Producer quickstart

This guide takes a producer — a cooperative, farm, or processor — from nothing to a published product that a buyer can see. Set aside about 30 minutes, most of which is waiting for two emails.

You do not need an invitation, a credit card, or a sales call. You start on the free plan and move up only when your catalogue outgrows it.

What you will end up with

• An organisation on PIE, with you as its administrator
• Colleagues invited and working alongside you
• One product, complete enough to pass GS1 checks, published
• One buyer able to see that product — and nothing else

1. Create your account

Go to the PIE home page and choose Start free. Fill in:

Choose Producer as the account type. Producers create and publish product data; buyers consume it.

2. Confirm your email address

You will get an email within a minute or two. Click the link in it.

Nothing exists until you click — the form on its own does not create anything. If the email has not arrived after five minutes, check spam, then try again with the same address.

3. Choose your password

The confirmation link takes you to a page showing your organisation name and the role you are about to receive (administrator, for the person who signs up). Check the name is right, pick a password, and continue.

You land straight in the producer app, already signed in.

4. Wait for approval — and what you can do meanwhile

New organisations are reviewed by a person before they can publish. You will see a banner saying your organisation is under review.

While it is under review you can look around, but you cannot create or change anything. This is deliberate and usually short. You will get a second email when you are approved.

5. Invite your team

Once approved, go to Administration → Team and choose Invite member.

Enter their name, work email and a role:

They receive an email with their own link, choose their own password, and appear in your team list. You never share your password.

The full picture is in Roles & permissions.

6. Check your settings

Open Administration → Settings and confirm two things:

• Organisation name — appears on anything you publish
• Languages — which markets you sell into. A product sold in Germany needs German; one sold in Switzerland needs German, French and Italian. These drive compliance checks and what buyers see

7. Create your first product

Two ways in:

Let the system read a document for you. Open Ingestion → New and upload a spec sheet (PDF or Excel), or paste a link. PIE reads it and proposes a product. It then stops and shows you what it found — every field editable. Nothing is created until you approve it. This review step cannot be skipped, by design: extracted data is a proposal, never a fact.

Or type it in. Fill in name, SKU, GTIN and the category fields. Add a photo — it uploads straight to storage rather than through the application, so large images do not time out. A thumbnail appears shortly after.

Either way, link a few reference entities — an allergen, a nutrient, a certification. GS1, compliance and passport features all read from these, so a few minutes here saves work later.

More depth: Products guide, AI guide.

8. Get to GS1-ready

Create the product in the built-in Food category and fill the nine required fields: brand, net content, ingredients, allergens, energy, fat, carbohydrate, protein and country of origin. Add a valid GTIN and a GPC brick.

A new producer organisation ships with the GS1 mappings already configured, so you reach "Ready" without mapping a single field by hand.

Set your target markets (say Germany and Switzerland) and the required languages follow automatically. See the GS1 & GDSN guide.

9. Publish

If your organisation uses the built-in approval workflow, an editor submits and an administrator approves. Publishing is blocked until that happens.

Quality and compliance checks also block publishing when they fail — and they fail closed: a required rule failing in any of your languages stops the publish until you fix it. That is the point. It is better to find a missing allergen here than in a buyer's system.

Once the checks pass, publish. You can then publish a Digital Product Passport with its own public page and QR code.

See Workflow, Quality & compliance, DPP.

10. Let a buyer see it

Products are private until you say otherwise. Open Grants and give a specific buyer access to specific products, optionally with an end date.

Buyers see only what you grant. That is enforced in the database, not by hiding things in the screen — there is no URL to guess and no API call that returns more.

See the Buyer quickstart for the other side of this.

When you outgrow the free plan

The free plan is a real plan, not a trial. It does not expire and it does not ask for a card.

When you reach its limits — products, team members or storage — you will see a warning in the app before anything is blocked, with a link to your plan.

To move up, open Administration → Settings → Billing, pick a plan and pay by card or SEPA direct debit. Two things worth knowing:

• Prices are shown without VAT. VAT is added at checkout where it applies. If you are a business elsewhere in the EU with a valid VAT number, you are not charged VAT and the invoice says so.
• Paying yearly costs ten months. Two months free.

If you later cancel, your organisation returns to the free plan. Nothing is deleted — published products, passports and portals keep working. You simply cannot create beyond the free limits until you subscribe again.

See Plans, entitlements & billing and the current limits.

Next steps

• Connect your own systems — Authentication and the API Reference
• Notifications and organisation administration
• How the platform works: architecture and multi-tenancy