// food & beverage
EDI for tight margins and unforgiving delivery windows
Grocery purchase orders and invoices, ASNs tied to delivery appointments, product data sync, lot and traceability: the document flow that gets food and beverage onto the shelf. Tediware handles it on a platform priced for perishable margins.
// the problem
Food & beverage EDI plays by its own rules, literally
Sell into grocery and you inherit a document set the rest of retail never touches: grocery-specific purchase orders and invoices (875/880), GS1 product data that has to stay perfectly in sync, ASNs tied to tight delivery appointments, and lot-level detail that regulators, not just retailers, now expect. Get any of it wrong and it's a rejected delivery, a chargeback, or a traceability gap you can't afford.
Legacy VANs charge a premium for exactly this complexity. Tediware handles it with AI-assisted setup and transparent pricing instead, so compliance doesn't come out of the case price.
// the solution
What makes it different
Grocery-native documents
875 and 880 grocery POs and invoices, 850s and 810s, 856 ASNs mapped to delivery windows: the full grocery compliance stack, set up fast with AI so a new banner is days of work, not months.
Built for lot, code date, and traceability
Perishable means lot numbers, pack and expiration dates, and, under FSMA 204, traceability records regulators can ask for. Tediware carries the detail your buyers and the FDA expect, instead of forcing it into a spreadsheet on the side.
Margin-aware pricing
Food and beverage runs on some of the thinnest margins in retail. Published pricing and no kilocharacter billing mean EDI compliance is a fixed, predictable cost, not a variable tax on every case you ship.
// proof
Proven under load
Tediware runs 25,000 transactions a month at 100% uptime for a Transport Topics Top-100 carrier group, and it displaced two incumbents for a retailer shipping live product into Petco. The same reliability and AI-assisted onboarding carry high-volume grocery and distribution flows, where a missed document is a missed delivery window.
As an official X12 Commercial Use Partner, Tediware works directly from the standard your grocery buyers hand you.
// the document set
How EDI works in food & beverage
Grocery is the one retail channel with its own dedicated transaction sets, layered on top of GS1 product-data standards and, increasingly, food-safety traceability. Here's what carries product from your dock to the shelf.
- 850 Purchase Order
- The standard order, used across general retail and many F&B trading partners.
- 875 Grocery Products Purchase Order
- The grocery-specific order format many supermarket chains require in place of the 850.
- 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgment
- You confirm the order, line by line.
- 856 Advance Ship Notice (ASN)
- What's in the shipment and how it's packed, tied to the delivery appointment. Carries lot and code-date detail for perishables.
- 880 Grocery Products Invoice
- The grocery-specific invoice paired with the 875.
- 810 Invoice
- The standard invoice, for partners not on the grocery set.
- 852 Product Activity Data
- Store-level sales and inventory movement shared back for replenishment planning.
- 816 Organizational Relationships
- Store and location hierarchy data, so orders and deliveries route to the right place.
- 820 Payment Order / Remittance Advice
- Payment and deduction detail (where chargebacks appear).
- 997 Functional Acknowledgment
- The machine receipt confirming each document was received and valid.
Beyond X12
Grocery trading partners increasingly require product data through GDSN (the GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network) and traceability records under FSMA Rule 204. These are separate standards from X12, but they live alongside your EDI program, and Tediware is built to sit at the center of that whole flow rather than bolting each piece on separately.
Facing a grocery banner's spec, or juggling GS1 data and EDI in two different places? That's exactly the problem Tediware is built to solve. Talk to an EDI expert.