Centric Software® has won M&A, Innovation, Business Expansion, Product Launches, and Research & Development awards in the 2025 Just Drinks Excellence Awards.
The company won the M&A award for its strategic acquisition that strengthened its digital platform. Centric received the Innovation award for rapidly adapting its solutions to address market disruptions and drive digital transformation. The Business Expansion award was earned through significant global growth and successful entry into new markets. Centric PLMTM, tailored for the beverage industry, led to its Product Launches award, while its advanced digital tools supporting research and development secured the R&D award.
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The Just Drinks Excellence Awards honor the most significant achievements and innovations in the beverage industry. Powered by GlobalData’s business intelligence, the Awards recognize the people and companies leading positive change and shaping the future of the industry.
“We are honored to be recognized across multiple categories, from PLM product launches to research and development tools and global expansion. These awards reflect our relentless commitment to innovation, customer success, and industry leadership. They inspire us to further push the boundaries of technology and provide even greater value to our clients worldwide.”
– Mary Haughey, Marketing BU for Food & Beverage at Centric Software
Strategic acquisition: Expanding digital capabilities with a key M&A move
Centric Software’s acquisition of Contentserv (now Centric PXM), a leading provider of Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions, represents a strategic move to broaden its platform capabilities and address the evolving needs of FMCG and beverage clients. Centric PXM’s expertise in PXM, including Product Information Management (PIM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), content syndication, and digital shelf analytics, complements Centric’s established strengths in Product Lifecycle Management. This integration creates a unified, AI-powered solution that manages product data and experience from concept to commercialization.
The acquisition was recognized for its clear vision of synergy and customer benefit. By combining Centric PLM with Centric PXM, clients can now access a central repository for all product data, enabling faster time-to-market, improved data quality, and enhanced consumer experiences across digital channels. For example, the integration allows brands to seamlessly enrich and optimize product content, ensuring that products are market-ready and tailored for diverse sales channels and consumer touchpoints. The joint platform also supports advanced analytics and real-time insights, enabling companies to refine product presentation and respond quickly to market feedback. The strategic acquisition demonstrates Centric Software’s commitment to delivering joint innovation and value to its global customer base.
Innovation: Leading digital transformation amid industry disruption
Centric Software’s recognition for innovation is rooted in its proactive approach to digital transformation, particularly in the face of market disruptions such as global tariff changes and supply chain volatility. The company has demonstrated agility by swiftly adapting its PLM solutions to help beverage manufacturers and retailers navigate complex regulatory and economic environments. For instance, Centric repackaged its solutions to address urgent challenges posed by new tariffs, enabling customers to model scenarios, simulate costs, and make informed decisions in real time.
Centric Software integrates advanced AI-powered modules that provide actionable insights, scenario modeling, and supply chain agility. These tools allow beverage companies to anticipate and respond to regulatory changes, ingredient shortages, and quality events. The platform’s transparency features support compliance with evolving food safety and labeling regulations. Centric’s industry-specific solutions are tailored to the unique requirements of the beverage sector, including managing complex formulations, packaging, and labeling. The company’s efforts to drive digital transformation have set new standards for transparency, responsiveness, and operational resilience in the industry.
Global expansion: Accelerating growth and market reach in beverages
Centric Software’s business expansion has been marked by significant growth in both company size and global reach, particularly within the food and beverage sector. The company has achieved a 25% increase in size since 2024 and a 57% increase since 2023, reflecting strong market traction and customer adoption. Centric now serves clients in over 50 countries, with a growing presence in high-growth regions such as Asia.
Notable examples of Centric’s expansion include partnerships with leading beverage companies such as Tsingtao Brewery. Tsingtao Brewery, one of the world’s largest beer manufacturers, selected Centric PLM to address challenges related to fragmented processes, inconsistent data standards, and innovation bottlenecks. By implementing Centric’s unified platform, Tsingtao has been able to streamline product development workflows, enhance cross-departmental collaboration, and standardize data management.
Centric’s ability to secure marquee clients in both established and emerging markets demonstrates its effectiveness in meeting the needs of diverse beverage companies. The company’s dual focus on sectoral and geographic expansion has contributed to its recognition as a key player in the global beverage industry.
Centric Software solutions: Powering faster, smarter product launches for beverage brands
Centric Software has been recognized for its development and launch of product lifecycle management and other integrated systems specifically tailored to the beverage industry. These solutions address the complex requirements of beverage product development, including regulatory compliance, ingredient management, and rapid response to market changes. Key features include multi-level impact analysis, which allows companies to assess the effects of regulatory changes, quality events, or ingredient shortages across all levels of their product formulations. This capability streamlines the process of identifying impacted products and accelerates the response to supply chain disruptions.
