A question you cannot quite answer
A customer asks which field the potatoes came from because they want to tell their friends. An easy question, and you probably know. Then a harder one: a supplier rings to say one batch of their cooked ham may have a problem and asks which of their deliveries you still have and what you have sold. Or your local authority asks about the beef you sold last Saturday: which animal, which abattoir, which cutting date.
The information exists. Kill numbers are on the paperwork from the abattoir. Supplier batch codes are on delivery notes. Field names are in the head of whoever harvested. But finding and linking them takes hours, and some links were never written down.
Why traceability is harder for a farm shop
A supermarket buys packaged products with batch codes and has systems to track them. A farm shop does something much more varied: own produce harvested daily, own animals sent to an abattoir and cut in-house, bought-in carcasses, local makers' products with hand-written batch dates, and a kitchen that combines ingredients into new products. Each route has its own paperwork, and they do not meet.
- Own produce comes from fields and harvests that are not labelled.
- Meat moves from animal to carcass to cuts with different identifiers at each step.
- Supplier batch codes are on delivery notes that get filed or lost.
- Kitchen products combine several batches of ingredients.
- The till records what sold, but not which batch.
What records you must keep, and for how long, is set by the rules that apply to your business and your local authority. We do not advise on those rules. We build records that make it quick to answer the questions they ask.
What weak traceability costs
When a supplier or authority asks a trace question, a slow answer means more product withdrawn than necessary, more time spent and more worry. If you cannot identify which batch was sold when, you may have to treat everything as affected. And the stories that sell farm shop products, this field, this herd, this beekeeper, are harder to tell with confidence.
There is also the everyday cost: staff unsure of the source of what they are selling, and customers who ask and get a vague answer.
The batch records we build
- A batch created whenever produce, meat or supplier goods come in: own harvest with field and date, carcasses with kill number and abattoir, supplier deliveries with their batch codes and dates, entered on a phone or tablet at the back door.
- Links from carcasses to the cuts made from them, recorded when the butcher labels cuts, and from ingredient batches to kitchen products, recorded when a batch is made.
- Batch codes printed on your own labels, counter tickets and packs of own produce, so the link travels with the product.
- Where products are sold by batch, the batch recorded at the till or at the scale, so you can see which batches sold on which day. Where that is not practical, the batch in stock on each day is used instead.
- A trace screen: search forward from a batch to everything made from it and the days it was on sale, or backward from a product to its sources.
- Records kept for as long as you decide, and exportable when someone asks.
| Question | How it is answered |
|---|---|
| Which field were these potatoes from? | Batch on the bag links to field and harvest date |
| Which animal was this steak from? | Cut label links to carcass and kill number |
| Do we have any of a supplier's batch? | Delivery batch search shows stock and sales |
| What went into this batch of pies? | Kitchen batch links to ingredient batches |
When a trace question arrives
The supplier phones about a batch of ham. You search the batch code, see that it arrived on Tuesday, was on the deli counter from Wednesday to Friday and that some remains in the chiller. You withdraw what is left and give the supplier the dates. It takes minutes.
Most days, traceability shows up in smaller ways. Staff can tell a customer which field their strawberries came from or which of your herd the beef is from. Your labels carry that story with confidence because it comes from the record.
Could you trace a product today?
- Supplier batch codes are on delivery notes that get filed away.
- Cuts on the counter are not linked to a specific carcass.
- Kitchen products do not record which ingredient batches went in.
- Answering a trace question would take hours.
- Staff give vague answers about where produce came from.