Central Kitchen Expiry Control: Stop the Store Room Leak

The store room find that ruins your morning

Someone is prepping a marinade at 6 a.m. and pulls a tub of flavouring concentrate from the back shelf. The best-before date is four months ago. Nobody knows when it arrived, which batches it went into, or whether anything left the kitchen using it.

That is not a careless staff problem. It is a structural one — and central kitchens are especially exposed to it because the gap between receiving and using is long, the SKU count is high, and the person issuing stock is rarely the person who received it.

Reuters reported in September 2026 that FSSAI tests over 100,000 samples a year, with roughly one in five coming back unsafe, substandard or mislabelled. A Navi Mumbai warehouse was caught relabelling expired stock of major brands with fake expiry dates. Inspectors are no longer doing desk reviews — they are walking into store rooms.

Why expiry slips through in central kitchens

The receiving dock and the production floor are different rooms, sometimes different shifts. A 25-kg bag of spice blend arrives, gets stacked behind the newer delivery because that delivery is closer to the door, and the receiving entry says only "spice blend — 1 bag". No batch code, no expiry date, no location.

Three months later, the newer bag is gone and the old one surfaces. By then the person who signed the GRN has no memory of it.

The second failure point is the indent system. A section head requests "1 kg chilli paste" and the store issues whatever is nearest. Oldest-first rotation only works if the person picking the stock knows which batch is oldest — and that means the batch expiry has to be visible at the point of issue, not buried in a receiving register.

The third failure is cost-centre invisibility. If the bakery section and the hot kitchen draw from the same store, and neither records which batch they consumed, you cannot trace a quality complaint back to a source. You also cannot see which section is burning through ingredients faster than planned.

A practical expiry system for central kitchens — no software required to start

Before you touch any software, fix the physical system. These four steps work with a notebook if that is all you have.

1. Capture batch and expiry at the dock, every time.

When a delivery arrives, write the batch code and expiry date on the carton with a marker before it goes to the shelf. If the supplier's label is too small to read across the shelf, relabel it. This takes thirty seconds per carton and is the only step that makes everything else possible.

2. Bin by expiry window, not by SKU.

Divide your dry store into four zones: expires this week, expires this month, expires in one to three months, long shelf life. Stock moves forward as it ages. Staff can see at a glance what needs to move first.

3. Issue indents oldest-first, by batch.

When a section head raises an indent, the store room picks the batch with the earliest expiry date for that item. Write the batch code on the indent slip. The section head signs for that specific batch. This creates a paper trail from receipt to consumption.

4. Log consumption by cost centre.

Every indent is tagged to a section — bakery, hot kitchen, cold prep, banqueting. At the end of the week, you can see how much of each item each section consumed, and from which batches. Variance from par tells you whether a section is over-consuming or whether you have a shrinkage problem.

Storage condition checks: the step most kitchens skip

Expiry dates assume correct storage. A flavouring concentrate rated for eighteen months at 18°C may degrade in six if it sits next to the steam line. A spice blend in a damaged bag picks up moisture and clumps within weeks.

Build a weekly storage walk into whoever does the indent review. Check:

• Packaging integrity: torn bags, broken seals, swollen cans
• Temperature in ambient, chilled and frozen zones — log it, do not just glance
• Separation of raw and ready-to-use ingredients
• Any batch that is within 30 days of expiry and has not been allocated to a production run

If you find a batch that has been stored incorrectly, do not assume the expiry date still applies. Quarantine it and make a decision before it goes into production.

For cold-chain items — dairy bases, sauces, proteins — the temperature excursion log is what shows the expiry date still means anything. The cold-chain temperature log guide covers what to record and how to structure the log so it is useful in an inspection, not just a formality.

What the FSSAI recall rules mean for a central kitchen

Under the FSS (Food Recall Procedure) Regulations 2017, regulation 6(1), every food business operator must keep distribution records — supplier name, batch code, manufacture date, expiry date — for one year past the expiry of each batch. If a recall is needed, you have 24 hours to notify the Food Authority under regulation 6(3).

For a central kitchen supplying multiple outlets, canteens or institutional clients, "distribution records" means you need to know which batches went into which production runs, and which runs went to which locations. If you cannot reconstruct that chain, you cannot comply with the 24-hour clock.

This is where the indent-by-batch system pays off beyond the store room. Every indent slip is a distribution record. Every cost-centre log is evidence of where a batch was consumed. If a supplier calls with a recall notice, you pull the indents for that batch and you know exactly which production runs used it and which clients received food from those runs.

The FSSAI expiry inspection guide covers what inspectors actually look for when they walk in — worth reading before your next renewal.

When a notebook is not enough

The paper system described above works for a small operation — for example a kitchen running 50–80 SKUs across two or three sections. Once you are managing 200+ SKUs, multiple store rooms, daily deliveries from 10+ suppliers and indents from five or more sections, the manual system develops gaps. Batches get missed. Indents do not get reconciled. The cost-centre report takes someone half a day to compile and is already stale by the time it is done.

ShelfLifePro serves central kitchens and catering operations. Indents from a section are issued oldest-first — the system picks the batch with the earliest expiry, and the indent records which batch went out. Consumption is logged by cost centre against that batch. If a batch expires overnight, the nightly sweep marks it and writes a costed wastage record; the disposal record writes itself. Any batch traces backward to the supplier invoice and forward to every indent that drew from it and every outlet it shipped to — one click, one PDF.

Expired stock cannot be issued. Not a warning — a refusal.

If you want to see how this works in a kitchen environment, ShelfLifePro offers a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. Start at shelflifepro.in/catering.

The flavouring tub is a symptom, not the problem

Finding expired stock in the store room means the receiving log did not capture the expiry date, or the rotation system did not surface the oldest batch, or both. Fix those two points and the store room find stops being a surprise.

The batch and lot traceability setup guide walks through how to structure your receiving records so that every batch can be traced forward from the day it arrives — useful reading whether you are setting up a new kitchen or auditing an existing one.