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Food manufacturers are brilliant at making products. They're losing a quarter of their week just looking for data.

Here's a number that should stop any food manufacturing leader mid-scroll. At a typical company doing £100m or more in revenue, employees can spend up to a quarter of their time just searching for data. Not analysing it. Not acting on it. Looking for it.

That's before you count the rest: copying and pasting between systems, rekeying the same spec three times, recreating information that was lost, correcting numbers that went out of date weeks ago.

It's the kind of problem that hides in plain sight, and it's exactly what Ryan Rafferty of Centric Software wants the room at Future Food-Tech London 2026 to confront. Centric joins this year's event as a Gold Partner, one of the highest tiers of support behind the summit, and Ryan's perspective is worth sitting with, because he's spent 15 years at the intersection of food manufacturing and enterprise technology, and stressesthat the industry is quietly blind to its biggest opportunity.

The problem isn't one headwind. It's all of them at once.

Ask most F&B leaders what's keeping them up and you'll get a list: regulation, reformulation, cost inflation, geopolitics, competition. Ryan's point is that no single item on that list is the real issue.

"The challenge is more the combination of converging / simultaneous headwinds, rather than any one challenge independently."

And the thing that could relieve that pressure is the thing most companies pay the least attention to.

"The opportunity we see as significantly underexposed is data - how it is stored, catalogued and utilised for insight, competitive advantage and effective decision-making... Most F&B companies we meet are relatively low in data and digital maturity, and so they are often blind to the opportunities available to them in digital."

Why brilliant food companies get stuck

This is the part that reframes the whole conversation. The problem isn't that these teams aren't good at what they do. They're excellent at it.

"They are experts in bringing innovative new food and drink products to market, but are still using document-based processes to do this."

And document-based processes have a breaking point. Ryan describes the modern food business facing a "cartesian explosion of complexity", converging regulations, reformulation, cost-of-living pressure, geopolitics, AI, competition, all compounding at once. Spreadsheets and documents weren't built for that.

"Those document-driven processes are collapsing under their own complexity, or requiring heroic effort from large teams to manage."

"Heroic effort" is the tell. When keeping the lights on requires heroics, the system is the problem, not the people.

The shift Ryan wants leaders to make

The fix isn't another document or a bigger team. It's a change in how a company thinks about its own information. Ryan calls it moving from a document-led approach to "object-oriented processes", where raw materials, packaging and suppliers are held as interlinked, interdependent "objects" inside a digital infrastructure rather than scattered across files.

"This mindset shift, once understood, clarifies how data can solve many of today's challenges."

Get the data foundation right, he argues, and the downstream wins follow: faster regulatory compliance, fewer errors, less rework, fewer recalls, and products reaching market faster, powered by AI, Product Lifecycle Management and Product Information Management working together.

The lesson 'food' can borrow from 'aerospace'

One of Ryan's sharpest points is that none of this is new. It's just new to food.

"Aerospace, automotive and similar industries have been leveraging digitalisation for decades; for them, it is an operational necessity, not a 'nice to have'."

Which points to the collaboration he's most excited about: F&B companies learning directly from the industries that solved these problems years ago.

"Counterparts from these industries are often the best teachers for leaders in our industry."

And why the clock is ticking on AI

There's an urgency underneath all of this. AI is coming to food, and Ryan is clear-eyed about what it needs to work.

"The one thing we know for certain about AI's competence in practical applications, is that the data it sits on needs to be a. robust, and b. very large. F&B manufacturers, being digitally immature for the most part, are at a disadvantage compared to their digitally native peers in other industries."

Translation: the companies that fix their data now are the ones that get to use AI meaningfully later. The rest fall further behind.

Meet Centric Software in London

This is precisely the conversation Future Food-Tech London 2026 is built for, the leaders wrestling with converging pressures, in a room with the people and technologies that can relieve them. As a Gold Partner, Ryan and the Centric Software team will be part of that conversation throughout the event.

If your data is costing you a quarter of your team's week, this is where you start getting it back.

Book your ticket today to save on your pass and join global food-tech leaders, investors and innovators in London.