Peasy vs. Guidance: Which Food Manufacturing Software is Right for You?

If you are looking for software to run your food and beverage manufacturing operations, you have likely come across Peasy. It's free, it's simple, and it's a great step up from pen and paper.

But as your food brand scales, "simple" can quickly become "insufficient." When you need to prepare for a USDA Organic certification audit, calculate your true Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) based on actual yield loss, or comply with FSMA 204 traceability requirements, a basic inventory tracker won't cut it.

Here is a detailed breakdown of how Guidance compares to Peasy, and how to know which one is right for your current stage of growth.

Feature	Guidance	Peasy
Target User	Scaling SMB food & beverage manufacturers with complex compliance needs.	Early-stage food makers looking for a free, basic digital logbook.
Lot Traceability	✓ Automated forward/backward tracing. FSMA 204 compliant.	~ Manual lot entry. Basic tracking only.
Organic Mass Balance	✓ Real-time tracking of raw material usage vs. finished goods yield. Audit-ready.	✗ Not supported. Requires manual spreadsheet reconciliation.
Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)	✓ Dynamic. Calculates true cost per unit including actual yield loss and labor.	~ Static. Based on theoretical Bill of Materials only.
Yield Loss Tracking	✓ Automatically calculated per batch. Flags variances from expected yield.	✗ Not tracked. Assumes 100% perfect yield on every run.
Material Requirements Planning (MRP)	✓ Predicts raw material needs based on production schedules and lead times.	✗ Basic low-stock alerts only.

Where Peasy Wins: Early-Stage Simplicity

If you are a solo founder making hot sauce in a shared commercial kitchen, Peasy is a fantastic tool. It is free to use, incredibly simple to set up, and it gets you off of clipboards and spreadsheets.

Peasy excels at basic inventory counting. It tells you what you have on the shelf right now. If your primary goal is just to stop losing track of how many boxes of packaging you have left, Peasy will solve that problem.

Where Guidance Wins: Operational Depth and Compliance

Guidance is built for food and beverage brands that have hit an operational inflection point. When you start hiring production staff, pursuing certifications, or selling into major retail channels, you need an operations platform, not just an inventory tracker.

1. The Yield Loss Reality

In food manufacturing, a recipe is just a theory. You might plan to get 1,000 units out of a batch, but due to moisture evaporation, trim waste, or equipment issues, you only get 920. Peasy assumes your theoretical Bill of Materials is reality. Guidance forces operators to log the actual output, automatically calculates the yield loss, and dynamically updates your COGS to reflect the true cost of that specific batch. If you don't track yield loss, you are systematically underpricing your product.

2. Audit-Ready Organic Mass Balance

If you are USDA Organic certified, your certifier will conduct a mass balance audit to prove you aren't selling more organic product than you purchased ingredients for. Because Peasy doesn't track yield loss or Work-in-Progress (WIP) inventory accurately, you have to export all your data to Excel and manually reconcile it before an audit. Guidance tracks mass balance natively. Your audit report is ready with one click.

3. FSMA 204 Traceability

The FDA's FSMA 204 rule requires strict, standardized lot traceability for certain foods. Peasy allows you to type in a lot code, but it doesn't build the rigid relational database required to execute a rapid traceback exercise. Guidance automatically links the lot code of the raw material to the lot code of the WIP, to the lot code of the finished good. If there is a recall, you can trace a product from the retail shelf back to the specific supplier field in seconds.

The Verdict

Choose Peasy if: You are pre-revenue or doing under $500k/year, you have a very simple product (no complex WIP stages), you aren't organic certified, and your primary goal is to digitize a paper inventory log.

Choose Guidance if: You are scaling rapidly, you need to know your true COGS down to the penny, you are managing organic certification audits, you utilize co-packers, or you need strict lot traceability to satisfy retail buyers.