Food traceability software records what went into every batch and where every batch went, so you can trace back from a finished pallet to its raw materials and forward from a supplier delivery to every customer who received it. CodeFish builds it for the operations, quality and leadership teams at Australian food manufacturers whose batch record still lives on paper and in the ERP. It captures the record on the floor as product is made, inside your quality management system. When a recall comes, you narrow it to the affected lots in minutes instead of pulling every product off the shelf.
Food Traceability Software
Food traceability software means you can answer a recall in an afternoon, not over a weekend.
Types of food traceability software
Most plants already run two or three of these. The trace breaks in the gaps between them.
ERP lot tracking
MYOB Advanced, SAP Business One, Pronto and Business Central track lots in stock and on invoices. You get the forward trace to customers, but rarely what happened on the line. See [ERP integration](/enterprise-integration/erp-integration).
Food safety and QMS apps
Safefood 360 and SafetyCulture hold HACCP checks, audits and corrective actions. Your evidence is in one place, but often not tied to the batch it belongs to.
Plant-floor batch capture
Lots consumed, yields, CCP results and changeovers recorded as product is made. This is the layer that is usually still on paper. See [MES](/enterprise-integration/mes-manufacturing-execution-system).
Warehouse scanning
Goods in and goods out scanned by lot and pallet, so the forward trace does not stop at the warehouse door. See [warehouse management](/enterprise-integration/wms-warehouse-management-system).
Labelling and coding
GS1 barcodes, batch codes and best-before dates printed from the batch record, not typed into a coder. Fewer mislabels, and every carton links back to its batch.
Recall and trace reporting
The forward and backward trace produced on demand from the data above. A mock recall becomes a report you run, not a weekend of folders.
What food traceability software has to record
Six records, and the recall is only as narrow as the weakest one. Ordered by how often they are the gap an audit finds.
Goods in, by lot
Every raw material and packaging delivery captured against a supplier lot, with the certificate of analysis attached. A batch record that names an ingredient but not the lot it came from cannot narrow a recall.
The batch record itself
What was made, when, on which line, by whom, from which lots, at what yield. Captured as production happens rather than transcribed from paper at the end of the shift, when the detail has already been rounded off.
Critical control points
Temperatures, metal detection, pH, checkweights and the corrective action when a check fails — recorded against the batch, with the out-of-spec result impossible to skip past silently.
Allergens and changeovers
What ran before, what cleaning was done between, and who signed it off. Allergen sequencing is where a paper system is most likely to be correct in practice and unprovable at audit.
Goods out, by customer
Which batch codes went on which pallets to which customer on which date. Without this the forward trace stops at the warehouse door and the recall widens to every customer you have.
The mock recall
Being able to run the trace on demand and produce the report, rather than assembling it from folders. Retailer and GFSI-aligned programs generally require this to be demonstrated within a set number of hours, which is the real test of the system.
How does traceability software relate to HACCP?
HACCP asks whether the process was in control. Traceability asks where the product came from and where it went. Both hang off the same batch record, so one system should capture both, or your team enters every batch number twice.
The Food Standards Code says you must be able to trace and recall. Retailers and certifiers set how fast. We build to the speed.
Should we buy food traceability software or build it?
Buy when your process fits a standard shape: discrete batches, fixed recipes and an ERP or QMS app that already covers most of the trace. Build when it does not, like blending, ageing, rework or co-packing, where a lot loses its identity partway through and off-the-shelf systems lose the thread. Most often the answer is to keep the ERP and food safety app you already run, and build only the plant-floor layer that captures the batch record properly. You pay for the gap, not a replacement.
How much does food traceability software cost?
The plant drives the cost, not the software.
Start with a $9,000 workshop
A fixed $9,000 + GST Rapid Insight Workshop follows one product from goods-in to dispatch and finds where the trace breaks.
Capture points drive the price
How many places on the floor record data, and whether line equipment can be read directly or needs an operator.
Clean data costs less
Tidy item and lot data shortens the build. Messy data is fixed first.
Fixed-price or Apex
A defined build is quoted fixed-price as an Amplify project. Changing ranges and customers suit an Apex partnership.
How a traceability project runs
Trace one product end to end
We follow a single product from supplier delivery to customer dispatch with the people who handle it, and record every form, label, spreadsheet and whiteboard it touches. The breaks in the chain are usually obvious within a day.
Capture the batch on the floor
The batch record is built first and put in front of operators, because a capture step that slows the line gets skipped and back-filled at the end of the shift. It runs alongside the paper record until the plant trusts it.
Run a mock recall against it
The system is proved by running the trace under time pressure, forwards and backwards, before it replaces anything. If it cannot produce the report from the data it holds, it is not finished.
How we deliver traceability software
Mobile App Development
App development in Adelaide for iOS, Android and cross-platform apps, built to a fixed price. Consumer products, enterprise tools and field apps.
Rapid Insight Workshop
We map how your business really runs — systems, costs, friction — and return a prioritised roadmap with a business case. $9,000 + GST, fixed.
Systems Integration
For operations businesses running five or more systems. We connect your ERP, CRM, warehouse and field systems so nobody retypes data, and keep them connected as a long-term partner.
Food traceability questions we get asked
That is the usual way these systems fail, and it is a design problem rather than a training problem. Capture on the floor has to be faster than the form it replaces — gloved hands, wet environments, a scan instead of a keyboard, and no screen that asks for information the operator does not have yet. If the paper is still being filled in a month after go-live, the software asked for too much.
Rework is where most traceability systems quietly break. Product held back and fed into a later run creates a lot with two parentages, and if the system cannot represent that, the trace stops at the rework step and the recall widens. Decide how rework, blending and part-pallets are represented before the build, because retrofitting it means re-recording history.
It passes an audit until it is tested. A spreadsheet can hold the records, but it cannot stop a batch being entered twice, cannot enforce that a CCP check happened before dispatch, and cannot be trusted to produce a full forward trace in the hours a mock recall allows. The failure is rarely that the data is missing — it is that nobody can assemble it fast enough.
No. Most Australian food manufacturers have an ERP that handles purchasing, stock and invoicing acceptably and a plant floor that is still on paper. The traceability layer sits between the two — capturing the batch record where the work happens and feeding the ERP — which is a far smaller project than an ERP replacement and considerably less risky.
Three to eight weeks for the first capture point running in the plant, once the process is agreed and access to the existing systems is available. The slow part is not the software — it is agreeing what happens when a check fails, when a lot code is missing, or when product is released before a result comes back. Those decisions are made in the workshop.
Where the equipment can be read, yes, and it is worth doing — checkweighers, metal detectors, temperature probes and coders often already produce the exact record a person is currently copying onto a form. Whether it is possible depends on the machine and its age, which is checked during the workshop rather than assumed in a quote.
It raises the standard. Co-packing means the traceability obligation belongs to someone else's brand and their recall procedure, and each customer is likely to want records in their own format and within their own timeframe. That is an argument for capturing the batch record once, in full, and generating each customer's report from it rather than keeping several parallel systems.
Four things: they walk the plant before quoting; they will tell you when an off-the-shelf system fits; they design capture for the floor rather than for the office; and they test the result with a mock recall instead of a demo. A partner who has never watched a changeover will build something that assumes the line stops when the software asks it to.