Food & Beverage
Inventory & production built for food and beverage makers
Perishable ingredients, batch recipes, and recall obligations leave no room for spreadsheet guesswork. IEMSuite tracks every lot from receiving to the customer who received it.
The challenges in food & beverage
Ingredients expire before they are used, and near-expiry stock ships by accident.
A supplier issue means tracing every affected batch and customer - fast.
Recipe yields and true cost per batch are invisible until month-end.
How IEMSuite helps
Every capability below is a feature that ships today - mapped to what food & beverage operations need most.
FEFO expiry control
Every ingredient and finished lot carries an expiry date. FEFO auto-allocates the soonest-to-expire stock first, so nothing ages out on the shelf.
Recipes & batch production
Define multi-ingredient recipes with quantities, units, and standard wastage. Each production batch consumes its components from stock automatically.
Incoming-ingredient QC
Inspect each ingredient lot against your test parameters; hold or quarantine non-conforming stock with an NCR before it enters production.
Recall in minutes
Trace any lot forward to every batch and order it touched, or backward to the supplier receipt - recall prep in minutes, not days.
How a batch moves through food & beverage
- 1
Ingredient receipt
Each delivery becomes a lot with its own supplier, expiry date and unit cost. Cost is frozen at receipt, so a later price change cannot rewrite the margin on batches already made.
- 2
Incoming QC
The lot sits in PENDING_QC. Inspection against your parameters either releases it or quarantines it with an NCR.
- 3
Batch production
A recipe consumes ingredient lots by FEFO, so the soonest-to-expire stock goes first and the finished batch inherits the genealogy of everything in it.
- 4
Shipping and recall
Allocation links the finished lot to the order. That link is what turns a recall from a week of spreadsheets into a query.
Standards food & beverage operations work under
IEMSuite is not certified against any of these. What it does is hold the records they ask you to be able to produce.
FSMA Rule 204 (Food Traceability Rule)
- What it asks for
- For foods on the FDA Traceability List, a record of key data elements at each critical tracking event - receiving, transformation, shipping - retrievable and sortable within 24 hours of a request.
- Where the record comes from
- Lot receipts, production batches and order allocations are stored as linked events, so a lot number resolves to its supplier receipt on one side and every order it shipped in on the other. You export that trail yourself; IEMSuite does not file anything with the FDA.
HACCP critical control points
- What it asks for
- A documented hazard analysis, monitoring at each critical control point, and a corrective-action record whenever a limit is breached.
- Where the record comes from
- QC inspections carry your own test parameters and pass/fail limits. A failed inspection quarantines the lot and opens an NCR, which is the corrective-action record with a timestamp and a named actor. Defining the CCPs themselves is your job, not the software.
21 CFR Part 117 preventive controls
- What it asks for
- Supplier verification and evidence that incoming ingredients were checked before use in production.
- Where the record comes from
- Ingredient lots land as PENDING_QC and cannot be allocated to a batch until inspection passes, so "used before it was checked" is blocked rather than audited after the fact.
Audit-ready by design
Lot genealogy, immutable stock history, and QC records give you an audit-ready traceability trail for food-safety reviews.
Food & Beverage inventory questions
How do I trace a food recall back to the supplier?
You need the chain to be recorded in both directions before the recall, not reconstructed after it. Trace backward from the finished lot to the production batch, from the batch to each ingredient lot it consumed, and from the ingredient lot to the supplier receipt. Trace forward from that same ingredient lot to every batch and every customer order it reached. If any hop lives in a spreadsheet, that hop is where the days go.
What is FEFO and when should food manufacturers use it instead of FIFO?
FIFO ships the oldest stock first by receipt date. FEFO ships the soonest to expire first by expiry date. They differ whenever a later delivery has a shorter remaining shelf life, which happens constantly with produce and dairy. Use FEFO for anything with an expiry date; FIFO will quietly leave short-dated stock on the shelf until it is waste.
Do small food producers need traceability software or is a spreadsheet enough?
A spreadsheet holds the data but cannot enforce the sequence. It will let someone allocate an uninspected lot, edit a cost after the fact, or ship past-expiry stock, and it leaves no record that any of it happened. The threshold is not company size, it is whether one person can still hold the whole chain in their head. Past a few dozen lots a month, that stops being true.
How do I calculate the true cost of a production batch?
Take the actual unit cost of each ingredient lot consumed, at the price you paid for that specific lot, not an average or a current price. Add labour and any overhead you allocate per batch, then divide by the yield you actually got rather than the theoretical yield. The gap between theoretical and actual yield is usually where the margin went.