Dear Food and Beverage Manufacturers: The Time to Digitize is Now

Modernizing systems is essential to staying recall ready in 2026.

TL;DR

• The average recall costs $10 million, not including damage to consumer trust and a company’s brand. 
• Digitization remains a central focus for the FDA, demonstrated by emerging traceability rules and the New Era of Smarter Food Safety Blueprint.
• Cloud ERP enables manufacturers to be proactive about food safety and compliance with real-time data, robust integrations, and improved audit efficiency.

The FDA issued 145 food recalls in Q3 2025, the second-highest recalls per quarter since Q1 2020. In total, there were 415 recalls impacting 109.74 million units in 2025. Whew.

Manufacturers had to manage several complex variables last year. Tariffs chipped away at margins, companies needed to pivot suppliers quickly, and higher standards for traceability were introduced. If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that digitization is no longer optional.

For actionable steps manufacturers can take to modernize in 2026, we decided to phone an expert. Meet Drew Pogones, product manager at Decision Resources. He’s spent the past 18 years building compliance expertise across a range of roles, including 7 years in the ERP industry. Having served as a quality manager himself, he’s acutely aware of the daily aches and pains of manual, paper-based processes and the tangible value of digital transformation.

Now as a product manager, Drew leverages these first-hand experiences to help manufacturers improve production efficiency with cutting-edge technology and best practices. We sat down with him to explore five crucial questions regarding food safety and digital transformation in 2026.

1. Over the past year, food safety became a larger part of the mainstream conversation as both consumers and regulators advocated for increased transparency and reform. As we head into 2026, which regulatory signals should food and beverage manufacturers pay closest attention to?

Drew: 2026 is going to be very interesting in the food and beverage world, especially when it comes to regulations. One that most people know about is the new food traceability rule. This is a new rule that was supposed to go into effect in January of 2026, but there has been a push out to 2028 by the FDA. 

FDA’s Food Traceability Rule

The delay for the new traceability rule is due to larger companies needing more time because their suppliers are smaller in general and they need to be able to go throughout the whole supply chain to be ready. There are many new records like Critical Tracking Events (CTEs) and Key Data Elements (KDEs) and recall plans that need to be put into place. This is brand new, and it’s a lot for people to put on.

The other reason why this got pushed off was within the FDA. FDA employees also need to be trained on new policy, since it’s hard to enforce a rule and regulate it if you don’t understand what you’re looking for. This, coupled with turnover within the FDA, prompted the decision to give it 30 more months.

Tightening Quality Control

The other area that we’re going to be paying close attention to is quality control. R&D is ramping up, and we’re seeing endless new products out there. You got these THC drinks, caffeine drinks—people are trying to come up with the newest craze. So when it comes to the quality control, it’s really about documenting all those QC parameters behind it (e.g. are we calculating the nutritional facts correctly). Quality control is going to be huge, making sure that the product is being made the way it’s intended and the way it’s being sold.

Strengthened Compliance on Allergen Labeling

The other thing is allergen mislabeling. Every year this is the number one recall issue, either putting the wrong product into the wrong packaging, or simply missing an ingredient in the labeling deck. These are all areas that can be automated to reduce the risk of a recall. On average, a recall costs $10 million to a company. This doesn’t include the damage to your brand and people not buying your products anymore. So just one recall is enough to close a company down. 

2. How are shifting consumer expectations and regulations changing the ways food and beverage manufacturers think about their technology environments and ERP?

Drew: The FDA is really empowering digitalization. They want to push from paper and pen to getting it into some sort of technology. The quicker the recall, the better. That was the whole point of coming out with this new food traceability rule. They went from taking weeks to be able to recall all their products to wanting that to be done in hours. 

The FDA also came out with the New Era of Smarter Food Safety. This is the main initiative to digitalize everything where possible. This is not a “requirement”, but this is a best practice that they’re trying to push for all manufacturers out there in the supply chain.

3. In what ways can cloud ERP help manufacturers be more proactive about food safety and compliance?

Real-Time Data For Rapid Recalls & Minimized Waste

Drew: When you’re talking cloud, you’re talking real-time. It’s not something where you input it by hand 24 hours later, go back, and realize you made a mistake and now your whole recall is off. This is real-time data that you can digest and use down the road, let it be a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) or anything else like that where you can be proactive to issues that may arise during your production.

For example, it can alert you when a certain temperature wasn’t made. Now you can make that real-time decision to stop that production line, minimize your waste, and get back to production even quicker. This eliminates having handwritten tests that involve human error where a quality control person reviews documents and realizes we didn’t hit the temperature for eight hours. 

Robust Integrations & Audits Efficiency

Integrations are just endless, whether it’s hooking into a QC type of integration with automated testing and immediate updates or a temperature control with temperature probes everywhere including your trucking. Integrations speed up your audits and enhance the trust behind your production and compliance.

Audits are quicker nowadays than when I was doing 35 audits a year. Back in the day, we were primarily paper and pen. We used ERP for a little bit, doing batch formulation and things like that. But when it came to temperature control and weights and everything, all of that was by hand and it took a long time to go through an audit. An audit wasn’t just an hour, it was sometimes one day, sometimes five days. So that’s where Cloud ERP really likes to show its efficiency and value.

4. What measures can manufacturers start taking today to ensure future compliance and recall readiness?

Drew: What I advise for manufacturers right now is test, test, test. Test your recall team right now and make sure that you got the right recall plan in place. 

It’s common for teams to assume all their product is good. It’s going out the door, we’re making our money, it’s high quality right? But what you want to have is that confidence that if a recall were to happen, you can click a button and know exactly where all that product went. For example, your warehouse manager sees an issue, locates the cases in the warehouse, and sets them to rejected status. They can report that to the quality manager, who then can report that to the CEO. Then there’s a protocol in place for the CEO to speak publicly about it if it needs to be done and you can go on from there. So there is a flow that has to be involved with this recall readiness plan and by practicing it as much as possible, it just becomes second nature.

I’ll tell you as a quality manager, if you have that confidence that everybody on your team knows what they’re doing and you have tested your ERP system to ensure you can accurately trace forward and backward to get all the documentation you need, it is that much easier to sleep at night.

5. How does Infor CloudSuite Industrial drive value for Food and Beverage manufacturers?

Drew: The biggest value right out of the box is your efficiency gains, speeding things up and digitizing everything. The other part is minimizing human error as well. With features like barcode scanning, you’re not asking humans to write down certain codes and item numbers. Another area Infor CloudSuite Industrial brings value to is tracking your quality and compliance—ensuring that the quality specs are being met and reducing the risk of bad product going out.

Ensuring Compliance in 2026 and Beyond

Digitization is essential to safeguard production, improve audit responsiveness, and take preventative action against recalls. Stay proactive, not reactive, by equipping your teams with the tools they need to act with clarity and confidence.

Still have questions? Our experts have the answers. Connect with us today.

About the Guest: Drew Pogones

Drew is a Regulatory and Compliance expert with 18+ years of experience in highly regulated industries — spanning Food & Beverage, Pharmaceuticals, Nutraceuticals, Cosmetics, and Chemicals. His career began on the plant floor in sanitation and quality, where he learned the importance of safety, compliance, and operational excellence firsthand. Over time, he built expertise in FDA and USDA regulatory requirements, food safety systems, and global compliance standards.

For the past 7+ years, he’s worked in the ERP software industry, helping companies transform complex regulatory challenges into streamlined, technology-driven solutions. Today, he focuses on bridging the gap between compliance, technology, and business strategy — ensuring products not only meet regulatory expectations but also create measurable value for customers.