Food Safety and EDI Compliance
Get clean, structured order and invoice data from the suppliers who still send paper
Food distributors face a double compliance burden: retailer EDI requirements (chargebacks for late ASNs, incorrect invoices) and FDA food safety regulations (FSMA 204 traceability, lot tracking). These two compliance worlds are converging as retailers increasingly require lot numbers, expiration dates, and traceability data within EDI documents.
Where Food Safety Meets EDI
Retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Costco already require lot tracking data in EDI 856 ship notices. FSMA Rule 204 makes traceability mandatory for foods on the FDA's Food Traceability List. The data that retailers want in your ASN (lot numbers, harvest dates, source locations) overlaps significantly with what FSMA 204 requires. If you handle both separately, you're doing double the work.
The FSMA 204 Traceability Challenge
FSMA Rule 204 requires tracking Key Data Elements (KDEs) at each Critical Tracking Event (CTE) in the food supply chain. For distributors, that means recording lot codes, quantities, source, and destination every time food changes hands. This data needs to be accessible within 24 hours of an FDA request. Maintaining paper records or disconnected spreadsheets won't cut it.
How OrderSync Fits Your Food Compliance Stack
OrderSync is the inbound document layer, not the traceability ledger. Most distributors have suppliers who will never send an EDI 856, and those suppliers are exactly where traceability data goes missing. OrderSync reads their PDFs, emailed order forms, and faxes into structured line-level records with a full audit trail, so the fields your traceability system needs arrive as data instead of a scanned attachment someone has to rekey. Which fields get captured is configurable per trading partner.
How OrderSync Solves This
Industries Affected
This challenge is particularly common in these industries:
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How to Test Order Extraction Before You Buy
Vendors demo on a clean, typed, single-page order. Your orders are scans and spreadsheets. Here is the test protocol, the seven traps that decide the result, and how to score a trial honestly.
- How to build a test set that reflects what you actually receive
- The seven traps that break extraction, unit of measure first
- How to score at the line, so a near-miss counts as the error it is
- The questions to ask every vendor, including us
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Frequently Asked Questions
FSMA Rule 204 is an FDA regulation requiring enhanced traceability records for foods on the Food Traceability List, including fresh produce, certain cheeses, nut butters, and shell eggs. It applies to manufacturers, processors, packers, and distributors who handle these foods anywhere in the supply chain.
Major retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Costco require lot numbers, expiration dates, and often GS1 identifiers (GTIN, SSCC-18) in EDI 856 advance ship notices for perishable products. Missing this data triggers chargebacks of $500 or more per shipment.
They arrive on paperwork: a PDF invoice, an emailed packing list, a printed bill of lading. Someone has to turn that into structured data before your traceability system can hold it, and hand-keying is where accuracy breaks down. OrderSync automates that step by reading inbound documents into structured line-level records. The traceability ledger itself stays with your food safety or ERP system.