Nearly 4 in 5 businesses in the UK’s chilled, convenience and ready-to-eat food sector say that product recalls and withdrawals are on the rise, and they estimate it would take them hours to trace every affected batch, according to research from supply chain technology provider Balloon One.

While 93% of businesses believe they could manage a recall quickly and accurately, a quarter (24%) say they would need five hours or more to find affected stock, and a quarter (25%) still track batch and expiry information on spreadsheets.

According to the study, the sector is managing one of its most complex and time-critical processes on a patchwork of systems and manual records. More than three quarters (77%) say they would need to consult two or more separate systems, spreadsheets or records to manage a live recall. Only 24% describe their traceability data as fully real time across warehouse, production and customer orders, leaving teams to reconcile data between systems by hand more than 100 times a year, and just 38% have fully automated first-expired, first-out stock rotation.

More than half (55%) report incomplete or inconsistent batch and lot information, and 42% say expiry or shelf-life data is not always visible in real time. When asked how long it would take to identify every affected batch, stock location and customer destination across those systems, businesses estimate four hours on average, and almost a quarter (24%) say they would need five hours or more. Where batch data is linked to stock movement, the same exercise takes closer to ten minutes.

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.”

More than nine in ten (92%) businesses have recalled, withdrawn or investigated an issue involving sandwiches, wraps or food-to-go in the past 18 months, with chilled ready meals close behind at 91%, and prepared salads at 89%. The research shows the leading causes over the past 18 months included foreign material or physical contamination (56%), undeclared allergens (40%), labelling and packaging issues (39%), and chemical contamination (37%)

The commercial stakes for businesses getting this wrong are significant. According to the research, UK F&B businesses estimate the total financial impact of a serious product recall or contamination issue to be around £545,249.

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