Customers requesting deliveries with COA/COC and we distribute over 1000 products!
Hi all. Thank you for taking time to read this. So I am in a food distributing facility and I have a major nightmare with customers requesting deliveries with COA/COC because we handle over 1000 products. It is a nightmare as much requesting these certificates from manufactures / suppliers. I was think then of compiling a certificate of conformance for dry goods which basically states the dispatching conditions and a separate COC for frozen and chilled products declaring dispatching temperature. But will this suffice on an audit when doing traceability or is it necessary to have a COA/COC from the manufacturer and also considering that these products are sold as is from the supplier? I could just put the product details, dispatching temperature and a statement of conformance on this COC. I am also horrified by the amount of paper we using, daily or having to email 50 COC's for just one customer is really strenuous. Please advise on a more efficient way of complying to this customer requirement. Thank you.
I assume that you're actually selling these products, rather than providing third-party storage and logistics for other food businesses?
Whether a basic temperature/conformity statement COC will suffice is difficult to answer, as it will very much depend on the nature of the products and the requirements of the individual customers. I think you'd be extremely lucky if all of your clients agreed to it, but that doesn't mean that it isn't worth a try!
What software to you use to manage your inventory and sales?
You may find that there are ways you can utilise this to help manage or potentially even fully automate the process, for example sending by email with the order confirmation or similar. That'll very much depend exactly on what you're using and how.
If you're only dealing with full pallets then you could potentially just stick a copy of the CofA on every one that comes in, so you know it'll be there when it goes out, but that doesn't really help with the paper use element.
I had a client that distributed a couple of thousand items.
They standardized and placed all scanned documents on their website so that customers could access the directory via passcode.
Should someone desire to receive same by email there is a processing charge of $10.00 each.
Rarely do they have anyone pay the fee - because no one is asking for the docs to be emailed.
So the deterrent works.