sell only D2C through Shopify. Shopify probably has you covered.
You have a handful of SKUs, a handful of customers and no retailer listings yet.
One person handles every order and knows the files inside out, and that person isn't stretched.
You're still changing your range every month and need total flexibility.

Spreadsheets also stay useful after you move. Pesto exports to CSV, so Excel is still there for one-off analysis. It just stops being the system that runs the business.

What does moving off spreadsheets look like?

Step 1
Send us your spreadsheets
Product list, customer list and price lists, in whatever state they're in. We set them up in Pesto with you.
Step 2
Add your recipes
Build your BOMs with quantities, wastage % and supplier terms.
Step 3
Load your opening stock
Upload a stock spreadsheet and Pesto pre-fills the lots with batch codes, use-by dates and costs for you to check.
Step 4
Connect your systems
Xero, Shopify, your 3PL and your EDI hub.
Step 5
Run real orders
Forward this week's POs and fix any product codes the first time they come up. Every future order from that customer matches.

Most brands go live in weeks, not months.

→ Read the full guide to outgrowing spreadsheets · → Work out what spreadsheets cost you with the ROI calculator

Frequently asked questions

What's the best Excel alternative for a food manufacturer?

Look for software that understands batches, use-by dates, recipes and retailer orders, not just generic stock counts. Pesto is built only for food and drink brands, covering orders, batch-tracked stock, production costing, supplier POs and Xero invoicing.

Can I still use Excel with Pesto?

Yes. Pesto exports orders, lots and analytics to CSV, so you can still build one-off analysis in Excel. Pesto also reads Excel and CSV purchase orders.

How common are spreadsheet errors?

Common. Field audits found errors in 94% of spreadsheets studied (Panko, 2015), and a study of 50 operational workbooks found errors in 86% to 94% of them (Powell, Baker and Lawson, 2009).

Will I lose my historical data?

Your spreadsheets stay where they are. We load your products, customers, prices and opening stock into Pesto, and you keep the old files for reference.

Is Pesto an ERP?

Pesto does what a food brand needs from an ERP (orders, stock, recipes, purchasing and invoicing) and connects to Xero for your accounts rather than replacing them.

How long does it take to move off spreadsheets?

Most brands go live in weeks.

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See Pesto running on your own orders.

Bring a real PO, your messiest one. We'll show you what Pesto does with it in 30 minutes.

Book a demo

Sources

Panko, R. (2015). Spreadsheet error field audits, arXiv:1602.02601. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02601
Powell, S., Baker, K. and Lawson, B. (2009). Errors in 50 operational spreadsheets, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth. https://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/spreadsheet/product_pubs_files/Errors.pdf
American Express and Small Business Saturday UK, SME Business Barometer, July 2026, as reported by ChannelX. https://channelx.world/2026/07/smes-spend-twice-the-time-on-admin-as-growing-their-business/
Food and Drink Federation, Regional Report 2026. https://www.fdf.org.uk/globalassets/resources/publications/reports/trade-reports/fdf-regional-report.pdf