Food and beverage manufacturing ERP in Australia: traceability, batch and recall

If you make or pack food and beverage product in Australia, traceability is not a nice-to-have you bolt on later. Under the Food Standards Code, you need to know what went into a batch, where every unit of that batch ended up, and you need a written plan to pull it back. The day the phone rings about a contamination or an undeclared allergen, the question is brutally simple: how fast can you isolate the affected lot and contact everyone who received it?

Most growing food manufacturers answer that question with spreadsheets, paper batch sheets, and an accounting package that was never designed to track a lot of yoghurt. This post walks through what FSANZ Standard 3.2.2 actually requires, what forward and backward traceability and a mock recall look like in practice, why batch and expiry control sits outside finance software, and how an operations layer fills the gap.

What FSANZ Standard 3.2.2 actually requires

Food Standards Australia New Zealand sets the rules through the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code. Standard 3.2.2 (Food Safety Practices and General Requirements) applies to food businesses and covers receipt, storage, processing, packaging and the handling of food generally. Two obligations matter most for traceability.

First, a food business must keep records that let product be traced. In practice that means you can identify the food you received, who you received it from, and who you supplied it to, one step back and one step forward through the chain.

Second, a food business must have a written recall plan and must be able to actually execute it. This is the part operators most often under-build. Having a plan in a binder is not the same as being able to run it under pressure.

• One step back: for every input, which supplier, which delivery, which date
• One step forward: for every output lot, which customers, which quantities, which dispatch
• A written recall plan that names roles, contacts, decision triggers and notification steps
• Evidence the plan works, which is where a mock recall comes in

A note on scope: certification and compliance are the operator's responsibility, not a software badge. OpsUI supports the workflows that make 3.2.2 traceability and a recall plan executable. It does not make your business "3.2.2 certified" on its own, and no software can.

Forward and backward traceability, and the mock recall

Traceability has two directions and you need both. Backward traceability answers "what is in this batch and where did it come from". Backward, you trace a finished lot back through every ingredient lot, every raw material delivery, and every supplier. Forward traceability answers "where did this batch go". Forward, you trace an input lot through to every finished batch it touched and on to every customer, marketplace order and dispatch that received it.

The link between the two is the batch or lot record. If a single contaminated ingredient delivery is implicated, backward tracing tells you which raw lots are suspect; forward tracing then tells you every finished batch that consumed those raw lots and every destination they shipped to. Without that two-way link recorded at the point of production, you are guessing, and in a recall you cannot afford to guess.

A mock recall is the rehearsal. You pick a finished lot, start the clock, and walk the full trace as if it were real: identify the batch, list every input, list every customer who received it, calculate quantities outstanding, and draft the notifications. Retailers and second-party auditors frequently ask for mock recall results, and a common expectation is that you can account for a high percentage of affected product within a tight window, often a couple of hours.

• Pick a lot at random and trace it end to end against the clock
• Reconcile quantity produced against quantity shipped, sold and remaining on hand
• Capture the time taken and the percentage of product accounted for
• Keep the result as evidence for your auditor and your own continuous improvement

If running that exercise today means a half-day of cross-referencing spreadsheets and ringing the dispatch team, that is the gap. The trace should be a query, not an archaeology dig.

Batch, lot and expiry: why FEFO beats a date in a spreadsheet

Perishable and dated stock is governed by expiry, not by purchase order sequence. First-expired-first-out (FEFO) means you pick and ship the stock that will go out of date soonest, regardless of when it arrived. Get it wrong and you ship short-dated product, fail a retailer's minimum-remaining-life requirement, or write off stock that timed out at the back of the rack.

Doing FEFO properly requires that every unit of stock carries its batch and expiry from receipt, through storage, through production consumption, to dispatch. That is a stock-level attribute the system has to enforce at pick time, not a date someone eyeballs on a carton. We cover the practical difference between this and plain FIFO in /blog/fefo-vs-fifo-au.

• Capture batch and expiry at receiving, against the supplier and delivery
• Enforce FEFO at pick so the soonest-to-expire stock leaves first
• Block or quarantine stock that is out of date, on hold, or failed QC
• Carry the batch through production so finished goods inherit a traceable genealogy

For cold-chain and temperature-sensitive lines, the expiry and batch discipline pairs with handling and storage controls; we go deeper on that in /solutions/cold-chain-au.