The platform also offers compliance checks, ingredient lists and scalable product development tools, supporting efficient formulation, labeling, and packaging management. Enhancements such as mass create and multi-copy features enable users to efficiently create and duplicate product SKUs, improving consistency and reducing manual errors. The integration of Centric Visual BoardsTM provides a visually oriented workspace for product portfolio optimization, allowing teams to collaborate, run what-if scenarios, and make data-driven decisions.
Centric PXM combines PIM, DAM, content syndication, and digital shelf analytics to optimize the product commercialization lifecycle. This enables beverage brands to capture demand signals from digital sales channels, monitor consumer behavior in real time, and adjust products accordingly. These innovations have contributed to faster, more accurate product launches and improved consumer experiences.
Digital tools for R&D: Supporting productivity and compliance in beverage innovation
Centric Software’s advancements in digital tools for research and development have delivered tangible benefits for beverage manufacturers. Multi-level impact analysis facilitates efficient formulation management and regulatory review. For example, regulatory specialists can quickly generate flat ingredient lists for compliance analysis, streamlining the process of meeting global food safety and labeling requirements.
Centric’s strengthened partnership with FoodChain ID further enhances compliance capabilities. The integration of FoodChain ID’s regulatory databases and analysis engine allows users to perform comprehensive compliance evaluations directly within Centric PLM. This supports adherence to sustainability standards and food safety regulations across multiple markets.
The platform’s digital R&D tools have led to measurable improvements in productivity—up to 50%—and reductions in time-to-market—up to 60%—for customers. Centric PLM serves as a digital hub for managing the entire product lifecycle, from ideation to end-of-life, supporting sustainability initiatives and regulatory compliance. The platform’s ability to centralize data, streamline collaboration, and provide real-time insights strengthens R&D processes and enables beverage companies to innovate efficiently while maintaining compliance and transparency.
“Winning the Just Drinks Excellence Awards for the second time in two years is a testament to the strength of our beverage sector. We are pleased that we have a solution that caters to this area and grateful to our customers for their input as Centric Software could not be the company we are today without the market-driven insights we get from working closely with the businesses we serve.”
– Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software
Company Profile
From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides the market-leading AI-enabled product lifecycle management platform for food & beverage manufacturers, grocery, brands and multi-category retailers. As experts in all fast-moving consumer goods, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to design, develop, source, comply, buy, make, package, assort, market and sell products. Centric Software solutions optimize the product portfolio, harmonize product offers and streamline product development by speeding time to market and innovation while enhancing quality control and ensuring regulatory compliance.
- Centric PLMTM features integrated industry best practices and innovative, AI-enabled capabilities tailored specifically for food and beverage manufacturers, retailers and food service providers. Seamlessly manage the overall product lifecycle, from initial concept and formula development to packaging, quality, supplier collaboration, nutritional labeling, production, SKU rationalization and beyond. Results include up to a 50% improvement in productivity and a 60% decrease in time to market.
- Centric Visual BoardsTM are a visually oriented product portfolio optimization tool. A singular accessible workspace pulls in real-time data and imagery from multiple business systems. It is a new, visual way of working to ensure robust, consumer-right product offers, dramatically decreasing assortment development cycle time.
- Centric PXMTM AI-powered product experience management (PXM) encompasses PIM, DAM, content syndication and digital shelf analytics (DSA) to optimize the product commercialization lifecycle resulting in a transformed brand experience. Increase sales channels, boost sell through and drive margins.
Centric Software’s market-driven solutions have the highest user adoption rate, customer satisfaction rate and fastest time to value in the industry. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition, appearing regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.
Centric Software is a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), the world leader in 3D design software, 3D digital mock-up and PLM solutions.
Centric Software is a registered trademark of Centric Software, Inc. in the US and other countries. Centric PLM, Centric Planning, Centric Pricing & Inventory, Centric Market Intelligence, Centric Visual Boards and Centric PXM are trademarks of Centric Software, Inc. All third-party trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners.
Contact Details
910 E. Hamilton Avenue, Suite 200
Campbell, CA 95008
USA
Website: https://www.centricsoftware.com
Phone: +1 408 574 7802
Links
Website: https://www.centricsoftware.com/food-beverage/
