Modern food traceability is required to do more than just show where an ingredient came from and where a finished product went. Manufacturers need accurate, lot-level information that follows materials through receiving, production, quality checks, storage, transformation, and distribution.
The question for ERP buyers is simple: Can your current system reconstruct that complete journey when it matters the most?
In this blog, we explore the FSMA 204 mandates and their relevance, why food traceability matters now more than ever, how ERP supports this task, and how Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage is best positioned for the shifting demands of the industry.
What is FSMA 204, and why should manufacturers understand it?
FSMA 204 is the section of the U.S. Food Safety Modernization Act behind the FDA Food Traceability Rule, which establishes additional recordkeeping requirements for certain foods.
The rule applies to organizations that manufacture, process, pack, or hold foods on the FDA’s Food Traceability List, subject to exemptions. It requires affected organizations to maintain key data elements for specific critical tracking events.
These events include:
- Receiving
- Shipping
- Initial packing
- First land-based receiving
- Transformation
The rule also requires covered organizations to provide certain records to the FDA within 24 hours, or within another reasonable timeframe, in agreement with the agency. The original compliance date was January 20, 2026. The FDA has proposed extending it to July 20, 2028, and Congress has directed the agency not to enforce the rule before that date.
That timeline gives manufacturers an opportunity to improve food traceability processes before implementation pressures increase. It should not be viewed as a reason to postpone data cleanup, integration, or testing, but rather a motivation to get it done efficiently.
What is changing in food traceability?
Food traceability is evolving from basic transaction history into connected visibility across every product movement and transformation.
Manufacturers increasingly need to identify which supplier lots entered a batch, what happened during production, where the resulting inventory is located, and which customers received it. That information must remain reliable even when materials are combined, divided, reworked, repacked, or transferred.
For ERP buyers, food traceability should therefore be evaluated as an operational capability, not simply a compliance feature.
Where do food traceability gaps usually appear?
The largest gaps typically appear when physical materials change but the related system information does not change with them.
When a manufacturer returns unused material from one production run to inventory and consumes it during another run, unless both transactions are accurately recorded, the relationship between the original ingredient lot and the later finished product may disappear.
Similar problems occur during:
- Blending and commingling
- Recipe or formula substitutions
- Batch splitting and consolidation
- Relabeling and repackaging
- Quality holds and releases
- Transfers between plants
- Production by co-manufacturers
- Storage by third-party logistics providers
Effective food traceability software must preserve lot genealogy through these events and connect external partner data with internal ERP records.
Why are traditional traceability processes no longer enough?
The challenge is not simply capturing traceability data. It is connecting that data across the systems, locations, and processes involved in a product’s journey.
A manufacturer may be able to trace a straightforward production order, but traditional processes often rely on information spread across suppliers, factories, warehouses, spreadsheets, and business applications. When records are incomplete, delayed, or difficult to reconcile, manufacturers can struggle to reconstruct the full product history quickly.
This can lead to:
- Manual reconciliation during recalls
- Delayed access to critical lot information
- Incomplete visibility across multiple sites
- Difficulty connecting supplier and customer records
- Uncertainty around affected inventory
- Wider recall scopes when affected and unaffected products cannot be confidently separated
These limitations make food traceability slower and less reliable particularly when manufacturers need to respond quickly to a quality issue, customer request, or regulatory requirement.
What should a modern ERP provide for food traceability?
A modern ERP should connect supplier, production, inventory, quality, and customer records through a searchable lot history.
Buyers should expect the following capabilities:
The system should support backward and forward searches. Backward food traceability starts with a finished product and identifies its ingredients and suppliers. Forward traceability begins with an ingredient lot and identifies every resulting product, inventory location, and customer shipment.
How does Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage support food traceability?
Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage combines industry-specific ERP with capabilities for production, quality, planning, warehousing, product lifecycle management, and integration.
Infor positions the platform as a connected suite that includes food and beverage ERP, MES, supply-chain planning, PLM, warehouse management, analytics, and the Infor Industry Cloud Platform. It also highlights bi-directional traceability as a core food and beverage capability.
This connected structure matters because traceability information originates in several places. Supplier lots may enter through purchasing and warehousing. Actual ingredient consumption may be captured during production. Quality results determine whether inventory is held or released. Distribution records identify where finished products were shipped.
Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage is purpose-built around industry requirements such as formulas, shelf life, variable yields, quality controls, and regulatory documentation.
Food Traceability in Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage
Discover how Fortude enables end-to-end food traceability across your operations with Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage.
What should buyers request during an ERP demonstration?
Buyers should ask vendors to trace a difficult manufacturing scenario rather than presenting a prepared, single-lot example.
Ask the vendor to:
- Begin with a supplier ingredient lot.
- Identify every batch that consumed it.
- Include rework and ingredient substitutions.
- Show remaining, held, released, and shipped inventory.
- Identify affected customers and delivery locations.
- Trace a finished product back to every ingredient.
- Export the complete record in a usable format.
Also ask how the solution handles missing scans, transaction corrections, co-manufacturers, inter-site transfers, and third-party warehouses.
These tests reveal whether the system supports practical food traceability or only ideal processes.
Why does implementation experience matter?
Food traceability improves only when software, data, integrations, and operating processes work together.
Even a capable ERP will produce incomplete results when lot-number rules vary by factory, item records are inconsistent, operators bypass scanning procedures, or warehouse and production systems do not exchange data correctly.
Fortude provides Infor CloudSuite consulting across implementation, integration, data migration, testing, rollout, optimization, and managed services. Its food and beverage experience includes multi-country CloudSuite programs designed to standardize ERP and improve operational visibility.
Fortude can also help manufacturers assess where food traceability information is created, where it is lost, and which system or process changes should be prioritized.
In practice: Building consistency across multiple sites
A recent example from The Compleat Food Group shows how a multi-site ERP foundation can help bring greater consistency across food manufacturing operations. Fortude supported the migration of three sites to Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, using a global ERP blueprint and standardized template that could be adapted to each site’s requirements. This approach helped maintain consistency across the group while creating a repeatable model for future rollouts.
For traceability, that multi-site capability matters. When sites operate on a shared ERP foundation, data and processes can be standardized across locations, making it easier to maintain consistent information as materials move between sites and to build a connected view of operations across the business.
Can your ERP keep pace?
Food traceability is becoming more detailed, connected, and data-driven. Manufacturers need confidence that every important movement and transformation can be reconstructed quickly, without relying on disconnected records.
Fortude helps food and beverage organizations assess, implement, optimize, test, and support Infor CloudSuite. Talk to Fortude to evaluate whether your ERP can support modern food traceability requirements.
