4 Steps to Create Excellent Food Product Traceability Procedures

From cherished childhood recipes to weekend comfort meals, food is more than sustenance—it’s a connection to who we are and where we come from. That’s why every bite should come with confidence that what we eat is safe, responsibly sourced and handled with care through every step—seed to store shelf, farm to fork. But in today’s food and beverage industry, that confidence depends on one critical capability: total food traceability. 

Without it, a single unknown can escalate into a costly recall, reputational damage or worse—a public health crisis. And consumers know it. In fact, 73% of shoppers say traceability influences their purchase decisions, and 71% of those who find it very important are willing to pay a premium for it. Thus, transparency isn’t a trend—it’s an expectation. 

Excellent food product traceability does more than build trust. It boosts brand loyalty, ensures faster responses when issues arise and opens doors to new markets. Yet many food manufacturers still rely on outdated, fragmented systems that can’t keep pace with modern production or supply chains. 

With food traceability regulations raising the bar on recordkeeping and responsiveness, now is the time to upgrade to a robust, digital, end-to-end traceability process. After all, safeguarding your business starts with safeguarding the people you serve. 

So, how do you modernize your traceability strategy to meet these rising expectations? In this blog, we’ll walk you through five essential steps to optimize your food product traceability procedure—from choosing the right software to enabling cross-functional alignment.  

1. Lay the Foundation With a Digital Platform 

The first step in establishing your traceability procedures for food safety will be to find the right system to use. Paper-based means don’t cut it in today’s day and age, so you’ll need to look for a fully digital solution—and it’s critical that whichever you select is tailored to food and beverage businesses like yours. 

The gold standard on this front is a food enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. These comprehensive platforms serve a number of different key functions, not the least of which is to effectively implement a robust traceability plan. 

Here are the key advantages of using an industry-specific food and beverage ERP for traceability: 

• Ability to define any number of fields for different kinds of raw material and finished product information, including lot numbers, country of origin, variety, quantity, expiration date and more 

• Integrations with smart devices, including barcode scanners and IoT-enabled equipment 

• Real-time updates based on the latest data 

• Ease of access, with an intuitive user interface and—in the case of cloud deployments—mobile access 

While this initial measure may require investments of time, effort and funds from the exploratory research stages through the go-live date for your system, it’s crucial that you have the right technology in place if you really want to excel in traceability.