The EU PPWR bans single-use plastic condiment and sauce sachets in foodservice settings from 1 January 2030. But the regulation becomes enforceable law in August 2026. From that point your restaurant, cafe, and hotel customers are under live obligations to start changing their operations. The EU sachet ban affects every SME food manufacturer supplying the foodservice market across Europe. Their pressure becomes your pressure. Fast. This post is the operational playbook for SM

The EU PPWR packaging regulation becomes enforceable law in August 2026. The SME guide to what it covers, who it affects, the key dates, and what to do now.

Until recently, advanced supply chain tech belonged to one group: the giants. Real-time inventory optimisation, predictive logistics, automated warehouses all of it needed dedicated IT teams, six-figure budgets, and months of implementation. If you ran a smaller business, you watched from the outside. That's not the case anymore. AI has flipped the economics. The kind of tools that used to sit behind enterprise contracts are now subscription-based, mobile-friendly, and built

You're selling through multiple channels. Maybe you started online. Then you added wholesale. Or you're operating across multiple physical locations. Your inventory used to be simple. Now it's scattered. Stock lives in your e-commerce platform. But orders are coming in through your website, your wholesale channel, and possibly retail locations. When someone orders through one channel, you're manually checking if you have enough. Meanwhile, your accounting team is asking "did

In 2026, the rules change faster than most businesses can react. Tariffs shift overnight. Supplier relationships that took years to build get disrupted in a news cycle. Geopolitical events that used to feel distant are now directly affecting lead times, landed costs, and stock availability. The question is no longer whether your ERP can handle complexity. It is whether your ERP can keep up. Business environments change at unprecedented speed. The Speed Problem: Supply Chains

Understand the difference between cloud hosted and cloud native ERP, and why modern SMEs need true cloud native architecture to scale efficiently.