La Biblio Gastronomica: How Brindisa turned 30 years of experience into a single source of product truth

Every new product record at Brindisa used to start the same way: built by hand, one field at a time, with nothing pulling in from anywhere else.

Brindisa has been bringing Spain's food to the UK for more than 30 years, since it started as a small wholesale operation next to Borough Market. It's grown into the UK's leading specialist importer of Spanish and European gourmet ingredients, and increasingly a brand-building, product-driven company in its own right. Perello olives, one of its own brands, has become a genuine breakout hit.

Brindisa sells through its own retail shops, wholesale, e-commerce, and has direct links into major supermarkets. Behind all of it sit 700+ active SKUs, sold as each, by weight, by case, and by pallet.

Brindisa's ERP, Winman, held the transactional core: SKUs, codes, pricing, purchasing. It was never built to hold what else a food business needs to sell well.

Technical specs lived in Word documents. Narrative descriptions and NPD tracking sat across 10+ spreadsheets. Marketing images sat in Dropbox. Supplier detail and product stories lived in email chains, or sometimes even not written down anywhere at all.

7 or more systems, all of them claiming to be the source of truth, and 170+ data points scattered between them.

Brindisa had built a Dark Stack the same way most growing brands do: one exception at a time, until the exceptions became the system.

Every pricing update meant downloading a spreadsheet with 100 columns, editing it by hand, then re-uploading it. New product creation ran the same way: no SKU rules, no duplicate checks, no way to confirm a product was allergen-complete before it reached Winman.

The frustration was simple and constant. The data already existed somewhere in the business. It just wasn't anywhere the person who needed it could find it.

Training carried the same problem at a bigger scale. Brindisa invested heavily in supplier visits, but that knowledge had nowhere to live beyond whoever went on the trip.

That's usually where a PIM brief gets written: fix the product data. 2 agencies, Quickfire and Impact Evolve, had both read Brindisa's problem that way and referred them to Nolo on exactly that basis.

Brindisa had already written down something more specific themselves.