How to Track and Reduce Waste in Food Distribution Warehouses

In most distribution businesses, damage is discovered at stock count as a gap between expected and actual stock. By then nobody knows which product, which store, or which week caused it — so nothing changes.

Perishable goods make this worse: produce stored in several cold stores and moved between them has many points where loss can happen.

Treat damage as a transaction, not a stock-count adjustment. Each record should capture:

• The product and quantity lost
• The location — main warehouse or a specific external store
• The date and the person who recorded it
• A reason: spoilage, transport damage, handling, expiry

Raw quantities mislead: 100 kg lost from a product you move 50 tonnes of is fine; 100 kg from a product you move 500 kg of is a problem. Divide loss by the quantity handled to get a loss percentage per product.

A damage report that ranks products by loss percentage shows your worst offenders immediately.

Once loss is measured per product and location, the fixes become obvious:

• Order smaller, more frequent quantities of high-loss products.
• Move sensitive products to the store with the best conditions.
• Ship high-loss items first (first-in, first-out).
• Check transfers between stores — loss often happens in transit.

Spreadsheets make this tedious, so it stops after a few weeks. In an ERP, recording damage takes seconds from a phone on the warehouse floor, stock updates automatically, and the damage report is always current. Enum ERP includes exactly this: per-location damage records and a loss-percentage report by product.