How Chefs Culinar Grew Its Digital Network 10x
About
Chefs Culinar is one of Germany's leading foodservice wholesalers, supplying professional kitchens across restaurants, hotels and institutional catering with food and non-food products.
With 6,000+ employees, 15 distribution centers across six European countries and around 25,000 products in Germany alone, Chefs Culinar operates a highly complex, time-critical supply chain spanning thousands of products and a large supplier ecosystem.
Alongside its transition toward SAP, the company is investing in AI-supported forecasting, master-data quality and increasingly digital supplier processes, with the ambition of creating faster, more reliable and less error-prone operations across its trading network.
Challenge
For Chefs Culinar, every delivery starts with reliable supplier data. With thousands of products moving through a time-critical logistics network, missing or incorrect delivery information quickly translates into manual work at goods receipt, where employees must validate deliveries article by article, checking batch information by hand.
But digitizing a highly diverse supplier network through traditional EDI was too slow to scale. Connecting a single supplier could take months, while differences in systems, master data and technical capabilities created friction with every new connection.
As Chefs Culinar expanded its logistics footprint and prepared for its ERP migration to SAP, the challenge became strategic: how do you digitize hundreds of supplier relationships quickly, without demanding significant time from purchasing and supply-chain teams for every single supplier?
Solution
This is where Procuros entered the picture. Instead of forcing Chefs Culinar's entire supplier network through the same EDI setup, Procuros introduced one AI-native connectivity layer that adapts to how each supplier already works.
EDI-capable suppliers can exchange structured data directly, while suppliers without EDI can continue using their preferred formats, such as PDFs. Procuros automatically extracts, understands, enriches and validates the data, turning different supplier inputs into standardized information before it reaches Chefs Culinar's systems.
This fundamentally changed the onboarding model: supplier digitization no longer had to wait for months-long integration projects. At peak, Chefs Culinar brought 30+ suppliers live in a single day, a level of onboarding speed the team would not have imagined.
At the same time, Procuros provides the digital supplier foundation for Chefs Culinar's broader transformation, allowing the company to scale connectivity today while remaining independent of its evolving SAP landscape.
We wanted to diversify how we onboard suppliers, not force every one of them through the same rigid EDI process. Procuros let us shape a smart, seamless onboarding experience that adapts to how each supplier already works, and hand that process over to our purchasing teams to run day-to-day.
Results
Procuros has turned supplier connectivity from a slow integration bottleneck into scalable infrastructure for Chefs Culinar's operations, enabling its digitally connected supplier network to grow at more than 10x the historical rate. Supplier onboarding that previously took months can now happen instantly, while structured and validated data enables more efficient processes across goods receipt, purchasing and finance.
The business impact compounds with every supplier connected: less manual handling, fewer data-quality issues reaching downstream teams, and faster availability of the information required to receive goods and release payments. Chefs Culinar specifically links better digital delivery data to lower error exposure and faster payment release.
As Chefs Culinar continues expanding its supplier network and transitions toward a new ERP, Procuros is becoming a critical infrastructure layer between suppliers and its internal systems, allowing the company to scale digital operations without scaling integration complexity alongside it.
Our goal is to digitize transaction and master data for as many suppliers as possible. We're investing accordingly, aligning our service providers and internal teams more closely to keep pace. It takes time, but the direction is clear: it frees our strategic purchasing team to focus on what they do best, finding the best quality for our B2B customers.
