How Food and Drink Distributors Can Turn Messy Supplier Inputs into Enriched Product Information

For food and drink distributors, product information rarely arrives in a perfect format.

It often comes from a wide mix of suppliers, all working in different ways — from farms, growers, factories and family-run producers to importers, brand owners and multinational corporations. Some send structured spreadsheets and complete product details. Others share information through emails, PDFs, image files, handwritten notes or informal comments passed on alongside samples.

I’ve even seen one customer receive product data from a farm in the form of a handwritten paper note attached to a bag of potatoes. It sounds unusual, but it reflects a very real challenge in this sector: valuable product information often exists, just not in a form that is easy to standardise, govern or publish at scale.

That is where the pressure builds for internal teams. Instead of focusing on enrichment, merchandising and getting products launch-ready, they end up interpreting, rekeying, chasing and validating supplier inputs before they can be used.

That puts the brakes on product launches, increases manual workloads and makes it almost impossible maintain consistent product information across channels.

Why messy data is such a common problem in food and drink distribution

One of the biggest challenges in food and drink distribution is supplier variation.

You might be onboarding data from a local grower one day, a family-run producer the next, and a global brand the day after that. The issue is not that those suppliers do not know their products. In most cases, they do. The issue is that they all provide information differently.

That often means:

• incomplete product descriptions
• inconsistent pack or variant information
• recycling or sustainability details supplied separately
• imagery without the right metadata
• handwritten or informal notes that need to be interpreted internally
• very different levels of detail from one supplier to the next

For product and ecommerce teams, the result is familiar: too much time spent stitching together supplier data, and not enough time improving content and getting products to market.

The real issue is supplier onboarding

In my experience, the real problem is not supplier willingness. It is supplier onboarding.

Most suppliers are sharing what they have in the way that works for them. But for the distributor receiving that information, the process is often fragmented and manual. Data comes in through inboxes, spreadsheets and back-and-forth follow-up, with internal teams left to bridge the gap between supplier knowledge and channel-ready content.

That may be manageable for a while. But as assortments grow, more suppliers come on board and compliance requirements increase, the cracks start to show. If every new product line creates another round of manual admin, the process is not really scaling.

Better onboarding needs the right support and structure

This is why I would not treat the problem as purely a systems issue.

Complete product information starts with a consistent way of collecting it, but that also means regular supplier engagement, clearer expectations and more validation earlier in the process. For many distributors, that is where Open Range can help.

Open Range is our consultancy service focused on helping businesses onboard more complete and sales-ready product data from suppliers. That can mean shaping a clearer supplier onboarding process, improving how requirements are communicated, supporting supplier engagement, and putting the right validation and governance in place from the start.

Once that process is better defined, Vendor Portal gives distributors a scalable way to run it day to day. Open Range helps strengthen the onboarding model; Vendor Portal helps operationalise it.

A vendor portal gives suppliers a structured route for sharing product information, while still allowing distributors to define what good data looks like for different product types. Rather than relying on every supplier to submit information in their own preferred format, the business can guide submissions through templates, rules and validation that make expectations much clearer from the start.

The result is simple: suppliers have a clearer route to follow, and internal teams spend less time fixing what comes in.

Why centralisation still matters

Capturing better supplier data is a big step forward, but it is only part of the picture. Once that information comes into the business, it still needs to be easy to access, organise and enrich.

That is why centralisation matters so much. You can see that in Pimberly’s work with The Chef’s Warehouse, where bringing ERP data into a central environment made it easier for more teams to view, organise and enrich product information. That improved internal accessibility, while also helping create more relevant customer-facing content.

For food and drink distributors, that is the wider opportunity: better onboarding improves the quality of incoming data, and a central platform makes that data easier to refine and use across the business.

Why centralising product data is so effective

What I like about this model is that it is practical. It is not about adding complexity. It is about making supplier collaboration easier to manage and product information easier to trust.

It helps distributors by:

• creating more consistency across supplier submissions
• reducing manual rework for internal teams
• supporting suppliers with different levels of digital maturity
• helping scale product ranges without scaling the manual workload

That matters commercially. Stronger product information supports faster time to market, better consistency across channels and more confidence in the data being shared with customers, retailers and partners.

