Foodservice wholesale
Inside the data engine behind Woods Foodservice's customer operations
Woods Foodservice deployed several AI agents into production to sustain its growth and protect its world-class customer operations, saving over 4,000 hours a year and lifting operating profit by 77%, all without adding headcount to keep pace.
Company size
Mid-market
Region
UK
Vertical
Foodservice wholesale
Share
Woods Foodservice is one of the UK's largest premium foodservice suppliers and it's scaling fast, recently acquiring John Mower & Co to push turnover past £50m and serve over 3,000 of the country's top restaurants. To support its growth, Woods Foodservice deployed Cerve's AI agents to automate commercial and operational processes, focusing on maintaining and improving customer service across a growing customer portfolio.
Results
77%
Increase in operating profit in 12 months
55%
Reduction in admin tasks
4000+
Hours saved in first 12 months
Customer service above all
Premium operators expect a premium product range and service to match. Delivering that takes serious effort from the commercial and ops team. As Woods grows, that effort compounds, surfacing as heavy admin and avoidable errors.
Lana Bhikha, Director, has been clear from the start that growth has to be sustainable. That means the team scaling with the business, not breaking under it.
AI agents in Production
Auto-replenishment
Forecast demand and draft purchase orders to suppliers when products are about to run out.
Specs validation
Collects and validates product specifications against industry regulations and Woods' quality standards.
Predictive churn
Tracks buying patterns across the customer base and flags when a churn signal arises for a product, category or customer.
Invoice reconciliation
Collects and compares supplier invoices against good received notes line by line, and flag discrepancies.
"All members of the team should be focussing on adding benefit to the business in terms of service levels to our customers, in a sustainable way. Not completing manual tasks that can be automated."
Lana Bhikha
Director, Woods Foodservice
The data challenge
The information Woods runs on lived across various systems, inboxes, spreadsheets and PDFs. The ERP for internal operations, the PIM for product specifications, BI somewhere else, and a constant flow of supplier emails covering NPDs, cost prices, promotions, invoices and order confirmations on top. Every team ended up doing the same thing — patching data between tools instead of using it. Reports took days. Specs took four systems and three departments. Customer signals sat buried in dashboards no one had time to read.
The rollout
Woods's stack ran on Aptean Swords as the ERP and Akeneo as the PIM, with mass data flowing in via email. Cerve plugged in alongside it. Data now flows continuously from across the business into Cerve, gets validated and corrected on the way in, and the agents run their tasks against that clean, connected view.
"We chose to work with Cerve because they spent time inside the operation, sitting with each department, understanding where the friction actually was and what good looked like for Woods specifically. The agents were designed alongside the team, not dropped in on top of them."
Lana Bhikha
Director, Woods Foodservice
