Expiration tracking, FEFO-aware picking, temperature-zone discipline, and lot-level recall. Built for operations where one bad date or a wrong-zone putaway becomes an FDA conversation.
Every industry has its quirks. Here are yours.
We've mapped the operational quirks of food & beverage against Nautilus capabilities. Each challenge here pairs with how we handle it.
Expiration management
Thousands of SKUs with different shelf lives. One missed date can mean a recall, a fine, or a customer complaint that takes years to recover from.
Expiration alerts
Nautilus tracks best-by, sell-by, and use-by dates for every item. Alerts fire days before anything expires, with quantities flagged for promotion or write-off.
FIFO compliance
First-in-first-out isn't optional for many food categories. It's the law, and manual tracking fails at scale.
Automated FIFO
Pick lists are automatically ordered by receipt date. The oldest stock always ships first, with supervisor override logged for any exception.
Temperature zones
Frozen, refrigerated, ambient, and dry storage all under one roof. Each zone has different rules, and the wrong putaway destroys product.
Zone mapping
Assign temperature zones to warehouse sections. Nautilus prevents items from being stored in wrong conditions, blocking the scan if a putaway would violate the zone.
From dock to door.
Every action a food & beverage warehouse takes, mapped to a Nautilus flow — running on phones, tablets, or rugged scanners.
Receive with dates
Inbound scan captures lot code and best-by date. Cold goods route direct to the refrigerated dock without an intermediate ambient holding step.
Zone putaway
Items go to the correct temperature zone: frozen, refrigerated, ambient, or dry. Wrong-zone scans block before the putaway is recorded.
FEFO pick
Pick lists order by expiration, not receipt date. Oldest stock always ships first; supervisor override leaves an audit trail with a documented reason.
Pack & manifest
Pack with the required liners. Lot manifest prints with the BOL; recall queries trace any lot in seconds.
What customers see.
Averages across Food & Beverage customers in their first 12 months.
Food & Beverage questions, answered.
The questions buyers in food & beverage ask before they sign. If yours isn't here, the team can answer it on a discovery call.
Does Nautilus enforce FIFO or FEFO?
Both, configurable per product. FIFO (first-in-first-out) drives pick order by receipt date; FEFO (first-expired-first-out) drives by expiration date. Most food customers run FEFO for date-sensitive products and FIFO for shelf-stable. The pick app sorts the list automatically; a supervisor override leaves an audit trail with the reason for the override.
How are temperature excursions logged and reported?
Nautilus integrates with continuous temperature monitors (DeltaTrak, MadgeTech, Sensitech, or our own paired sensor). Excursions outside the configured range alert immediately to a configured pager list. The excursion report exports with timestamps, duration, and which lots were in the affected zone, ready to attach to a credit request or an FDA submission.
Can we recall an entire lot in under an hour?
Yes. The recall query takes a lot number and returns every receipt, transfer, pick, ship, and current location for any unit from that lot. On the customer side, it returns every order that includes a unit from that lot, including customer contact information. Most recalls execute in under 5 minutes; the bottleneck becomes reaching out to affected customers, not finding them.
How does it handle co-products and weighted-average costing?
Co-products (the same SKU produced from different inputs at different costs) post at weighted-average cost across all active lots. The cost basis recalculates on each receipt; reporting can view either current weighted average or per-lot actual cost. For yield-variance accounting, transformations record both input quantities and output yields so variance reports surface meaningful production efficiency data.
See Nautilus running in a food & beverage warehouse.
Live demo with a warehouse engineer. 30 minutes. We bring the data, you bring the questions.