FreshCo
One worked scenario, seven questions, one model underneath.
FreshCo is a fresh juice producer. It exists to demonstrate what a connected model of a business can answer that a collection of disconnected systems cannot. Everything below runs on a single dataset of four suppliers, seven deliveries, three tanks, four finished lots and seven shipments. Nothing is added between one question and the next.
How production works
Suppliers deliver raw materials in numbered batches. Several batches are blended and pasteurised into a bulk base held in a tank. Each tank is then bottled, sometimes across several runs into different pack sizes, and the finished lots ship to customers as pallets.
Batches merge going into a tank and split coming out of it. That is what makes the questions hard: once three deliveries are in one tank, no single record connects a supplier to a customer.
The terms
| Term | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Raw batch | One delivery of one material, with its own number | MP-2214, 4,800 kg mango pulp, received 3 July |
| Certificate | A document belonging to a supplier, valid between two dates | CERT-1001, residue report, expires 12 June |
| Bulk batch | A tank of blended, pasteurised base | TK-A-0731, 12,000 L mango orange |
| Packaging batch | One delivery of bottles or caps, with its own number and its own required documents | PK-9910, 120,000 PET bottles, received 28 June |
| Production run | The bottling step, and the only place content and container meet: one tank in, one packaging batch in, one lot out | PR-3301, Line 1 shift A, 1 August |
| Finished lot | The bottled product from a run | L-7781, 6,800 bottles of Mango orange 1L |
| Shipment | Pallets of one lot going to one customer site | SH-8801, 9 pallets to NordMarkt DC Utrecht |
Where the bottle meets the juice
A finished lot has two parents, not one. The tank supplies what is inside the bottle. A packaging batch supplies the bottle itself. They meet only at the production run, and the run is the record that ties them together.
This matters because packaging carries its own documentation obligations, separate from the food ones. A bottle batch needs a declaration confirming the material is safe in contact with food. Batch PK-9910 arrived without one and nobody noticed, so the same lot can be clean on its ingredients and not clean on its container.
It also means a packaging problem spreads differently. One tank feeds the lots bottled from it and no others. One packaging batch can be used on any run, across different tanks and different recipes — PK-9910 reaches L-7781, which is mango orange, and L-7790, which is orange only and shares no ingredient concern at all. Tracing by recipe or by supplier of ingredients would miss it entirely.
Why certificates are the hard part
A certificate does not belong to a delivery. It belongs to a supplier and has a validity window. Whether it covers a given delivery depends on whether that delivery arrived inside the window. That comparison is never made today, because the expiry date lives inside a PDF and the arrival date lives in the order system.
Tropico Pulp let its residue report lapse on 12 June and renewed it on 20 July. Mango batch MP-2214 arrived on 3 July, inside the gap. The next batch, MP-2218, arrived on 11 August and is properly covered. Same supplier, same material, opposite answers — which is why a supplier-level rule would be wrong and a date-level rule is right.
The scenario as a flow
Read it downward. Raw materials merge into tanks, tanks split into bottled lots, bottles join at the bottling step, and lots split again into shipments. Circle size shows quantity within each band. Two separate problems run through it: red follows mango batch MP-2214, whose residue report had expired; amber follows bottle batch PK-9910, for which no food-contact declaration was ever received. They reach different product. Lot L-7781 is the only one carrying both, and lot L-7790 is clean on the mango question but not on packaging. Grey lines show the same orange and sugar flowing into product that stays fully documented.
The same events as a schedule
Bars run from arrival to last use, so the length of a bar is dwell time. Use the zoom buttons to open up August, where almost everything happens. Arrows follow each material into the tank it was blended into, each tank into the lots bottled from it, and each lot into its shipments. Red marks the residue-report gap on the mango; amber marks the separate packaging gap on batch PK-9910, which has no food-contact declaration and reaches two different lots. Lot L-7781 is the only one carrying both.