It also matters for compliance and trust. In this sector, product information often extends far beyond a title and description. It can include pack formats, ingredients, provenance, recycling information, storage guidance, sustainability details and other commercially or legally important attributes. If that information is incomplete or inconsistent when products are being onboarded, the impact is felt much later downstream.

Why other approaches to product data often fall short

When food and drink distributors look at ways to improve product information, they are often pointed towards a range of different solutions. The issue is that not all of them are designed to solve the same problem.

An MDM can be valuable for broader enterprise data governance, but it does not automatically fix upstream supplier data onboarding. If suppliers are still sending inconsistent information through emails, spreadsheets and manual handoffs, internal teams are still left cleaning, interpreting and validating it before it becomes usable.

A PLM typically focuses on product creation, specifications and lifecycle management than the operational challenge of collecting and improving supplier-submitted data for downstream sales channels.

Brandbank may play a role in specific retail content workflows, but it is not the same as owning your supplier onboarding process. It can help move content into certain ecosystems, but it does not remove the need to collect better information from suppliers, validate it and enrich it before it is ready to go anywhere else.

That is the common pitfall. Businesses invest in a system that helps manage, store or distribute product data, but the upstream challenge remains the same.

What to look for when onboarding suppliers

If supplier onboarding still depends heavily on inboxes, spreadsheets and manual follow-up, I would look for an approach that helps you:

• guide suppliers through structured submissions
• standardise requirements across product types
• reduce internal cleanup and chasing
• support suppliers with different levels of digital maturity
• keep internal control over review and enrichment
• prepare product information for multiple downstream channels

The goal is not just to collect more data. It is to create a more reliable process for turning supplier inputs into better product information.

Final thought

Food and drink distributors do not struggle with product information because suppliers lack knowledge.

They struggle because the process for collecting that knowledge is often too fragmented, too manual and too difficult to scale.

In my experience, the strongest approach is to improve supplier onboarding first, then support it with the right structure and tools. That is where the combination of Open Range and Vendor Portal becomes so powerful. Open Range helps businesses improve the quality of supplier onboarding, while Vendor Portal gives them a scalable way to run that process day to day.

Together, they help turn messy supplier inputs into a process that is far more consistent, efficient and scalable.

A single source of truth improves collaboration across the business

“Single source of truth” can sound like a technical phrase, but the real value is much more practical than that.

It means regional teams are not rebuilding the same product information independently. It means ecommerce is not chasing different versions of the same specification set. It means an acquired business has a route into the wider operating model instead of sitting alongside it indefinitely. It means approvals are clearer, updates are more visible, and product information can move more easily across teams and markets.

That is why I see PIM as a collaboration enabler as much as a product information platform. The point is not centralisation for its own sake. The point is making it easier for a growing business to work together without losing consistency.

That creates a much clearer link between better product information management and wider business performance. Collaboration improves, duplication reduces, and the organisation becomes easier to scale.

The business case is simplification and automation

This is the part I would always bring the discussion back to.

The case for a group-wide PIM strategy is not simply that product information becomes better organised. It is that the business becomes easier to run.

A stronger product information model reduces duplicated effort across teams and regions. It makes supplier onboarding more repeatable. It helps standardise approvals. It removes avoidable manual handling. It creates a clearer path for integrating acquisitions. And it gives the business a more scalable way to grow without adding operational complexity at the same rate.

That is why I think the best way to position product information internally is not as a clean-up project, but as a simplification and automation strategy.

It is about improving the way the organisation operates. It is about reducing friction between teams. It is about creating more consistency across the group. And it is about building an operating model that supports growth rather than making growth harder to manage.

Why a group-wide approach to product information matters now

I do not see this as a future issue for IT distributors, resellers and solution providers. For many businesses, it is already here.

If one brand now includes multiple regions, specialist teams and acquired entities, then product information is no longer a local operational concern. It is shared business infrastructure. And once you see it that way, the case for a global PIM strategy becomes much clearer.

The businesses that handle this well are not the ones trying to solve product information one team at a time. They are the ones creating a shared framework that brings clarity to ownership, consistency to execution and structure to collaboration across the whole organisation. That is what makes it easier to integrate acquisitions, support regional teams, reduce duplicated effort and remove the manual complexity that slows growth down.

Done well, a group-wide approach to product information does more than improve data quality. It gives the business a more scalable way to operate, a clearer path to simplification and automation, and a stronger foundation for growth across regions, teams and channels.