Food service specialist Fresh Ideas grows company with NetSuite

Fresh Ideas Management serves quality food concepts to students in campus dining halls, coffee shops and other campus outlets. With their FreshX mobile app they allow students to simply order everything from salads, to pulled-pork sandwiches. Their focus on on-going technological innovations sets them apart from even the larger competitors. “Technology is really changing the way students interact in dining halls, and we are at the forefront of that change” says Kate Boatright, CFO of Fresh Ideas Management. In order to grow their business and remain an innovation-leader in their industry, Fresh Ideas choose NetSuite as their top-notch future-ready ERP-solution.

No self-service to data Prior to 2018, the directors of the many different business units within Fresh Ideas entered sales, inventory and vendor invoice data into a homegrown database. This data was then downloaded by the corporate accounting department and imported into QuickBooks. This process made it challenging to offer self-service data access and analytics for the business units. For a company with two subsidiaries, 1200 employees and a revenue of $50 million this was an unacceptable situation. A new ERP-solution was needed. After evaluating several solutions, such as SAGE, Fresh Ideas opted for NetSuite as their business growth enabler.