Food and beverage distributors deal with high-frequency multi-SKU B2B orders from restaurants and retailers. How to automate the intake.
Food and beverage distributors and manufacturers face a specific version of the B2B order management problem that's more acute than most other industries. Orders come in daily, sometimes multiple times per week from the same customer. They contain dozens of line items. SKU descriptions on the customer's PO rarely match your product names exactly. Pricing is customer-specific and changes with promotions. And the volume is high enough that manual entry consumes a meaningful portion of your ops team's day.
A specialty food distributor sending to 40 restaurant and retail accounts might process 60 to 100 purchase orders per week. At 15 minutes per order, that's 15 to 25 hours of data entry per week, work that creates no value, just moves information from one document to another.
This guide covers how food and beverage companies on Shopify can eliminate that problem without asking customers to change how they order.
Compared to other industries, food and beverage B2B orders have a few characteristics that make automation more challenging.
Non-standard product descriptions. Your restaurant customer calls your 750ml bottle of olive oil "EVO 750" on their PO. Your Shopify SKU is "OO-750-ESP." A basic OCR tool fails here. AI-powered matching that understands product context handles this well.
High line-item counts. A single foodservice PO might have 30, 50, or 80 line items. Manual entry for a PO like that takes 30 to 45 minutes. Automated processing takes seconds.
Customer-specific pricing. Your distributor pricing for Account A is different from Account B, which is different from your retail pricing. Any automation that doesn't respect these pricing rules creates more problems than it solves.
Frequency. Food orders recur weekly or biweekly. The same workflow happens dozens of times, every single week. The ROI of automation compounds fast at this frequency.
PDF to Order is designed to handle exactly the characteristics that make food and beverage orders hard to automate manually.
Your customer emails their purchase order, a PDF from their accounting software, an Excel file, or even a plain-text email listing products and quantities. That email goes to your LevelOps forwarding address. The AI reads the document, matches each product description to the closest SKU in your Shopify catalog, applies the correct customer-specific pricing, and creates a draft order for your team to review.
The SKU matching is the critical piece. PDF to Order uses AI-powered fuzzy matching that understands product context, so "EVO 750" matches "OO-750-ESP" even though the strings are completely different. If a product can't be matched with confidence, the app flags it for human review rather than guessing wrong.
The result: most orders are processed accurately without any manual intervention. Edge cases, new products, unusual descriptions, pricing discrepancies, get flagged and handled by your team in seconds, not minutes.
For food manufacturers who also need production visibility, PDF to Order works well in combination with Katana MRP. Orders created in Shopify via PDF to Order sync automatically to Katana, giving your production team real-time demand visibility against your raw material inventory.
For distributors who need financial management, Shopify integrates natively with QuickBooks and Xero. Orders created through PDF to Order flow into your accounting system without double-entry.
For food companies with more complex operations, multi-SKU production, traceability requirements, or complex customer pricing structures, Odoo is often the right ERP backbone. LevelOps implements Odoo for food and beverage manufacturers and connects it to Shopify for a full order-to-fulfillment workflow.
Here's a typical workflow after automation is in place for a food distributor.
Monday morning: 12 purchase orders arrive from restaurant and retail customers. All 12 are automatically processed and appear as draft orders in Shopify within seconds of arriving. Your ops coordinator reviews them in the morning standup, confirms any flagged items (usually 1 to 3 per batch), and the orders are live before 9:30am.
Before automation, processing those 12 orders manually took the better part of Monday morning, roughly 3 hours. After automation, the same outcome takes 15 minutes.
Multiply that across the week, across the year, and the labor savings for a mid-size food distributor are typically in the range of $15,000 to $40,000 annually.
PDF to Order installs directly from the Shopify App Store with no technical setup required. Your product catalog loads automatically. You receive a unique forwarding email address. From that point, any purchase order emailed to that address is processed automatically.
For food and beverage companies with complex customer-specific pricing, large product catalogs, or multi-system integration needs, LevelOps offers an onboarding call to configure the setup correctly before go-live. This is included in the Growth and the Growth plan and available on request for Starter plans.
If you're a food and beverage distributor or manufacturer processing more than 10 B2B orders per week on Shopify, book a free operations audit. We'll assess your current workflow and show you what the same outcome looks like after automation.
Maxime Lavoie
Founder & CEO, LevelOps
Industrial engineer by training. Former Deloitte supply-chain consultant. Former VP Operations at Goodfood Market. Now writes the ERP, MRP and B2B order playbooks he wishes had existed in 2018.
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Yes. Each line is matched against your Shopify catalog using the description as well as any code the buyer put on the document, which is what lets a line written as EVO 750 land on your own olive oil SKU. Anything the match is not confident about is flagged in the draft order rather than guessed at, so a person confirms it before the order goes live.
Pricing is not taken from the customer's PO. Every matched line is priced from your Shopify catalog and from the company and price list that account is attached to, so Shopify B2B contract pricing is applied automatically. If the price printed on the incoming document disagrees with what you have loaded in Shopify, the draft order is where you see that before confirming.
The free tier is capped at 50 items per order and 50,000 variants, so a very long foodservice PO is not the right thing to test on Free. Paid plans are counted in successful orders rather than in lines, so a 15 line order and an 80 line order each use one order from your allowance.
No. Every processed order lands as a Shopify draft order with the source file attached, and it stays a draft until someone reviews and approves it. That review is where flagged lines, unit confusion and price mismatches get caught, which matters because unwinding an erroneous order costs about $250 once you count the pick, the freight, the credit note and the call.
The typing goes away, the checking does not. Manual entry runs about six minutes per order against about one minute with LevelOps, and the measured error rate is 0.5% with LevelOps against 3% for manual entry, which is six times fewer. At weekly or biweekly reorder frequency that gap repeats on the same accounts all year.
Yes, because the app writes into Shopify rather than around it. Orders created in Shopify sync on to Katana for production visibility, and Shopify's native QuickBooks and Xero connections pick them up for accounting without double entry. For food companies whose traceability or pricing structure needs a full ERP backbone, LevelOps implements Odoo and connects it to Shopify.
Book a short demo with a real purchase order and we run it live on your own data.
