buah: Pure flavor meets automated processes

That’s buah: Healthy pleasure combined with convenience

Do you think convenience foods and healthy eating can never coexist? Then you obviously don’t know buah! This startup, founded by siblings Jessica and Daniel Krauter, can sweeten your day with delicious fruit explosions – no matter how busy your schedule is. Since 2015, the two founders have been offering freeze-dried, natural fruit snacks and fruit balls that stay fresh, nutritious, and flavorsome for an exceptionally long time.

The concept appeals to anyone who values a vitamin-rich and varied diet, but has difficulty integrating fresh and healthy fruit into their daily routine, for whatever reason. This startup turns healthy food into convenience food – for anyone who doesn’t have their own garden, or deals with high levels of stress every day. 

 Today, buah customers can easily order the flash-frozen fruits online and savor the intense aroma whenever suits them. But the path for founders Jessica and Daniel was somewhat more complex: implementing this convenience idea in their own processes and workflows was one of the biggest challenges in the history of this young company.

The challenge: 100% natural, 100% flexible

The founders of buah want to offer their customers high-quality, crunchy, and chewy fruit, while completely avoiding artificial additives. “We love life and nature. Just the way they were created: simple, authentic, and wholesome. We want to share this love,” says Daniel, summarizing the company’s goals.

buah’s must-haves

These high standards posed major challenges for the food startup’s purchasing, production and logistics strategies right from the start:

• All production steps and batches must be traceable at all times.
• Each ingredient must be carefully selected and processed. 
• The customers must always get good value for their money.
• The fruity pleasures must be easy to order online.
• All business processes must be synchronized and as automated as possible.

The problem: Missing features and flexibility

To give customers the most convenient shopping experience possible, buah founders Jessica and Daniel decided to establish both a retail sales channel and an online shop built using Shopware. They used the weclapp ERP in the backend. 

Since the entire power of buah is nested in a small but talented team, many features in both systems remained unused due to time constraints. Features such as picking orders by scanning barcodes were completely missing, and many important processes were not linked between purchasing and shipping. Instead of optimizing workflows, the setup was frustrating. Flexibility fell by the wayside. 

The all-in-one solution for small teams: Xentral

As the buah team gained experience and customers, they also grew more interested in finally bringing all the processes together in one place. In 2018, they started looking for an all-in-one solution. Chatting to other startups, the siblings were soon made aware of Augsburg-based Xentral. 

After extensively testing the ERP software, it was clear: Xentral’s clear process handling and range of functions are exactly what buah was missing. The ERP now finally allows Jessica and Daniel to link their complete inventory management system, purchasing, production, and parts of their accounting system through Xentral. The connection to Shopify, which is now used in place of Shopware, also works great with Xentral.

Hot tip for ambitious startups: Ambitious teams in young companies often have just a few people, all working together to get major tasks done. Work like this demands a flexible and intuitive ERP.  Interfaces with the most important shop systems, logistics platforms, POS systems and more are also indispensable – this is the only way to ensure a smooth start with a new ERP or transition from an old one.

Growth report What has changed for buah since switching to Xentral in 2019?

The biggest push Xentral brought to buah was in the automation of many processes: 

“We were able to automate a lot of our accounting and all aspects of order processing, so Xentral laid the foundation for our growth. We couldn’t have done it without Xentral,” Jessica points out.

Key milestones since switching to Xentral:

• 100% automation: Order processing is now completely automated with Xentral.
• 18x as many orders: The number of orders increased from 1,000 to 18,000 per month.
• 50% time savings: Thanks to Xentral, buah was able to halve their logistics and accounting workloads.

With Xentral’s apps for production, purchasing, and accounting, the buah team was able to automate and synchronize key business processes. All order data is now combined in Xentral and can be conveniently managed in one place. The result is that even more freeze-dried flavor explosions can be delivered to vitamin-hungry customers every month. 

“xentral has laid the foundation for our growth.”

Jessica,

CEO & founder of buah

Ready for more with Xentral

With the workload significantly reduced in many areas, Jessica and Daniel now have more time for the essentials and the further development of buah. The next big milestones for the food startup are already mapped out: the two founders dream of conquering new markets and expanding their product portfolio with this in mind.  

The upcoming plans to scale up the business and get into cross-border e-commerce will continue to bring new challenges in the future. Together with Xentral, the team will confidently master these challenges and achieve their goals with ease. 

Profile: buah