About PIE
PIE — Product Information Exchange — is a product-data platform built for the food and agriculture industry, and for the people in it who are tired of describing the same product five different ways.
Our mission
We exist to liberate product information.
Data about food — what is in it, where it came from, whether it may be sold — should not be trapped in one company's spreadsheet, one retailer's supplier portal, or one vendor's licence agreement. PIE makes structured, regulation-ready product information affordable enough for a six-person cooperative, accessible to every trading partner its owner chooses and to no one else, and machine-readable and machine-writable through an open, documented API rather than a proprietary import mask. The producer owns the data. We only move it.
Our vision
A European food supply chain where a product is described once — by the people who make it.
Every buyer, marketplace, shop system and authority should be able to read that description directly, in their own language and their own format, without anyone re-typing it. We want the cost of publishing correct product data to fall far enough that compliance stops being a project and becomes a by-product of ordinary record-keeping — and that a small producer can meet the same data standard as a multinational, on the same day, at a price they do not have to think about.
How we get there
Affordable by design
Structured product data should not cost more than the margin on the products it describes. Publishing to an industry data pool is commonly licensed by the product count and runs into the hundreds or thousands of euros a year for a modest catalogue. That is a real barrier for exactly the producers whose data is hardest to get. It is why there is a free tier that is genuinely usable, and why the entry tier is priced where a small producer can decide without building a business case.
Machine-writable, not just machine-readable
Anyone can publish a PDF. The harder and more useful thing is an interface a partner can write to — which is what supplier onboarding, document ingestion and the REST API are for. Data that can only be read still has to be typed in by somebody, and that somebody is usually the person least equipped to get it right.
Open standards over lock-in
GS1 identifiers, the GS1 Global Data Model and the EU Digital Product Passport are public standards. We implement them so your data is portable by construction — and we will not charge you to leave. Export of your own catalogue, assets and history is available on every plan, including the free one, at no cost.
Manage once, offer everywhere
A product described in PIE becomes a concrete offer wherever you sell it: a Shopify listing, a marketplace feed, a flat file for a buyer's ERP, a page in a print catalogue, a public brand portal, a Digital Product Passport behind a QR code. One record, many destinations — and when the record changes, every destination changes with it. The alternative is the status quo: the same product described five times, differently, in five systems, and nobody quite sure which one is right.
Your data stays yours
Hosted in the EU. Isolated from every other organisation at the storage layer, not by application code that could be bypassed. Private by default, shared only where you grant it, and exportable at any time — which is both our position and, increasingly, European law.
No security tax
Single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and the audit log are included on every paid plan. Charging extra for the features that keep an account from being compromised is a practice we would rather not participate in.
The problem we solve
Food producers and buyers spend enormous effort exchanging product information through spreadsheets, PDFs and ad-hoc email. Data is inconsistent, hard to keep current, and impossible to integrate into modern ERP and procurement systems without custom work that somebody has to maintain forever.
PIE replaces that with a structured, API-first platform: producers get one place to manage product data, and buyers get a reliable, current feed they can build on.
Food is a particularly hard case, which is why we started here. The data is regulated, so being wrong has consequences beyond embarrassment. It is multilingual, because the same product sells across borders. It changes, because recipes and suppliers change. And it is wanted simultaneously by retailers, wholesalers, marketplaces, authorities and consumers — in four different shapes. A generic catalogue tool handles none of that; it just stores whatever you type.
The team
PIE is built and operated by a small team in the DACH region. We would rather show you working software than a page of photographs — if you want to know who you would be working with, get in touch.