Traceability and stock control

The opening picture shows the single most important habit in stock control: first in, first out, usually shortened to FIFO. The idea is simple. Stock is arranged so the oldest is at the front where you take from, and when a new delivery arrives it goes behind the older stock, never in front of it. That way you always use the oldest first, and food gets used while it is still well within date and not being pushed to the back and forgotten until it has gone off. The picture also shows the other half of the habit: anything found past its use-by date is not rotated or used, it is removed. FIFO keeps good stock moving in the right order, and removal takes bad stock out of the system entirely. Together they are how a kitchen or store avoids both waste and danger.

This is the most important distinction in the lesson, and confusing the two dates is a genuinely serious and common mistake. A use-by date is about safety. Food must not be used after its use-by date, because past that point it may be unsafe even if it looks and smells perfectly normal. That last part is the key: harmful bacteria do not always change how food looks, smells or tastes, so your senses cannot be trusted to judge a use-by date. It is a hard line, exactly like a critical limit. A best-before date is different. It is about quality, not safety. After a best-before date food may have lost some flavour or texture, but it is generally still safe to eat. So a best-before date is a guide you can use judgement around, while a use-by date is a rule you must never break. Never pass a use-by date, whatever the food looks like, and never throw away good stock just because it is a day past best-before.

Traceability only works if the information exists to trace, and creating that information is part of a food handler's job. Two habits matter most. First, label opened and decanted items with the relevant date. The moment food leaves its original packaging, it loses the date printed on that packaging, so if you open a container or decant something into another one, you label it with the date so its life is still tracked. An unlabelled tub in a fridge is a guess waiting to happen. Second, keep delivery and batch records: a note of what came in and its batch code. That record is what links an item on your shelf back to the exact delivery it arrived on. Neither habit feels urgent in the moment, but together they are what give food a history, and without a history an item is just an anonymous box that no one can vouch for.

Here is why all of it matters. Imagine a supplier issues a recall on a particular batch, because a problem has been found. In a business with good records, that batch code can be traced from the delivery it arrived on, through storage, into the dishes it was used in, so the business can find and remove every affected item quickly and precisely. In a business without records, the same recall is a nightmare of guesswork, and the safe response is often to throw away far more than necessary, or worse, to miss affected product entirely. Traceability is the ability to answer the question where did this come from and where did it go, and it is only possible because of the labelling and record habits from the previous slide. This is the point where the quiet, everyday paperwork of stock control suddenly becomes the thing that protects the public.

A supplier recalls batch B-4471 and the question is simple to ask and impossible to answer without records: where did that batch go. Open the delivery log and you learn six tubs came in on Tuesday. Open the storage labels and four of those tubs are still on the chilled shelf, each one carrying the batch code because someone labelled it. Open the prep sheet and the other two turn up inside Tuesday's chicken sauce, which is three trays now sitting in the chiller. Only when all three records are read does the batch add up to six, and only then can everything affected be pulled. This is what the traceability slide means in practice. The labelling and the delivery records feel like paperwork on the day you do them, and then one phone call from a supplier turns them into the only thing standing between a recall and a guess. Without them, the four tubs look like any other stock and nobody would ever connect the sauce back to the batch at all.

The scenario tests the use-by rule in the exact way it tends to be broken. You find a tub of cream past its use-by date by one day, and it looks and smells perfectly fine. The right answer is to remove it, because food past its use-by date must not be used. The tempting wrong answers all rest on the same error: trusting the look and smell of the food over the date. But a use-by date exists precisely because harmful bacteria can be present without any visible or smellable sign, so fine appearance proves nothing. Moving it to the front only makes sense for stock still in date. Keeping it another day on the belief that there is a hidden safety margin misunderstands what the date is: a hard safety line, not a soft target. Once a use-by date has passed, the food comes out, every time, regardless of how it seems.

The lesson in five lines. First in, first out means using the oldest stock first, with new stock going behind. Use-by is about safety and must never be passed, while best-before is about quality. Label opened and decanted items with the relevant date. Keep delivery and batch records, and remove any stock past its use-by date. And traceability, built from those labels and records, lets a business find and remove affected product quickly if something goes wrong.

This is the fourth of six lessons in Level 3, and every lesson is free to watch for as long as you need. When you are ready, the quiz proves what you know and earns a certificate recognised by TrustBite, an independent food safety recognition body. One payment covers the quiz and certificate for all three levels, so whichever level you buy first, the other two are included at no extra cost, and each certificate is valid for three years with renewal at 5 euros. No registration is needed to keep learning, and you only pay when you decide you are ready to be tested. If you are training a team, group options are available for both hospitality and production sites.

You can now keep stock rotating in the right order with first in first out, read use-by and best-before dates for what they really mean, label and record so food keeps its history, and understand how traceability lets a business act fast when a batch is recalled. The next lesson deals with the moment a specific item turns out to be wrong: handling nonconforming food, which means putting suspect food on hold, reporting it, never hiding a problem, and following the escalation route to someone who can act. Every lesson stays free and you can rewatch any of them. When you are ready, the quiz earns a certificate recognised by TrustBite, and one payment covers all three levels.