Allergen control as part of traceability

Australia has strict allergen labelling and declaration rules, and undeclared allergens are one of the most common causes of food recalls. Allergen control is a traceability problem as much as a labelling one: you need to know which allergens are present in which ingredient lots, which finished batches inherited them, and that the right controls (segregation, sequencing, cleandown between runs) were recorded.

When allergen status is an attribute of the batch and flows through the genealogy, an allergen-driven recall is the same trace as any other: identify the implicated input, find every finished lot that consumed it, find every customer. The alternative, reconstructing it from memory and labels after the fact, is exactly the scenario the recall plan exists to prevent.

• Record allergen attributes against ingredient lots, not just product specs
• Carry allergen status into finished-batch genealogy automatically
• Log changeover and cleandown steps as part of the batch record
• Trace an allergen incident with the same forward and backward query as any recall

Why Xero and MYOB cannot do batch tracking

This is where a lot of food businesses get stuck. Xero, MYOB and NetSuite are finance systems. They are very good at invoices, GST, payroll and the general ledger. They are not built to track a lot of product through receipt, storage, production and dispatch with batch and expiry attributes attached to each unit.

Your accounting system records that you bought 500 kg of an ingredient and sold a quantity of finished goods. It does not record that delivery LOT-A2291 expiring on a given date was consumed into production batch BCH-0457, which became 1,240 units that shipped across four customer orders and two marketplace channels. That genealogy, the thing a recall depends on, simply is not a concept the ledger holds.

• Finance software tracks value and tax, not lot genealogy or expiry by unit
• It has no FEFO pick logic, no quarantine state, no batch-to-customer trace
• Bolting batch tracking onto a ledger with spreadsheets reintroduces the manual gap
• The fix is an operations layer that owns batch, expiry and traceability, sitting alongside finance

The honest framing: you do not need to rip out your accounting system to get traceability. You need the operations layer that finance software was never meant to be, connected to the ledger you already run.

When a dedicated food MES or QMS is the better fit

To be fair about it, an operations-layer ERP is not always the whole answer. If you run high-speed, highly regulated processing with in-line sensors, recipe-level process control and deep statistical process monitoring, a purpose-built manufacturing execution system or a specialised food quality management suite may do things a general operations platform will not. Very large multi-site processors with mature systems may also already have this covered.

The operations-layer approach fits best for the large middle: growing food and beverage manufacturers, co-packers and distributors who have outgrown spreadsheets, need real batch and expiry traceability and an executable recall, and want it connected to the finance system they already use rather than buried inside a multi-year, five-figure implementation. If that is you, the gap is operational, not financial, and that is exactly the gap to close first.

How OpsUI fits

Food and beverage traceability lives in the operations layer, so that is where OpsUI puts it: batch and expiry captured at receiving, FEFO enforced at the pick, full forward and backward lot genealogy from supplier delivery through production to customer and channel, and a recall trace that runs as a query instead of a half-day spreadsheet hunt. The relevant modules, bought a la carte, are receiving-inbound, inventory-management, production-manufacturing, quality-control and order-management, with returns-management for the recovery side of a recall. To be clear on responsibility: OpsUI supports the Standard 3.2.2 workflows and your written recall plan; the certification and compliance remain yours.

Keep your existing finance system, Xero, MYOB or NetSuite, as the ledger and add OpsUI as the operations layer on top, so you get batch tracking and recall readiness without migrating your accounts. Bidirectional NetSuite sync runs in production today; Xero and MYOB sync is wired during rollout via the finance-accounting module. Flat modular pricing from A$399/module/mo, full breakdown at /pricing.

If you want to see the food and beverage workflows end to end, start at /solutions/food-and-beverage, and for temperature-sensitive lines see /solutions/cold-chain-au. To weigh expiry-driven picking properly, /blog/fefo-vs-fifo-au breaks down FEFO against FIFO. When you are ready to pressure-test it against your own products and a mock recall, book a walkthrough at /book-demo.