GS1 Lot Traceability

Outbreaks of foodborne illness from E coli, Salmonella, and other pathogens continue to make headlines and have sparked major recalls of meat, eggs, and produce. Public concerns and regulatory pressures are prompting many food manufacturers and distributors to implement new and better ways to quickly identify and remove unsafe food products from the nation’s food supply.

The Food and Drug Administration’s Food Protection Plan launched in 2007 is intended to increase food safety by focusing on a combination of prevention, intervention, and response. The FDA expects food manufacturers and distributors to implement ever more rigorous food handling and anti-contamination methods. The FDA also wants food distributors to effectively manage the data required to support the FDA’s own prevention efforts of risk-based inspections, sampling, and surveillance. Labeling food product cases with lot codes and logging these codes along with date and handling time stamps as products pass from food manufacturer, to distributor, to retail outlet to consumer, is a key enabler of the FDA plan.

Similarly, the Produce Traceability Initiative, supported by the Produce Marketing Association and other groups, seeks broad adoption of electronic tracking of all cases of produce by 2012. These and other food safety initiatives depend on standardized industry approaches to product traceback and rapid and efficient traceability systems. This initiative supports the global standards defined by GS1, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the design and implementation of global standards and solutions to improve the efficiency and visibility of supply and demand chains globally and across sectors.

Because food recalls are all too common, it pays for food distributors to have a plan and process for managing them when they occur. Being able to quickly and accurately trace back the location of any recalled products will help a food distributor limit the scale, scope, and expense of any recall and help protect the well being of the public.

Consider the scenario where a food manufacturer isolates a production or compliance issue down to the lot level and issues a product recall. If a distributor receiving items from the recalled lot can trace every case based on lot number, then only the product cases identified in the recall will have to be located and controlled. If the warehouse or delivery location of every case by lot number is known, the time, effort and costs to execute any recall will be minimized. Without lot traceability, all or more of that product type might well have to be included in the recall for compliance reasons.

Food Freshness

The perishable nature of food products demands that distributors move products out of their inventory before they spoil or lose value for exceeding freshness dates. In the daily hubbub of a busy food service DC, it is not uncommon for newly received products to be put away without rotating food products to ensure that older products are picked first. For example, instead of moving older stock to be physically in front the newer stock, the busy worker buries the older stock. When that product type is next picked, the selector takes the product in front without detecting the older stock behind it. Or, a partial pallet might languish as selectors pull only full pallets.

Case-level lot traceability systems can provide visibility into any build up of cases that need to ship to avoid losing value due to aging freshness dates. Syntelic can direct selectors to pick products by lot and their location, according to first-expired-first-out (FEFO) rules, to ensure that the oldest products are picked first. Workers must verify the location of products putaway, replenished, or otherwise moved, and at the same time verify lot numbers based on whole pallet tags or individual case labels for less-than pallet amounts. Syntelic’s advanced dashboards and reporting features can help managers monitor inventory levels by freshness dates and spot any trends to prevent excessive inventories of products approaching expiration dates.

Managing Inventory Loss

Being able to trace and track all inventory by date coded lots as well as by all product movements and work assignments can reveal patterns of loss due to missed picks, damage or outright employee theft. Reducing inventory losses by identifying their root causes and taking corrective actions improves financial performance.

Traceability at the Case Level

Most food manufacturers apply standardized labels to cases and pallets to identify product type, manufacturer, packing configuration, and date-specific lot number. Typically these labels are formatted using serialized numbers developed by the GS1 US food industry consortium. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are another less common way the contents of cases can be identified. Traceability systems use the information provided by manufacturers and will append it with additional information such as the ID of personnel last handling the cases, current warehouse location, and added time and date stamps. Voice and bar code scanning technologies can aid in automated collection and retrieval of this information.

Product items within cases may also bear serialized bar code labels with similar information, however item-level traceability has many practical challenges that prohibit its widespread adoption at this time. An individual product may not offer sufficient room to affix a label, or in the case of variable-weight produce harvested in the field, include any packaging at all. Moreover, having to label individual items would prove prohibitively expensive for manufacturers by slowing down production.

While accurate standardized labels on every case is a requirement for case-level lot traceability, some food manufacturers only employ pallet labels that include lot information. When pallets are broken up, an individual case’s lot ID may well be lost. Also, some manufacturer’s case labels may not conform to industry standards or prove difficult to read.

An accurate case-level lot traceability system must employ a system for efficiently creating new labels that include lot IDs when cases lack them, as product is received into the warehouse or at the point when cases are separated from a pallet bearing the case’s lot ID.

In Conclusion

To promote food quality and safety, food service distributors can deploy a system to track and trace food products by lot number and date codes. As a function of an inventory or warehouse management system, lot traceability enables a distributor to identify the location and count of product lots currently in the warehouse or previously shipped.