Today let’s tackle some ways and learn how to handle products with expiry dates. We’ve prepared a few tips below that should help you overcome some of the challenges of perishable goods:
- optimizing your product’s shelf-life;
- maintaining and selling them before their near-expiration dates.
Because such items may become spoiled over time and unsafe to consume or use. You’ll need to consider a lot of factors to ensure freshness when sold.
1. Learn about FEFO (First-Expired-First-Out)
The First-Expired-First-Out technique is commonly used in the food industry or with businesses handling perishable goods. This method suggests checking the expiration dates upon receipt of your stocks and selling the batch that will expire first to optimize shelf-life management.
Hence, FEFO ensures products sold or distributed are fresh and helps you focus more on production rather than constantly checking for expiry dates.
2. Storage is Everything
Maintain the right temperature for your warehouses, observe cleanliness and train your staff about handling pallets. It helps prevent damage and spoilage of your products.
However, it’s not smooth sailing all the time. In case of emergencies, you may want to prepare a backup plan if there are sudden events such as a power outage, broken pallets, or damaged products by accident.
3. Inspect Stocks
Aside from asking your staff about storage conditions and tracking them, take time to actually see your stocks.
It’s good practice to oversee your product’s condition and identify any issues before selling them. Through this, you can also evaluate the quality of your items or the ones you receive from your suppliers.
4. Barcoding (and QR Codes)
Thanks to technology, you can now minimize the risk of data error by using and scanning information such as expiry dates from barcodes or QRs. Reduce effort and save yourself time from manual encoding through this process.
5. Observe Purchasing Patterns
Analyze your purchasing habits or production through reports. Identifying if your warehouse frequently has near-expiry and expired items help avoid spoilage from overstocking.
6. Talk to your Suppliers
Now that we’ve mentioned suppliers in the last tip. You may also discuss better terms with them to help improve the quality of your produced goods or improve delivery schedules and receive products with longer expiration dates.
7. Discounts and Donations
When we’re nearing expiry dates, you may opt to offer discounts on your products and bundle up. It will help you empty your shelves and have your products consumed ASAP.
Better yet, you may choose to help out others. Conduct an outreach program and donate them to foundations or orphanages that need stocks. Don’t let your products go to waste.
8. Handle Products with Expiry through Batch Tracking
Without a befitting system for your business operation’s needs, you can imagine the trouble of repeatedly filling up spreadsheets and frequently double-checking only to get an inaccurate result.
It’s risky, especially when you need to batch-track items with expiry dates. For this process, ideally, you would rely on a system such as Zayls that can give you a heads up with notifications and real-time updates, which saves time, especially with batch recalls–most importantly, it will prevent any harm to your customers.
Photo by Daria Volkova via Unsplash.