Ops & Supply

How to trace lot-level inventory as Restaurant and Hospitality Founders

Ops & SupplyFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You received a health department notice last spring about a listeria concern in romaine from a specific grower. You had four cases in the walk-in and no way to know fast which prep it touched, which dishes went out that week, or which tables were affected. You dug through paper invoices, a spreadsheet your sous chef maintains inconsistently, and dated delivery receipts for two days. For a restaurant or small hotel kitchen, lot-level traceability sounds like a CPG problem — but your liability is identical the moment a guest gets sick or an inspector asks for your records. Most operators track inventory in Toast, Square, or a Google Sheet with no lot numbers attached at all.

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Ops & SupplyFor Restaurant and Hospitality Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A lot-level trace for every ingredient from the delivery invoice through the prep log to the dish it went into — so when a supplier calls with a recall, you know in minutes what's affected and what went out

Expiration date tracking tied to actual lot numbers in your walk-in, with alerts before product ages past your FIFO rotation window

A mock-recall drill you can run in under five minutes — pull every ticket that touched Lot X, see the date range, and have a documented record ready for your health department, insurer, or legal counsel

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Lot Tracker Inventory Planner

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Slack (scheduled-sync provider) for morning expiration alerts. Square or Toast sales data is pulled via browser automation — no formal API connector needed. Supplier invoice data can be imported manually or pulled from Gmail (Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule) if invoices arrive by email. Lot entry and prep linkage happen inside the Lot Tracker app itself.

Prompts to copy

Build me a lot tracker for my restaurant kitchen. Every time we receive a delivery, I want to log the supplier, invoice number, product name, lot number, and use-by date. When we use that ingredient in prep, I want to link it to the prep batch. Show me a dashboard with current lots in the walk-in, what's expiring in the next 5 days, and a search where I can type in a lot number and see every dish it touched.

Set up an expiration alert that checks our active lot inventory every morning at 6am and sends me a Slack message listing anything expiring within 72 hours, sorted by quantity on hand.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail to Starch so supplier invoices that arrive by email are synced automatically — Starch scans incoming delivery confirmations and surfaces lot numbers and use-by dates for review.

2 On delivery day, open the Lot Tracker app and log the delivery: supplier name, invoice number, product (e.g., 'Romaine Hearts — Supplier: FreshPoint'), lot number from the case label, quantity received, and use-by date. This takes about 90 seconds per line item.

3 When your prep cook breaks down that case into a prep batch — say, chopped romaine for caesar salad — they log the prep batch in Starch and link it to the source lot. One field, one tap.

4 Starch's Inventory Planner (currently in development — request beta access) will eventually give you a real-time view across your walk-in and any secondary storage; for now, the Lot Tracker dashboard shows current on-hand by lot with days-to-expiry flagged in red for anything inside 72 hours.

5 Set a morning automation: every day at 6am, Starch checks active lots, filters for anything expiring within your threshold, and sends a Slack message to the kitchen manager channel listing the product, lot number, quantity, and expiry date.

6 When a supplier calls with a recall — or when you see a news alert about an ingredient — open Lot Tracker, type the supplier name or lot number into the search field, and get the full chain: when it arrived, how much you received, which prep batches used it, and what date range those batches were active.

7 Cross-reference the prep batch dates against your POS data. Starch automates your Square or Toast transaction history through browser automation so you can see covers served on the affected dates without manually exporting CSVs.

8 Run a mock recall drill quarterly: pick a random lot number from three months ago, trace it forward to prep and service, and document the result. Starch can generate a simple report from the lot record — supplier, receipt date, prep batches, service dates — that you save as a PDF for your files.

9 For hotel food and beverage operations running a banquet or room-service program, add a banquet event field to prep batch records so you can trace not just which dishes but which events were served from a given lot.

10 Set a reorder alert tied to lot depletion: when the last active lot of a high-turn ingredient drops below your par, Starch flags it so you're not ordering blind based on a gut feel at 7am before the produce delivery arrives.

