One step back, one step forward

The whole principle in one sentence

For anything you handle, you should be able to say who supplied it and who you supplied it to.

That is it. Everything else is implementation. A business that can answer those two questions can bound an incident to a batch. A business that cannot has to treat every complaint as potentially affecting everything it has made, because it has no evidence to the contrary.

Which FSSAI tier you fall under

Food businesses in India sit in one of three tiers, set by turnover and by the nature of the operation. Basic registration covers the smallest operators. A State licence covers the middle band. Central licensing applies to the largest, to importers, and to those operating across multiple states.

The thresholds are specified by FSSAI and have been revised before, so confirm the current bands against the FSSAI site or with your consultant rather than against a figure someone quoted you. What does not change is that record-keeping obligations rise with the tier.

Capture it at receiving or not at all

Traceability fails whenever it is a separate task performed later. It survives when the batch is captured at goods receipt, because that is a moment that already exists in the day and somebody is already writing something down.

Anything that requires a person to go back at the end of a shift and reconstruct which sack went into which batch will be guessed, and a guessed traceability record is worse than none because it is trusted.

Test it before you need it

Pick a finished item at random. Trace it back to its incoming batches and forward to where it went. Time yourself.

If it takes more than a few minutes on a quiet afternoon with nobody shouting, it will not work during an actual incident, when the phone is ringing and somebody wants an answer now. Most businesses that try this the first time are surprised by how long it takes.