As food costs continue to rise, It’s more important than ever for food manufacturers and distributors to calculate their sales, costs, and traceability efforts to ensure product quality and operational strategy are as competitive as possible.
Catch weight calculation tools help to minimize human error and increase profit margins. While the concept of catch weight is nothing new, plenty of food distributors still use manual processes to calculate catch weight – which can result in inefficient processes and a higher risk of error.
Manual catch weight management and calculation processes are outdated and can lead to more problems than they solve – which is why choosing a state-of-the-art ERP solution like Inecta is crucial for growing your business and learning how to calculate catch weight.
Below, we're exploring everything you need to know about calculating catch weight effectively for your business.
How to calculate catch weight
Catch weight is calculated easily in supermarkets and grocery stores. It more easily quantifies the total amount of value you get per dollar and is especially useful for items that would otherwise depreciate with shelf time.
Without catch weight, customers would either be getting slightly more or less for a pound of a more loosely quantified item (such as ham), which can hurt the profit margins of the grocer, manufacturer, and distributor. Customers may also feel cheated when they believed that they were purchasing more than what they believe was given – leading to further complications.
At a food manufacturing plant, calculating catch weight may be a manual or automated process, and is done by the food worker on the assembly line. For food items with a variable weight, such as fresh produce, meats, poultry, and seafood, the worker weighs the food on a scale and records the value on paper. They'll then input the values recorded on paper into an singular computer system.
Without any system to verify that the worker’s calculations are correct, your food business could lose a substantial amount of money each time the catch weight is off. Additionally, food workers are often overwhelmed with work, and the possibility of human error enters the equation.
Knowing how to calculate catch weight is useful for high-value products. You'll most often encounter catch weight when dealing with seafood, cheese, meat, and poultry since these are often high-value products for which producers need accurate measurements.
Managing catch weight in an ERP system
Managing and learning how to calculate catch weight is more difficult for manufacturers with variable-weight products since the pricing uses a different unit of measurements than an inventory unit like cases. Since there’s no direct unit conversion between cases and pounds between items, a comprehensive ERP system can help to eliminate the risk of error and promote accuracy and transparency within the organization and customer purchase experience.
Why use Inecta for catch weight?
Fortunately, catch weight is built into ERP systems like Inecta, which simplifies manual catch weight processes that are inefficient and outdated. The Inecta ERP system is easy to set up and is designed to intuitively support your business in all areas of operation – housed and managed out of a sleek, centralized framework that supports transparency, function, and efficiency.
Visit our website to schedule your free demo and find out why the top food and beverage manufacturers trust Inecta with their catch weight and ERP needs.
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