M&S asks its food suppliers to run digital systems for the checks that keep a product safe and legally labelled, and the one that catches most people out is the date code: the date printed on every pack has to be right, on every run, with a record to prove it. Enterprise food-safety software does that job for large sites at large-site prices, so artisan and mid-sized manufacturers were left doing it on paper, with a clipboard by the line, a signature per check, and a filing cabinet to reassemble when the auditor arrived. InspectionWorx saw the gap and came to us to build Veridate: a product for the whole supplier market, rather than a system for one factory.
Built for InspectionWorx: a scanning app and a back-office portal that give food manufacturers M&S-compliant date-code checks without enterprise software prices.
01
The start
Food manufacturers on paper, with M&S requirements to meet
02
The journey
A scanning app on the line, a portal in the office
The operator side is a mobile app for iOS and Android. An operator picks the product, starts the production run and works through the check scheme set up for that line. For a date check they photograph the pack, the app reads the printed code with OCR and judges it against the date the run should be printing, in whatever format that product uses. Barcodes scan the same way. A failed check triggers the corrective action, and the record is kept whichever way it went.
The back office is a web portal. Quality managers build check schemes to match how each line actually runs, manage products, lines and runs, set date formats, handle concessions, and get an alert when something escalates. Every action lands in an audit log, so the report M&S or an auditor asks for is already written by the time they ask. It is multi-tenant, so each manufacturer sees only its own data, and it can be white-labelled where a larger group wants it under its own name.
03
The result
Audit-ready from the first run
Manufacturers that could never justify enterprise software now run checks that meet M&S’s digital-system requirements, with the paper gone and the audit trail building itself. And the product keeps moving: the September 2026 release added a date format per check and a retry on a single failed check, both asked for by the people using it on the line.
- Meets M&S digital-system requirements for food suppliers
- OCR date-code and barcode checks on iOS and Android
- Check schemes built to match each production line, with unlimited products, lines and runs
- Date concessions, corrective actions and alert escalation
- Full product and system audit logs and reports
- Multi-tenant, with white-labelling for groups
