UK chilled, convenience and ready-to-eat food businesses are confident in their ability to manage product recalls, but new research suggests a significant gap between that confidence and the systems being used to support traceability.

Research from technology partner Balloon One found that 93% of food and beverage businesses believe they could manage a live recall quickly and accurately, while 78% say recalls and withdrawals are becoming more frequent.
However, the findings indicate that many businesses could face delays when attempting to identify affected products. Almost a quarter (24%) say it would take five hours or more to locate affected stock, while 25% still use spreadsheets to track batch and expiry information.

The research, Trace Against Time, also found that 77% of businesses would need to consult at least two separate systems, spreadsheets or records to manage a live recall. Only 24% said their traceability data was fully real time across warehouse, production and customer orders.

Craig Powell, managing director at Balloon One, said: “Most chilled food and beverage businesses tell us they have a recall plan, they test it regularly, and they trust it. They also tell us recalls are on the rise, so there’s clearly a paradox at play.

“It isn’t that recalls are badly managed, it’s that businesses have little oversight of the gaps in their own systems. When teams are manually reconciling data between production, warehouse management, QA and ERP, they’re exposing themselves to real commercial risk the moment they need to pull a product quickly and accurately.”

The research found that more than half (55%) of businesses have incomplete or inconsistent batch and lot information, while 42% said expiry or shelf-life data is not always visible in real time.

On average, businesses estimated it would take four hours to identify every affected batch, stock location and customer destination across their systems. For almost a quarter, the estimated time was five hours or more. Where batch information is linked directly to stock movement, however, the same exercise takes closer to ten minutes.

The frequency of issues affecting chilled and food-to-go products also emerged from the research. More than nine in ten businesses (92%) had recalled, withdrawn or investigated an issue involving sandwiches, wraps or food-to-go products during the previous 18 months. Chilled ready meals followed at 91%, with prepared salads at 89%.

Foreign material or physical contamination was the most frequently reported cause, cited by 56% of respondents. Undeclared allergens accounted for 40%, followed by labelling and packaging issues at 39% and chemical contamination at 37%.

The potential financial consequences add another dimension to the findings. Businesses estimated the total financial impact of a serious product recall or contamination incident at £545,249.

Poor visibility of expiry dates and shelf life has already had commercial consequences for some businesses, with 39% reporting customer complaints over the previous 12 months and 32.7% experiencing retailer chargebacks or penalties.

Product recall or withdrawal is now the sector’s third biggest operational concern, cited by 37% of businesses. Yet the research suggests that companies are more likely to attribute recall risk to external pressures than weaknesses in their own systems. Commercial pressure was identified by 51%, supply chain complexity by 46%, and shorter shelf lives and tighter delivery windows by 39%.

Powell said: “Supply chain complexity and disconnected systems are cut from the same cloth, and the thread running through both is a lack of visibility over batch and expiry data.

“As it gets harder to move products through the supply chain, businesses urgently need to audit how they’re managing that data. Without the right visibility, the safest decision in a live recall is to pull everything – this can mean you end up withdrawing far more stock than the problem warrants and absorbing the retailer penalties and lost sales that follow.

“Bringing it into one connected system is what lets you move quickly when a serious issue does land.”