How a Health & Wellness Retailer Achieved 100% Lot Traceability with FIFO Enforcement

This anonymized specialty retailer sells health supplements, natural cosmetics, and wellness products online. Over 800 SKUs carry expiry dates (DLC -- Date Limite de Consommation), ranging from 6 months for certain supplements to 3 years for sealed cosmetics. The business operates from a single warehouse with a team of five handling reception, storage, picking, and shipping.

The Challenge

Tracking batches was a manual nightmare. When new stock arrived, someone was supposed to note the lot number and expiry date in a shared spreadsheet. In practice, this step was often skipped during busy reception days. In the warehouse, products were stored wherever space was available, with no distinction between batches of the same SKU. Pickers grabbed whichever box was closest -- sometimes newer stock sat in front of older stock. The result: 2-3 times per month, a customer received a product dangerously close to or past its expiry date. Worse, when a supplier issued a batch recall on a supplement ingredient, the team had no way to determine which customers had received products from that batch. The investigation took days of cross-referencing paper receipts with shipping records. As one team member described it: 'Lot traceability and DLC management -- it's an imperative for us.'

The Solution

myFulfillment introduced end-to-end lot management that tracks every product from warehouse reception through to final delivery.

The system blocks picking of expired lots entirely -- warehouse staff physically cannot scan a product past its sell-by date. Expiry alerts trigger 30/60/90 days before DLC, giving the team time to run promotions on near-expiry stock.

The Results

Expired product shipments dropped from 2-3 per month to zero. The shared Excel spreadsheet was retired. Every lot in the warehouse is now digitally traced from reception to delivery, with a complete audit trail. When a supplier issued a batch recall three months after implementation, the team generated a full report of affected customers in under 5 minutes -- a process that previously took days. Near-expiry stock is now proactively promoted through flash sales, reducing waste. Staff compliance improved because the system enforces FIFO automatically -- there's no way to accidentally pick the wrong batch.