What is Lot Tracking in the Produce Industry?

Taking detailed accounts of the wares in your inventory is an important part of running a produce business. With the large amounts of produce that arrive daily at your warehouse, this can quickly become tiresome. Having a system that helps keep track of inventory can take a lot of the stress away. Lot tracking is an example of such a system.

What is lot tracking?

Also referred to as batch tracking, lot tracking is a system used in inventory management to follow the progress of raw materials that go through the production process. In the produce business, this system is used to track produce, starting from when they arrive at the store to when they are shipped to distributors.

This system allows distributors to keep track of where each batch is coming from, as well as which vendors receive certain goods. This simple process has a number of far-reaching benefits that should not be overlooked.

Benefits of lot tracking in the produce business

Lot tracking has various benefits that can vary depending on your unique industry. For the fresh produce industry, here are a few of those benefits: 

1. Easy inventory organization

This is the most basic benefit of lot tracking. With your produce arranged in batches and labeled, lot tracking keeps your inventory organized. This makes it much easier to keep stock of what you have in store, keeping track of what goes in and what goes out. The fact that each lot is labeled makes it easy to track where each lot has been shipped to. 

2. Achieves regulatory compliances

While lot tracking is not always mandatory, it is critical in the fresh produce industry. A deviation from produce quality standards in this field can have negative effects. Hence, regular inspections of produce businesses by governing bodies are necessary. Lot tracking is necessary for the inspection of distributors who have been found to not be in compliance with regulations; they may face heavy financial consequences.

3. Helps maintain product quality

Quality is an important part of the fresh produce business. Lot tracking helps ensure that only produce that meets your business or national quality standards gets shipped to your vendors. This prevents sub-quality lots from being shipped out. 

4. Helps handle contamination

Contamination can be a really big problem in the fresh produce business, one that should be handled as soon as possible. Lot tracking makes handling cases of lot contamination easier by making it easy to track the source of the contamination. It also helps ensure that contaminated produce is not released into the market.

5. Helps contain spoilage

It’s a well-known fact that fresh produce starts to spoil when it comes in contact with other spoiling produce. Lot tracking helps ensure that spoilage is contained within singular lots and reduces the spread of the damage to the other perishables in store.

6. Easier product recalls

Product recalls can be a serious pain if you have no idea which of your vendors got what. With lot tracking, you know exactly which vendor received which goods. This way, you can easily call back faulty goods on time before things get out of control.

Keeping track of all the lots that go through your business can be tedious work though, especially if your business is a large one. 

ERP systems can help you with handling this by providing lot tracking solutions that can help improve traceability. These software solutions provide even more unique benefits to your fresh produce business. These include:

• Simplified lot keeping process

Lot tracking is a detailed process. The more produce your company deals with, the more complex the process becomes. Lot tracking solutions help simplify this process by making it all fully automated, thereby reducing the stress involved.

• Reduced risk of human error

Keeping track of the hundreds of lots that come in and go out of your store (including where each lot is coming from and going to) can be very overwhelming. The more lots you have to manually track, the higher the chances of making a mistake. Lot tracking solutions help reduce the chances of making these errors by streamlining the tracking process.

• Better recordkeeping

Recordkeeping is an important part of the inventory process, but traditional paper documentation can only do so much. On the other hand, lot tracking solutions are more flexible and versatile. They are easy to follow and edit. What’s more, they can hold records of past lot tracking activities much better than any paper documentation system can. Not to mention they take up less space.

• Improved ease of access

Lot tracking services like those offered by ERP systems are online services. This offers your business a wide range of produce tracking benefits, including easy access to your lot’s history anywhere you are, right from the comfort of your personal devices. This way, you can obtain immediate insight into what you have in stock and what you need to stock up on without needing to physically be at the store. 

• All the data you need in one place

Whenever you need to make recalls, determine which produce is trending in the market and determine which suppliers are providing bad goods. Lot tracking solutions can be of use here. Since these solutions gather your data into one location, this makes it easy to access so that you can take the necessary actions.

Lot tracking offers numerous benefits to you as a produce distributor and is something you should consider implementing in your business. If it’s a system you are already making use of, you might want to consider employing the use of lot tracking solutions, especially those offered by produce industry-specific companies. These solutions provide industry-specific services, making them far more effective for lot tracking in the produce business.