Shipping by expiry date instead of by pallet

Dated food has two deadlines, and the brand was only tracking one. Amazon will not receive a unit that is close to its printed date, and it pulls stock from sale well before the date arrives — so the usable selling window is months shorter than the one printed on the pouch. The brand shipped whole production runs the week they came off the line, which meant the last third of every lot sat in a fulfillment center burning through that window while the first third sold.

The result looked like a demand problem and was a calendar problem. Slow SKUs were written off wholesale every quarter, and the brand compensated by under-shipping the fast ones — so the same account simultaneously destroyed stock it could not sell and ran out of stock it could.

We stopped treating inbound as a logistics decision and made it a dating decision.

• Weeks of cover capped by remaining shelf life, with lot codes recorded on every shipment — shipment size set by what a SKU can sell before its window closes, and the network's stock known by date rather than by quantity.
• Oldest-lot-first sequencing — newer lots held at the 3PL until the older ones clear, which is trivial to do and was not being done at all.
• Scheduled removals before the cut-off, so aging stock leaves as donation or clearance rather than as disposal.

Write-offs fell from $34k a quarter to $4.2k, and almost none of that is now expiry — it is damage, which is a different and much smaller problem.

Revenue grew 18% on the same production plan. That surprised the brand, though it follows directly: the cash and warehouse space that used to be tied up in stock destined for destruction now goes into the SKUs that sell, and the fast movers stopped running out because nobody is rationing shipments to avoid the next write-off.