What is reverse traceability and why do you need it?
While traceability follows a product’s journey from entry (purchases) to exit (sales), reverse traceability does the opposite: it starts from the final dish a customer has eaten or that has gone out in a dispatch, and travels backwards to find out exactly which raw materials, from which source suppliers, make up that product. This process is your emergency tool for health alerts, food poisoning or quality complaints.
Step-by-step: trace a product in reverse (reverse traceability)
To understand reverse traceability in tspoonlab, we’ll look at two cases:
Traceability of a defective product in a restaurant with POS sales
Practical example: your tinned-goods supplier issues an urgent health recall of a specific batch of Crushed tomato due to a packaging defect. The information they can give us is that they sold us this batch on Tuesday 2 June. Thanks to tspoonlab’s batch record, you can resolve this crisis:
The first step, once you know a product is defective, is to check which recipes and dishes contain it. To do so, go to "Offer" and click "Products". Then type the product in the search box and select it.
Look for the "In recipes & dishes" section and click the eye icon to open the recipe(s) or dish(es) where the product is used.
Once inside the Tomato sauce recipe record, look for the "In recipes & dishes" section to find which dishes you must pull from sale (in our example, Lasagne and Shakshuka).
Once you’ve stopped selling the contaminated dishes, look for the production batches affected by the defective product’s batch. To do so, go to the Crushed tomato product record via the shortcut button above the recipe name.
Inside the product record, look for the "Used in productions" section and enter the defective product’s purchase date in year.month.day format in the batch search box.
Once you’ve filtered the productions by the product batch, you’ll have the contaminated productions. Click the eye icon to open the affected productions.
On each affected production’s record, you can get the batch number in the production information list.
In the example we have already stopped selling the affected recipes and dishes, accessed the defective product’s batch and located the productions at risk. Now it only remains to:
Check whether any defective product remains in the store: using the QR labels printed at goods reception, we can confirm whether any product with the affected batch number remains.
Check whether any contaminated productions remain in the kitchens: using the QR labels printed at production, we can confirm whether any productions with the affected batch number remain.
Remove the contaminated goods from circulation: we can remove and, finally, write off the defective product as waste.
Claim the financial loss: after writing off productions and product, we’ll have the total cost removed from our stores to claim from the supplier.
Reverse traceability in a production center or hotel due to a health inspection
Practical example: you have a health inspection; the inspector picks a produced item at random, for example Tomato sauce. They ask for its latest sales and tell you that customer X reported the product was in poor condition and you must stop selling the whole batch. You then have to trace all the products used in this recipe and check batches, expiry dates and delivery notes of every product in its composition. Thanks to tspoonlab’s batch record, you can resolve this crisis:
First, check the customer’s sale to get the batch of the produced item. Go to "Management", click "Sales" and select the relevant sale in the search box.
Once you’ve located the product within the sale, you can get the batches of the production sent and start tracing the products used in it.
With the production batch number(s), you can (via the eye icon) open the affected recipe record.
Once inside the recipe record — in the example, Tomato sauce — look for the "Latest productions" section and enter the defective item’s batch in year.month.day format in the batch search box.
Once you’ve filtered the productions by the product batch, you’ll have the contaminated productions. Click the eye icon to open the affected productions.
On each affected production’s record, you can get the batch number of each product used in the contaminated production.
The inspector will then ask for the delivery note of one of these products. Note the batch number used and simply click the eye icon to go to the product record.
Inside the product record, go to the "Recent purchases" section and find the batch number in the list. Click the eye icon to go to that batch’s purchase.
Once inside the orders folder, select the order and open the delivery note by clicking "Delivery note".
In the example, we have located the batch of the production selected by the inspector, accessed the batch list of the products used in the recipe and obtained their corresponding delivery notes. It would now remain to:
Check whether any defective product remains in the store, using the QR labels printed at goods reception.
Check whether any affected productions remain in the kitchens, using the QR labels printed at production.
📌 Note: This reverse trace can be done in both FIFO mode and FEFO mode.
Conclusion and access to the modules
Reverse traceability is not just a safety measure; it is a tool that protects your brand’s reputation and your customers’ health against any surprise, and gives you full control in the event of a health inspection. With this article, we close the traceability collection in tspoonlab.
We encourage you to read the different articles in this collection independently, according to the area of your operation you need to set up or refine.
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