One-up, one-back

One-up, one-back is the baseline traceability rule in most food regimes. You must be able to say, for anything you handle, who you got it from and who you passed it to. One step up the chain, one step down. You are not asked to trace a tomato to its field, only to name your immediate supplier and your immediate customer, and to do it quickly.

“Quickly” is the part that decides whether your records are good enough. Authorities generally expect an answer in hours, not days.

What the rule asks you to hold

• Incoming. What arrived, how much, when, from whom, under which of their lot codes.
• Outgoing. What left, how much, when, to whom, under which of your lot codes.
• The link between them. Which incoming lots went into which outgoing ones.

The first two are the easy half; most people already have delivery notes and invoices. The third is where paper systems fail, because the link is made on the production floor and written down later, if at all.

Why the middle link is the hard one

A delivery arrives and is poured into a batch alongside three others. That batch fills 240 jars, which leave over six weeks in eleven orders. Reconstructing which jars carry that delivery means reading a production log, a stock sheet and a set of invoices together, and being sure nobody wrote the wrong date.

Recording the link as it happens turns that reconstruction into a lookup.

How BatchDash keeps it

Drawing stock for a run records the exact vendor lots taken. Completing it books the output under your own lot code. Shipping a sales order draws from a specific lot of finished stock.

That gives a chain of records rather than a chain of inferences, and tracing a lot walks it in both directions: from a delivery forward to every jar it reached, or from a jar back to the vendor it came from.

Some regimes ask for more than the baseline. Certain foods in the United States carry additional record requirements under FSMA, and cosmetics in the EU need a product information file rather than a trace as such. The underlying records are the same ones; what changes is what you have to hand over and how fast.

The pitch version is on the traceability page.