Every food and beverage manufacturer I talk to believes their organization can adapt to whatever the market throws next. Our own research says the same thing. In Alithya's 2026 Manufacturing Trends and Analysis Survey, 93 percent of manufacturing leaders told us they are confident they can adapt to change. Independent work from Deloitte suggests fewer than half have built an operating model agile enough to actually do it at speed.
That gap between confidence and capability is the real story of the industry right now, and in food and beverage it runs wider than most leaders want to admit. The confidence is genuine. The foundation underneath it often is not.
Here is the argument I keep making to clients: the companies that win the next few years will not be the ones reacting fastest to every trend. They will be the ones whose operations can actually execute when the trend arrives. And in food and beverage, execution gets tested by things a generic manufacturing article never mentions.
Why the food and beverage industry is a harder test
Cost pressure, health and wellness, sustainability, labor, supply chain risk. Those forces are real, and you can read about them anywhere. What you read far less about is what it takes to respond to them when your business runs on lot codes, recipes, and expiry dates.
A consumer goods brand can decide to chase a cleaner label. A food manufacturer has to reformulate the recipe, re-cost every yield and by-product, requalify suppliers, update allergen statements, and prove the whole chain stays traceable from raw material to finished pallet. A retailer can ask a supplier for a sustainability number. A processor has to pull that number out of systems that were never built to report it. The trend is the easy part. Execution is where food and beverage companies win or lose, and execution lives in the systems.
Our survey named the barriers, and they are not a menu of separate problems. Nearly two-thirds of leaders put implementation cost first. About 42 percent pointed to a shortage of internal expertise. Roughly 40 percent said legacy systems are slowing them down. Those three feed each other. Old systems make every change slower and more expensive, and the people who could modernize them are the hardest to hire. I see it most plainly in plants still running core operations on an AS/400 or a decades-old ERP. The will to adapt is there. The platform cannot carry it.
What the work actually looks like
The clearest proof is the work already in production. My team is several phases into a Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain program for a US food producer that went live and is still building on it. The core was a supply chain implementation, and the hard problems were the ones specific to food: lot and batch traceability from raw materials through work in process to finished goods, recipe and yield management, and the inventory and costing detail a food operation lives or dies by. Once that foundation proved dependable, the enhancements kept coming, which is the healthiest sign there is. A platform people keep investing in is a platform that works.
That pattern repeats across the food and process manufacturers I work with. The recurring hard parts are rarely the general ledger. They are the traceability you can stand behind in a recall, the recipes and yields with by-products and catch-weight, the quality holds that actually hold, and the discipline of cutover: moving off an AS/400 or a decades-old ERP without taking the plant down for a long weekend and hoping it comes back. In food, you cannot do that. The discipline of the transition is as much the product as the software.
None of this is really a technology story. It is an operating-model story, and that is the point our survey data keeps landing on.
The risk leaders are not staffing for
One more finding is worth naming, because food and beverage leaders consistently underrate it. When we asked what the industry is underestimating, cybersecurity came out near the top. The outside data agrees. IBM's 2025 threat research puts manufacturing as the most targeted sector for cyberattacks, ahead of finance and healthcare. We are also connecting more systems, more sensors, and more AI into plants every quarter. Every connected line and every AI agent added without a governance framework is an exposure nobody has quantified yet. In an industry where a stopped line has an immediate and measurable cost, that is not an IT problem. It is a production problem.
What separates the leaders
The manufacturers pulling ahead are not the ones chasing the longest list of trends. They are the ones who fixed the foundation first. Integrated data instead of disconnected spreadsheets. A modern platform instead of a patched legacy core. People who understand how a decision on the floor connects to cost, service, and profitability. The trends will keep coming. The only question that matters is whether your operation can act on them before your competitor does.
So here is the one question I would ask if we were sitting across the table. Which of these is actually slowing you down today, not in the strategy deck but on the floor? The legacy system, the data you still stitch together by hand, the traceability you assemble manually, or the people you cannot hire? Start there. The rest gets easier once the foundation holds.
This is the work my team at Alithya does with food and beverage manufacturers: modernizing the ERP and supply chain foundation on Microsoft Dynamics 365 so traceability, compliance, and real-time visibility stop being manual and start being built in.