Two things the schedule makes plain. Mango batch MP-2214 sat in the warehouse for 28 days, entirely inside the period with no valid report, so a daily check had four weeks to catch it before anything was blended. And 2,400 kg of that same batch is still in stock today, unblended and unblocked.
Audit
A food safety inspector in the warehouse points at a pallet of Mango orange 1L and asks which fruit deliveries are in it and where the test certificates are.
L-7781 was bottled by run PR-3301 on 1 August, Line 1 shift A, from tank TK-A-0731. That tank holds 2,400 kg of MP-2214 mango, 3,000 kg of OC-8871 orange and 900 kg of SG-4402 sugar. Orange and sugar are fully documented. The mango is covered by CoA CERT-1002, but its pesticide residue report CERT-1001 expired on 12 June, twenty-one days before the batch arrived on 3 July.
Four hops through data the systems already hold, plus one link that exists nowhere today.
Claims
Cafe Bene reports a fermented off-taste in Mango orange 0.33L, lot L-7782, and is withdrawing it from service pending a response.
L-7782 came from run PR-3302, Line 2 shift B, 1 August, cleaning record CIP-442, drawing on tank TK-A-0731. The same tank also fed L-7781, which is already sitting at two NordMarkt distribution centres and has not been reported. The mango in that tank carries an open documentation gap.
The defensible answer names the sibling lot before the customer finds it.
Recall
A problem is confirmed in mango batch MP-2214. Which finished product contains it, and where is that product now?
MP-2214 entered only tank TK-A-0731. That tank produced L-7781 and L-7782. Those two lots left on three shipments: 9 pallets to NordMarkt DC Utrecht, 5 to NordMarkt DC Antwerp, 6 to Cafe Bene Gent. Total 20 pallets, 11,387 litres.
Equally important is what is not affected. Tank TK-B-0802 shares the same orange OC-8871 and the same sugar SG-4402, but never received the mango, so lot L-7790 is outside the scope, including the 12 pallets of it sitting at NordMarkt Utrecht alongside affected stock.
Compliance
An authority asks FreshCo to produce the conformity file for the packaging used on its 1 litre products.
PET bottle batch PK-9910 was received on 28 June and used on runs PR-3301 and PR-3305, so it is in lots L-7781 and L-7790. No food-contact declaration was ever received for it. A missing document is invisible to every transactional system, because nothing records an absence.
The same chain that answers a food safety question answers a packaging question. Only the required document type changes.
Certificates
Nobody asks this. It runs on its own, every day, against every batch in stock and every batch already shipped.
For each raw batch, the system asks whether a certificate of the required type, from that supplier, was valid on the day the batch was received. MP-2214 fails. MP-2218 passes, because CERT-1007 became valid on 20 July and the batch arrived 11 August. Same supplier, same material, different answer.
Had this been running on 3 July, the gap would have been caught at the gate and nothing would have shipped.
Customers
NordMarkt asks FreshCo to confirm the origin of the fruit in the deliveries it received in August.
NordMarkt received three lots across August. L-7781 and L-7803 are mango orange, drawing on Tropico Pulp in Valencia and Valle Verde in Piura. L-7790 is orange only. Each answer carries the supplier, the batch number and the documents behind it.
Same model, external audience. The customer gets a sourced answer instead of a promise to look into it.
KPIs
Which supplier actually costs the most, once documentation failures are counted alongside delivery performance?
Tropico Pulp delivered on time and to spec. It also caused one documentation gap that put 20 pallets and two customers at risk and triggered a claim. A delivery scorecard built from the order system alone would rank Tropico as a good supplier.
This is not a dashboard. It is a number the order system cannot produce, because the document data was never in it.
What the seven have in common
Every question above walks the same chain, from one end or the other: certificate, supplier, raw batch, tank, run, lot, shipment, customer. Nothing was added to the data between one question and the next. The seven are not seven products. They are seven places to enter one model.
Dataset: 4 suppliers, 8 certificates, 7 raw batches, 3 tanks, 4 production runs, 4 finished lots, 7 shipments, 1 complaint. Demo date 9 September 2026.