By Erin Johnson, FAPC Business and Marketing Client Coordinator

Consumers are hearing more and more about products being recalled because of mislabeling or safety issues. With stories of recalls in the news today, it is important for producers to know where their finished products are going after they leave their manufacturing plants.

Your first thought may be, “How do I trace my product from production to store?” You also may be asking, “How do I develop this system?”

One common way is to use a batch code identification system. This is accomplished by either using the date and time of production to identify the product, or the code date or best by date.

Once you have developed a system to use, you must be able to follow your product after it leaves your facility. Let’s look at an example.

You have 300 cases of product produced from three different batches, labeled A, B and C. Each batch produced 100 cases. You have orders that account for 200 cases with shipment to 5 different locations.

This is where you need to know the product from which batch was shipped to which location. You should be able to track the product that was shipped to the final locations back to the batch it originated.

You still have 100 cases remaining to be shipped from the warehouse. After consulting your coding system, you find the remaining cases in the warehouse are from batch C.

Now, you need to determine which locations received product from batch A and B. Shipping records show 50 cases were sent to location 1; of those cases all were produced from batch A. The remaining 50 cases from batch A were sent to location 2. The final three locations received product from batch B.

Now that you know where the product was sent, you can notify the locations that received the product in question and arrange to pick up the product.

Please note not every detail of conducting a recall was included in the above example.

Having a tracking system that you can use to assist in tracing out-going product back to time of production is highly beneficial. It is important to have a plan in place in case a recall is needed.

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Oklahoma State University is a modern land-grant university that prepares students for success. OSU has more than 36,000 students across its five-campus system and more than 25,000 on its combined Stillwater and Tulsa campuses, with students from all 50 states and around 120 nations. Established in 1890, Oklahoma State has graduated more than 260,000 students who have been serving Oklahoma and the world for 125 years.