The now legal requirement to provide nutritional and allergen information to consumers is common-to-all food businesses. Making a common-to-all collaborative solution more desirable that ever, if food companies are to keep pace with increasingly technically-minded, savvy consumerism.

Erudus is primarily a product datapool and although this isn’t a new concept the additional features, offered alongside its incomparable range of listings and easy to use interface, make it a clear leader as a collaborative solution created by the industry, for the industry.

It’s easy for us to talk about the benefits, but what we really need is action. We want the industry to get onboard and work together with us here at Erudus to ensure their customers’ are safe, complying with legislation and also providing a key service to their users.

Our years of experience in the food industry have allowed us to understand the needs of supplier, wholesaler, caterer and all other service providers. So much so that when the legislation regarding allergens and nutritional requirements came into place, we knew that it was our job to provide the solution.

Below are the key questions our potential users should be asking and how we manage to resolve those challenges:

Challenge 1: Number of Product Attributes

Questions? What’s included? Do we still need to ask suppliers for other data sets? How Erudus Resolves? Erudus covers more than 200 attributes, everything from product images and accreditations to certifications, allergen information, nutritional values and more.

Challenge 2: Attribute Completion

Questions What level of data has been entered? How Erudus Resolves Every item in Erudus has at least every allergen and nutritional attribute required by law as mandatory.

Challenge 3: Product Coverage

Questions How many? Which? How Erudus Resolves 30,000 brand and own-brand lines across every category including non-foods (and growing daily).

Challenge 4: Supplier Coverage

Questions How many? Who? How Erudus Resolves 1,200 suppliers including most major brands (also growing).

Challenge 5: Accuracy

Questions Can you trust the data? Who entered it, the brand or someone else e.g. a 3rd Party or web-scrapped? How Erudus Resolves Through using Erudus it gives full responsibility to the brand owner to provide up-to-date and accurate data. Using an alternative could incur liability problems and very serious consequences.

Challenge 6: Ease of Use

Questions How easy is it to enter or extract data? How Erudus Resolves Very easy! You can view and add data online through your dedicated log-in and you can also export lists to Excel via CSV files.

Challenge 7: Maintenance

Questions Are amendments communicated and how soon? How Erudus Resolves Erudus notifies product users immediately, including caterers.

Challenge 8: Validation

Questions What checks exist? How Erudus Resolves Automated checks exist on key attributes such as allergens, dietary and GTINs (barcodes) if changed or incorrectly entered.

Challenge 9: Cost to Suppliers

Questions How much do they pay, especially SME’s? Is it per product or a flat fee? How Erudus Resolves Erudus is FREE for hundreds of smaller manufacturers with a maximum of just £400 p.a. regardless of the number of lines entered.

Challenge 10: Cost to Wholesalers

Questions How much? How Erudus Resolves Erudus starts from just £500 p.a.

Challenge 11: Cost to Caterers

Questions How much? How Erudus Resolves Erudus is FREE for thousands of caterers or less than £5 p.a. (Wholesaler dependent).

Challenge 12: Industry Fit

Questions What solutions are your competitors using? Do they add cost to suppliers because they’re not widely adopted? Is it retail or food service sector focused, influencing the total range and accuracy of content entered by suppliers? How Erudus Resolves Erudus focuses on food service and convenience. Beyond basic search and download functionality for all, Erudus also provides caterers with market leading allergen search and nutritional calculators, together with menu and recipe management tools. Together, these make Erudus a complete solution lowering costs for everyone suppliers, wholesalers and caterers by achieving ‘critical mass.’

Challenge 13: Integration with other platforms

Questions Can the solution work alongside other overlapping platforms that are using some product data? How Erudus Resolves Erudus is already linked to several other major solution providers with more in the pipeline. Integration is vital for many users if further costs to serve demanded by multiple customers using these platforms are to be avoided. Our vision is to feed the industry ecosystem, a collaborative solution owned by the industry, for the industry.

We want the industry to work together so that everyone can share the overheads rather than a singular cost and we feel that this platform provides the opportunity to do that. Everyone benefits from working together and increasing the supply of data across the industry, with highly accessible pricing for each user community, we have a scalable platform ready for each part of the industry to take advantage.

Join us in being the industry-wide solution.