11 If your health department, insurer, or a guest attorney ever asks for traceability documentation, export the lot record directly from Starch — chain of custody, dates, prep linkage, and affected service periods in one document.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Romaine Recall Response — February 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Lots received from FreshPoint (Feb 1–15)	6
Lots still active in walk-in at recall date	2
Prep batches linked to recalled lot (Lot FP-2026-0214)	3
Estimated covers served from affected prep (Feb 12–14)	187
Hours to complete trace (vs. prior manual process)	0.25

On February 16th, FreshPoint called to report a recall on Lot FP-2026-0214 — romaine hearts delivered February 10th. Before Starch, this would have meant pulling delivery binders, cross-checking the prep log your sous chef keeps in a Google Sheet, and manually scanning Toast exports to estimate which nights the caesar was on the menu. It took about two days last time. This time: search Lot FP-2026-0214 in Lot Tracker, see that it came in on the 10th (4 cases, 48 lbs), linked to three prep batches on February 11th, 12th, and 13th. Those prep batches were active during dinner service on the 12th, 13th, and 14th — roughly 187 covers on caesar salad across those three nights. Two cases from a different lot (FP-2026-0218) are still in the walk-in; those are clean and stay. The health department wants documentation: Starch exports the lot record — receipt date, invoice number, prep batch IDs, service dates, estimated volume used — as a PDF. Total time from the supplier's call to documented response: about 15 minutes.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Time-to-trace on a recalled lot (target: under 30 minutes from supplier call to full chain-of-custody documentation)

Percentage of received lots with complete lot numbers logged at delivery (target: 100% — gaps are liability)

Ingredients flagged and rotated before expiration vs. waste-composted after expiry (a direct food cost line)

Mock recall drill completion rate — quarterly at minimum, documented for health department audit readiness

Prep batch linkage rate — what percentage of prep batches are tied back to a source lot (gaps mean blind spots in a real recall)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Paper delivery log + Google Sheets

Free and familiar, but a recall trace takes 1–2 days of manual cross-referencing across binders and tabs that were probably built by someone who no longer works there.

MarginEdge

Good at food cost tracking and invoice digitization, but not built for lot-level traceability or chain-of-custody documentation — you'd still need a separate system for recall readiness.

BlueCart or Notch (ordering apps)

Streamline the ordering and receiving workflow but don't track lot numbers through prep, so you can receive a product and still lose the lot trail the moment it hits your cutting board.

Restaurant365

Full-featured food and labor platform with inventory, but lot-level traceability is an enterprise add-on priced for multi-unit operators — overkill cost structure for an independent with 1–3 locations.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — lot tracker, inventory planner all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a formal API connection to my POS for this to work?

No. Starch automates your Toast or Square history through browser automation — no API needed. You log into Toast the same way you normally would, and Starch pulls the data it needs. If your POS does have an available connection in Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps, it can query that live instead.

The Lot Tracker app says 'currently in development' — what can I actually use today?

Lot Tracker is in development and not yet live in the App Store. You can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, you can describe what you want to Starch in plain language and the agent will build a custom app — a lot-tracking surface with the fields you need, expiry alerts via Slack, and a search interface — from scratch today. The pre-built Lot Tracker app will be an opinionated starting point once it's live; a custom-built version is available right now.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We're asking because our hotel's corporate parent has a vendor security review process.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your parent company requires that certification as a condition of vendor approval, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap. For independent operators without that requirement, the practical question is whether the data you're handling — lot numbers, supplier invoices, prep logs — warrants waiting, or whether the operational benefit of having traceability at all outweighs the gap.

My supplier doesn't print lot numbers on every case. How do I handle that?

That's the most common gap, and it's a process problem more than a software problem. The most practical fix is to require lot numbers on all delivery invoices as a condition of your supplier agreement, and flag non-compliant deliveries in your receiving log. Starch can build an alert that marks a received item as 'lot number missing' and flags it for follow-up — so you're not discovering the gap during a recall when it's too late.

Can Starch connect to my reservation system — OpenTable or Resy — to correlate which tables were served on an affected date?

Yes. OpenTable and Resy are web-based platforms, so Starch can automate them through browser automation — no API required. You could pull a guest list or cover count for a specific date range and cross-reference it with the affected service dates from your lot trace. Whether you'd want to contact guests is a legal question; having the data documented is the starting point.

We have a second location. Can one Starch setup track lots across both kitchens?

Yes. You'd configure the lot tracker to include a location field on each delivery receipt and prep batch record, so every lot entry is tagged to Kitchen A or Kitchen B. The search and recall trace views can filter by location or show both. If you receive from the same supplier to both locations, you'll see immediately whether a recalled lot went to one or both.