Caffeine and Code: How Park Avenue Coffee Replaced NetSuite and Sped Up Orders by 90% with Odoo

Park Avenue Coffee began in 2006 as a single neighbourhood café in St. Louis, Missouri. Over the next decade it grew into a multi-company operation: several cafés, a separate roasting business and a baking division supplying famous gooey butter cakes. Each entity adopted its own software—QuickBooks Enterprise for roasting, Restaurant365 for cafés and QuickBooks Online for the bakery.

As the group scaled, this patchwork became increasingly painful. Inventory was tracked differently in each system, inter-company transactions were hard to reconcile and producing consolidated financials required serious effort. In 2021 the company attempted to move to a large cloud ERP, NetSuite, hoping to unify everything. After a long and expensive project, key features were still not working as promised.

Frustrated, the leadership team started looking for alternatives and discovered Odoo. They partnered with Talus ERP to design a cleaner, more pragmatic implementation. The migration focused on getting core processes right: purchasing, inventory, manufacturing for roasting and baking, sales for cafés and wholesale customers, and full accounting for all entities.

Odoo’s multi-company capabilities allowed Park Avenue Coffee to keep legal entities separate while sharing products, price lists and key workflows. For example, when a café creates a purchase order for baked goods, Odoo automatically generates a corresponding sales order in the bakery company. This replaced manual double entry and eliminated many opportunities for mistakes.

Staff immediately noticed the speed difference. Creating a sales order that once required multiple screens and slow page loads now happens in a fraction of the time. Year-end inventory, which used to consume a full week, is finished within days, with adjustments recorded directly in Odoo. Management dashboards show performance by location and business line without switching systems.

Perhaps most importantly, the team feels confident again in its systems. Instead of battling a complex ERP that never quite fit, they have a flexible platform that supports their day-to-day reality and future expansion plans. For restaurant groups and food chains juggling multiple brands and production units, Park Avenue Coffee’s switch to Odoo is a powerful example of how the right tool can simplify operations and free people to focus on great food and customer experience.