Food & Beverage ROI calculator: Building a business case
Find out how much time your quality and supplier management team are losing to manual document control , CAPAs and audits.
Ideagen Food & Beverage brings food safety, quality management and multi-tier supplier mapping into one platform, so NC’s get raised, investigated and resolved long before they turn into recalls, fines or audit findings, protecting food integrity from source to shelf.
This calculator puts a number on it, turning "we should really fix this" into a business case you can take to finance.
Tell us about your food safety programme
Enter headcount
Industry range: £45,000 – £65,000
Benchmark: 30–40% of a 37.5 hr week = 11–15 hrs
QA, procurement and compliance teams touching supplier data
Benchmark: ~12 hrs/week ≈ £18k/yr per person
Typically £25 – £35/hr
BRCGS, SQF, FSSC and similar audits
A unified system reduces preparation to ~1 day
Used to estimate multi-site inconsistency overhead
A few details to view your results
Please share your details below to unlock your personalised ROI breakdown on this page. Ideagen may follow up about your results.
Your ROI breakdown
| Saving area | Annual saving |
|---|
Build your business case:
Thanks to the results above, you’ve already got your cost and productivity justification. Use our cost of fragmented systems guide to turn your results into a business case for senior stakeholders.
How to use this guide:
- Use the financial benchmarks in this guide to calculate your own organization's annual cost of fragmentation — including staff time, audit failure risk and recall exposure — and present it to leadership as a quantified business case rather than a technology preference
- Run the ten diagnostic questions with your food safety team and use the results to identify which specific fragmentation gaps are creating the highest risk exposure in your current infrastructure
- Use the five hidden costs framework to audit your existing systems and identify where data currently sits in isolation — HACCP plans, CCP monitoring records, corrective actions, training logs, supplier documentation — and what connecting them would change operationally
- Share the opportunity cost section with operations leadership to make the case that your food safety team's time is being consumed by data management rather than the strategic work — proactive supplier assessments, continuous improvement programs, ESG compliance planning — that builds genuine food safety culture and competitive advantage
- Use the guide as a briefing document before any platform evaluation conversation, so that the questions you ask potential vendors are grounded in the specific cost and risk profile of your current fragmented environment rather than a generic features checklist
Built for food and beverage, with an enterprise platform behind it
You get the specialist depth of our platform, built by industry experts, that 65% of top F&B industries already trust, but the real shift is what we're building into it.
Frequently asked questions
We take the hours your team currently spends on things like audit prep, document filing, corrective actions and supplier checks, and apply the time savings measured in an independent 2025 study of Food & Beverage users. Multiply those hours back by your team's size and average cost, and you get a realistic picture of what moving to one platform is worth in time and money.
They're not modelled or estimated, they come from the independent study of real Ideagen customers, and from our annual market survey. So the ranges you see (efficiency gains, time saved on audits, document handling, and so on) reflect what businesses like yours actually experienced, not a best-case projection.
It depends on where you're starting from. Businesses still running on paper or spreadsheets tend to see the biggest jump, because so much of that admin time is spent chasing, filing and re-keying, the exact challenges that a connected platform removes. The study's figures range from around 7% to 17% of staff time depending on the task and business size, so we've built the calculator to reflect that range rather than a single flat number. If your result looks high, it's worth checking the inputs against how much of your process is still manual today.
The figures above are the time and cost saved from consolidating your manual or paper-based point solutions into gross savings, not a net return. If you’d like a bespoke quote for our solution, reach out to the team and we can take you through the platform and share an exact ROI projection with you.
Yes - you'll get a summary you can download or send on, so you don't have to re-explain the numbers from scratch in your next meeting.