DIOMAC and Herbst sell food ERP.
Keystone deliberately does not.

DIOMAC and Herbst are competent food-ERP vendors. They will quote you a full ERP stack covering finance, customers, suppliers, stock, production, traceability, EDI, reporting and more — wrapped in a 6–12 month implementation. For some producers that is the right answer. For most artisan, family-owned and mid-market producers we talk to, it is not — because the real risk is the moment a project tries to replace the trusted accounts package, not the moment it improves production.

• Keep your existing accounts package — no ledger migration, no year-end risk
• 30-day pilot vs typical 6–12 month food-ERP implementation
• Standard licence €790/month — total transparency
• Founder implements every customer personally for the first 12 months

Sounds clean. The risk is usually invisible.

A full food-ERP project promises one system for everything: finance, CRM, stock, production, traceability, EDI. Done well it is powerful. Done poorly — which is how most artisan and mid-market food-ERP projects end — it derails finance during a year-end, disrupts a tax filing, fractures the relationship with your accountant, and the operational side never gets the attention it actually needed. The cost is rarely the licence; the cost is the year of distraction.

We are not building a food ERP.

One operational layer. Done well.

Not for everyone — and we will tell you so.

If you are running a multi-site producer with complex production scheduling, full EDI across multiple retailers, procurement planning, MRP, advanced costing and an in-house IT team — a full food ERP from DIOMAC, Herbst or a peer may genuinely fit. If you are smaller than that and you have already tried to make Sage do production, you have already felt where this is going. Keystone is the production layer for exactly that gap.

Questions buyers actually ask.