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Showing 6 posts tagged #Traceability .
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Your regular supplier is sold out, so you find another source and it's even cheaper. The catch: the substitute lot is the one most likely to skip your records. Why the backup ingredient is the real traceability risk, and the one habit that keeps it a non-event.
You track every pepper lot. Then you turn on the tap, and the biggest input by volume goes in with no record. Water that touches food must be safe and of adequate sanitary quality (21 CFR 117.37(a)), and your hazard analysis has to account for it. Here's how to record water as the traceable input it is.
At one person and one product, a binder is a fine traceability system. The day a buyer, a lender, or an auditor asks to see your records, it stops being enough. Why the records you keep are what get a small food brand taken seriously as it grows.
You can run traceability out of your head at one employee. You can't at three shifts and a co-packer. The habit is cheapest to build before growth forces it, not after. What starting early actually looks like: four record-keeping habits worth putting in place before a buyer, an auditor, or a recall makes you wish you had, and why retrofitting a system under pressure costs more.
A supplier's recalled ingredient becomes your recall, on your clock, with your name on the label. Here is how to trace which finished batches used a recalled lot, and who received them, before you are forced to pull everything.
Most small producers land on a lot code by accident. FDA requires the code be unique within your records and says nothing about its format, which puts the weight on the record it points to. How to design one that survives a trace request.