That £545,000 figure assumes the recall is contained quickly. Slow detection, caused by fragmented provenance data spread across multiple carriers, 3PLs and storage providers, pushes total exposure far higher through wasted stock, retailer penalties and reputational damage.
Traceability is persistently treated as a warehouse management system feature. In practice, a product's provenance record is only as complete as the weakest data-sharing link in the chain. If a secondary haulier logs a pallet ID differently from the cold-store that received it, the audit trail breaks at that join. Balloon One's findings suggest those joins are still common.
The gap rarely sits in technology. Most logistics providers already capture the data. What is missing is a shared data contract: agreed identifiers, handoff events and timestamp standards that survive the transition between parties. Operator briefs in food and beverage still frequently specify service levels and temperature ranges without stipulating how provenance data must be structured and passed on.
Building traceability into a tender means specifying data handoff requirements alongside physical service requirements and confirming that every provider in the network can meet them. That is a procurement discipline as much as a technology one.
