Food traceability software records what went into every batch and where every batch went. You can trace back from a finished pallet to the raw materials, and forward from a supplier delivery to every customer who received it.
The rule underneath is one step back and one step forward. Everything else exists to keep that record accurate without slowing the line. It sits inside your quality management system and depends on the production floor and warehouse.
Six records, and the recall is only as narrow as the weakest one. Ordered by how often they are the gap an audit finds.
Every raw material and packaging delivery captured against a supplier lot, with the certificate of analysis attached. A batch record that names an ingredient but not the lot it came from cannot narrow a recall.
What was made, when, on which line, by whom, from which lots, at what yield. Captured as production happens rather than transcribed from paper at the end of the shift, when the detail has already been rounded off.
Temperatures, metal detection, pH, checkweights and the corrective action when a check fails — recorded against the batch, with the out-of-spec result impossible to skip past silently.
What ran before, what cleaning was done between, and who signed it off. Allergen sequencing is where a paper system is most likely to be correct in practice and unprovable at audit.
Which batch codes went on which pallets to which customer on which date. Without this the forward trace stops at the warehouse door and the recall widens to every customer you have.
Being able to run the trace on demand and produce the report, rather than assembling it from folders. Retailer and GFSI-aligned programs generally require this to be demonstrated within a set number of hours, which is the real test of the system.
HACCP asks whether the process was in control. Traceability asks where the product came from and where it went. Both hang off the same batch record, so one system should capture both, or your team enters every batch number twice.
The Food Standards Code says you must be able to trace and recall. Retailers and certifiers set how fast. We build to the speed.
Buy when your process fits a standard shape: discrete batches and fixed recipes. Build when it does not, like blending, ageing, rework or co-packing, where a lot loses its identity partway through.
Most often the answer is to keep the ERP and build the plant-floor layer that captures the batch record properly.
The plant drives the cost, not the software.
A fixed $9,000 + GST Rapid Insight Workshop follows one product from goods-in to dispatch and finds where the trace breaks.
How many places on the floor record data, and whether line equipment can be read directly or needs an operator.
Tidy item and lot data shortens the build. Messy data is fixed first.
A defined build is quoted fixed-price as an Amplify project. Changing ranges and customers suit an Apex partnership.
We follow a single product from supplier delivery to customer dispatch with the people who handle it, and record every form, label, spreadsheet and whiteboard it touches. The breaks in the chain are usually obvious within a day.
The batch record is built first and put in front of operators, because a capture step that slows the line gets skipped and back-filled at the end of the shift. It runs alongside the paper record until the plant trusts it.
The system is proved by running the trace under time pressure, forwards and backwards, before it replaces anything. If it cannot produce the report from the data it holds, it is not finished.
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That is the usual way these systems fail, and it is a design problem rather than a training problem. Capture on the floor has to be faster than the form it replaces — gloved hands, wet environments, a scan instead of a keyboard, and no screen that asks for information the operator does not have yet. If the paper is still being filled in a month after go-live, the software asked for too much.
Rework is where most traceability systems quietly break. Product held back and fed into a later run creates a lot with two parentages, and if the system cannot represent that, the trace stops at the rework step and the recall widens. Decide how rework, blending and part-pallets are represented before the build, because retrofitting it means re-recording history.
It passes an audit until it is tested. A spreadsheet can hold the records, but it cannot stop a batch being entered twice, cannot enforce that a CCP check happened before dispatch, and cannot be trusted to produce a full forward trace in the hours a mock recall allows. The failure is rarely that the data is missing — it is that nobody can assemble it fast enough.
No. Most Australian food manufacturers have an ERP that handles purchasing, stock and invoicing acceptably and a plant floor that is still on paper. The traceability layer sits between the two — capturing the batch record where the work happens and feeding the ERP — which is a far smaller project than an ERP replacement and considerably less risky.
HACCP proves the process was in control; traceability proves where the product went. They share the batch record, so one system should capture both rather than making an operator write the batch number twice. Certification programs typically test traceability by making you run a trace on demand, which is why the mock recall is the measure to build towards rather than the paperwork.
It starts with a Rapid Insight Workshop at a fixed $9,000 + GST, which maps the current trace and produces the roadmap and the number. What a build costs after that depends on how many capture points sit on the plant floor and whether line equipment can be read directly rather than transcribed. A defined build is quoted fixed-price before it starts.
Three to eight weeks for the first capture point running in the plant, once the process is agreed and access to the existing systems is available. The slow part is not the software — it is agreeing what happens when a check fails, when a lot code is missing, or when product is released before a result comes back. Those decisions are made in the workshop.
Where the equipment can be read, yes, and it is worth doing — checkweighers, metal detectors, temperature probes and coders often already produce the exact record a person is currently copying onto a form. Whether it is possible depends on the machine and its age, which is checked during the workshop rather than assumed in a quote.
It raises the standard. Co-packing means the traceability obligation belongs to someone else's brand and their recall procedure, and each customer is likely to want records in their own format and within their own timeframe. That is an argument for capturing the batch record once, in full, and generating each customer's report from it rather than keeping several parallel systems.
Four things: they walk the plant before quoting; they will tell you when an off-the-shelf system fits; they design capture for the floor rather than for the office; and they test the result with a mock recall instead of a demo. A partner who has never watched a changeover will build something that assumes the line stops when the software asks it to.