Food & Beverage
Cold-Chain Calm for High-Stakes Food & Beverage Supply Chains
DataShip helps food & beverage manufacturers, co-packers, and brands manage shelf life, traceability, production, and distribution with one unified data backbone—from plant to plate.
12-week QuickStart · Food & Beverage supply chain specialists
BEFORE DATASHIP
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Expired or short-dated inventory surprises
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Paper-based QA, lot, and recall workflows
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Blind spots between plants, 3PLs, and customers
AFTER DATASHIP
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Live visibility on lots, expiry, and quality holds
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Traceability from raw material to finished case
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Stable, automated ordering and allocation
Built on your existing stack
The Reality for Food & Beverage Supply Chains
Food & beverage operations juggle perishable inventory, strict compliance, and demanding customers. When data is scattered, risk and waste go up together.
Disconnected view of raw materials, WIP, and finished goods across plants and 3PLs.
Slow, stressful recall or withdrawal drills with incomplete data.
Short-dated and expired inventory discovered too late to act.
No single place to see production plans vs. confirmed demand.
Lot and batch traceability managed in spreadsheets or paper.
Manual handoffs between QA, production, logistics, and customers.
How DataShip Helps Food & Beverage Teams Win
We connect production, QA, inventory, logistics, and customers into one coherent nervous system designed for freshness and compliance.
Lot & Batch Traceability
Track ingredients and finished goods from supplier lot to customer delivery with a few clicks, not a war-room.
Production & Co-Packer Visibility
Connect in-house plants and co-packers so everyone sees upcoming runs, capacity, and material readiness.
Compliance & Audit Readiness
Centralize records and flows needed for audits, recalls, certifications, and customer scorecards.
Shelf-Life & Date Management
Manage expiry, best-before, and hold dates with automated rules to prioritize the right stock by channel.
Cold-Chain Inventory & 3PL Sync
Real-time inventory across refrigerated, frozen, and ambient locations—down to lot, location, and status.
Ops Dashboards & Alerts
Monitor freshness risk, service levels, and plant/3PL performance with alerts before issues hit customers.
Our 12-Week Food & Beverage Playbook
A 12-week, milestone-based approach to gain control of freshness, traceability, and production-to-customer flow.
1
Weeks 1–3
Discovery & Risk Map
Map plants, co-packers, 3PLs, customers, and critical QA/traceability flows.
2
Weeks 3–6
Data Model & Lots
Standardize item, lot, date, and location structures. Connect core stack and 3PL feeds.
3
Weeks 6–8
Inventory & Freshness
Turn shelf-life rules and constraints into code across plants, DCs, and 3PLs.
4
Weeks 8–11
Traceability & Recalls
Enable end-to-end lot trace, mock recalls, and QA workflows in the new backbone.
5
Weeks 11–12
Dashboards & Go-Live
Deploy dashboards, alerts, and handover materials with hypercare support.
FLAGSHIP CASE STUDY
Harbor Fresh Kitchens · Refrigerated Meals
Food & Beverage · Refrigerated ready meals · Grocery + foodservice
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A regional producer of fresh, ready-to-heat meals struggling with short shelf life, complex 3PL networks, and demanding grocery and foodservice customers.
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The Challenge
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Limited visibility into remaining shelf life by product, location, and customer.
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Multiple co-packers and 3PLs, each with different data formats and update frequencies.
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High scrap and markdowns due to late discovery of short-dated inventory.
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Traceability and mock recalls driven by manual spreadsheets and email chains.
The DataShip Solution
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Connected ERP, 3PLs, and co-packers into a central freshness and traceability data layer.
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Standardized lot and date attributes and enforced them at receiving, production, and shipping.
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Implemented FEFO (first-expired, first-out) logic across key customers and channels.
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Built a recall/withdrawal cockpit to identify impacted lots, locations, and customers in minutes.
Outcomes (illustrative)
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25–35% reduction in write-offs and markdowns tied to expired or short-dated stock.
Hours to minutes for recall and withdrawal impact analysis across plants and 3PLs. -
Improved service levels to key grocery and foodservice customers with fewer last-minute expedites.
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QA, operations, and sales working from the same live view of lots, dates, and risk.
“DataShip gave us something we never had before: a live picture of freshness and risk across our entire network. Our teams finally stopped arguing over whose spreadsheet was right.”
– Director of Supply Chain, Harbor Fresh Kitchens (illustrative)
Platforms We Work With
We specialize in the platforms that matter most to food & beverage supply chains—ERP, WMS/3PL, planning, and QA/traceability tooling.
ERP & Production
Dynamics 365 · NetSuite · Fishbowl
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QA & Compliance
QA logs · Certificates · Audit records
WMS & 3PL
3PL WMS · Cold storage providers · SFTP feeds
Integration
API · EDI · SFTP-based patterns
Planning & Analytics
Power BI · Azure · Custom data models
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Customers
Retailers · Foodservice · Distributors
Why Food & Beverage Teams Choose DataShip
Supply chain and QA first, code second. We design around risk, freshness, and compliance.
Connector mindset. Reusable patterns for plants, co-packers, 3PLs, and customers.
Small senior team. You work directly with the architect and lead developers.
Operational empathy. Built for planners, QA, production, and logistics teams.
Engagement Options
12-Week Food & Beverage QuickStart
Quickly gain control of freshness, traceability, and key flows with a fixed-scope, milestone-based engagement.
Ongoing Optimization & Support
Proactive monitoring, new customer onboarding, and continuous improvement as your network grows.
We'll review your plants, co-packers, and 3PL network and outline a practical 12-week plan.
FAQs
Ready to De-Risk Your Food & Beverage Supply Chain?
If you're juggling short shelf life, strict compliance, and complex networks, we'll help you build a backbone that keeps product—and data—moving to the right customers at the right time.
No generic audit deck. We'll map your network, highlight the biggest unlocks, and recommend a realistic rollout path.