3 Ways Food Distributors Can Prepare Their Supply Chains for Recalls

Food recalls in 2024 were triple what they were in 2022. That number is eye-popping to begin with, but it’s even more startling when you realize that the average cost to the manufacturer for a food recall is upwards of $10 million. And that’s just in direct costs—recalls also have a negative impact on brand perception and can affect sales in the short and long term.

While these events mostly originate with manufacturers, it’s often the food distributors that they work with further down the supply chain that have to step up and make effective recalls possible. These events can impact every part of the supply chain, and if you’re not prepared to tackle your end of the process quickly and efficiently you can run into added costs and disruptions elsewhere in the value stream. 

Luckily, disruption and chaos don’t have to be the norms when it comes to recalls. Sure, you hope that it’s never going to happen to a brand that you distribute, but if and when it happens there are steps that you can take to prepare for a smooth, efficient recall process. 

How Are Food Recalls Impacting Distributors?

For food producers and distributors, high profile food recalls and new reporting rules at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have put the spotlight squarely on traceability. 

While manufacturers certainly feel the brunt of the impacts when there are widespread or high profile food recalls, the distributors who work with them are often caught in the middle. They need to be able to provide traceability for what units went to what stores or restaurants at what times. Locations, lot numbers, production dates, and other tracing data are table stakes—the real goal is to have that information at your fingertips in a usable form so you can take action quickly. 

What Are the Key Tactics for Fighting Food Recalls as a Distributor?

When it comes to tackling the dreaded food recall, the best offense is a good defense. You don’t want to be implementing new tactics to boost your visibility and agility when it happens—you want those capabilities to already be there. 

Visibility, Visibility, Visibility

There’s no getting around the importance of visibility and traceability across the entire delivery and distribution process. You want to be able to see where every pallet or case moving through your warehouse has been, where it’s going, and when it arrived at its destination. This way, when a recall strikes you can quickly identify where the stock is out in the world. 

To make this a reality, you need to focus on visibility and traceability at every stage of the delivery process. A best practice here is to make sure you have GS1 compliant capabilities every time you scan a barcode. By adhering to these standards, you help ensure that items can be traced quickly and accurately. 

Proof of delivery can also be crucial here—especially for deliveries where the driver may have been dropping off pallets at a loading dock to be unloaded later in the day or otherwise didn’t interact with the staff at the customer site. You want to make sure you have the ability to access photographic proof of what was delivered where at any time. 

Reduce Delivery-Related Data Silos

Here, it’s valuable to take stock of what we really mean by visibility. It’s not just about having the data—it’s about how easy or difficult it is to find that data. If you have all of the date and timestamps for which pallets were scanned off which truck at which location, but it takes you hours of digging through your delivery management system to find them, that’s not true visibility. Likewise, if the route planner who put the routes together is the only one who can actually decipher what went on during the delivery based on the data in the system, visibility is still a long way off. 

That’s why one of the most important best practices for preparing yourself for potential food recalls is to reduce silos and ensure that data is not just collected but easy to access at the right time. A lot of the work here comes down to ensuring that your technology is set up to empower users across roles to get the information they need when they need it. UX is a big component here—after all, unintuitive design can really slow people down, especially in a stressful situation—but so data processing. You need a system that can handle huge amounts of data being collected every day without becoming virtually unusable. Operational complexity is no excuse for silos. 

Take Stock of Your Tech Stack

Like we hinted at above, these best practices for mitigating food recall headaches are going to be supported by your technology in a big way. Individual software solutions like your last mile delivery software or your ERP need to provide you with GS1 tracking, delivery visibility, connectivity between drivers and back-office staff, etc. But they also need to integrate seamlessly with one another so you can follow the journey of each product for the entire length of your delivery chain. 

When it comes to recalls, you want to make sure you have a single source of truth that you can rely on. You also want to be sure that the other solutions in your tech stack are reflecting that same data, and that you can drill down to details as needed without having to do a lot of manual data processing work. This last part is key: you need to be able to do all of that and more quickly. 

When you take a step back and look at your technology stack holistically, is it really providing you that level of traceability, connectivity, and visibility across the board? Or are there components of your technology stack that either can’t play well with other solutions or just aren’t getting the job done? 

How DispatchTrack Can Help Food Distributors Grapple with Recalls

DispatchTrack prides itself on partnering with a number of top food distributors around the globe to help them manage their last mile delivery and distribution processes. We’ve helped businesses like Wismettac, Quirch Foods, S Bertram, and many others reduce their routing time by 50% or more, decrease distribution costs, and gain total delivery visibility within a single solution. 

We’re committed to helping food distributors improve their posture against food recalls as well, which is why we’ve launched GS1 barcode scanning within our platform to enable scanning GS1 standard Location and Item barcodes during the last mile delivery journey—customers can capture GTIN, Product Lot, and Production Date information, enhancing item level traceability to the final destination. 

DispatchTrack also provides its food industry customers with capabilities for catch weight for pricing, segmenting trucks into separate compartments (frozen, dry, refrigerated), and on-the-spot price adjustment capabilities for drivers. This is on top of powerful routing technology that enables you to create more efficient routes in radically less time—all while managing customer delivery experience and providing visibility into deliveries for all roles and functions. 

To learn more about our food distribution capabilities, check our food distribution solution here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/industries/food-beverage