Every food and beverage company I sit with has the same person. She runs procurement, or quality, sometimes both. She’s sharp, she’s trusted, and at the start of every month she blocks a few hours for a job that has no name on any org chart.
She opens a spreadsheet, scans for which supplier certs expire this month — CoAs, spec sheets, allergen statements, continuing guarantees — and starts writing emails. Request the new one. Chase the missing one. Ask why this one’s dated 2023. Then she waits three weeks for replies to trickle back, most of them partial, and starts over.
One operator put a number on it without being asked: four hours a month just to figure out what’s expiring and get the requests out the door — before a single supplier replies. She’s not behind. She will never be caught up. The job is built to never finish.
It looks like a document problem. It isn’t.
Buy a document system, make everyone upload to a shared drive, add a column to the tracker — every company tries this, and the tracker dies quietly on a SharePoint site nobody opens. The documents were never the problem.
CPG runs on a unit of coordination that decays. These companies don’t buy finished goods; they buy ingredients, packaging, components — and each input drags a tail of paperwork that has to be collected, verified, and then re-collected forever because it expires. One mid-sized manufacturer I met is tracking roughly 200 ingredients and 1,000 packaging materials, each carrying around 20 documents. Tens of thousands of living files, none of which stay valid, all arriving as PDFs stapled into email threads.
The inbox becomes the system of record
Want to see the tax with your own eyes? Look at who’s on the chain. A simple supplier request turns into 20–30 replies, half of them internal — people keeping themselves copied on a document that “might be referenced later.” A quality leader described it exactly: nobody wants to dig the tracker out of SharePoint, so they stay on the thread. The inbox becomes the system of record by default, because it’s the only place the file and the conversation live together.
I asked one lead whether a different person at the supplier ever answered than the one he’d emailed. “Only every day.”
That behavior gets called sloppy. It’s rational. When there’s no canonical place where a supplier’s current, verified documents live, the email thread is the canonical place — and staying current means staying copied.
Why this gets more expensive in 2026, not less
FSMA 204 was supposed to land this past January. It slid to July 2028 — and the reason is the whole story. Companies that were ready themselves told the FDA they still couldn’t comply, because they couldn’t trust the data coming from partners who weren’t. The rule asks for sortable electronic records within 24 hours of a request. You can’t produce that when your records are 24,000 PDFs scattered across inboxes. The regulator effectively conceded that the coordination problem is bigger than any one company solving it alone.
The job nobody should have to do
The winners in this category won’t be the ones who hire another coordinator to send another round of emails. They’ll be the ones who stop treating supplier information as something you search for and start treating it as a live system — where a document’s status is a state, not a hunt through an inbox.
The four-hour ritual isn’t a slow person. It’s an industry paying a coordination tax it’s quietly accepted as the cost of doing business — a job built to never finish. The first companies to refuse to do it will look, in hindsight, like they saw something obvious a few years early.
