The Origin Story

Thirty years ago, I was studying software engineering at university. At the same time, my family ran a meat processing business—the kind of hands-on manufacturing operation where recipes are everything and margins are tight.

They had a problem: managing formulations. Every product had a recipe. Every recipe had ingredients. And every ingredient had a cost that seemed to change constantly. When beef prices shifted or a supplier quoted new rates, someone had to manually recalculate the cost of every affected product. It was tedious, error-prone, and never quite up to date.

So I built them a solution. Nothing fancy—just practical software that kept formulas organised and automatically recalculated costs when ingredient prices changed. That cost cascade feature, born from a real business need, remains the cornerstone of Trace Swift today.

From University Project to Production System

I eventually joined the family business. What started as helping out became fifteen years of hands-on experience in food manufacturing—everything from production planning to quality management to facing auditors across the table.

During that time, the software grew alongside the business. We added production batch tracking because we needed to know exactly what went into each batch. We added supplier lot capture because auditors asked about ingredient sources. We added traceability because regulations demanded it and customers expected it.

Every feature was built to solve a real problem we were actually facing. I understood the domain. Nothing was theoretical. Nothing was added because it seemed like a good idea. If it's in Trace Swift, it's because a manufacturing business genuinely needed it.

The Knotty Problem: Traceability

Of all the challenges in manufacturing, traceability was the hardest. Auditors would ask: "Show me everything that went into Batch 2847." Then they'd flip it: "Show me every product that used Ingredient Lot X from Supplier Y."

With spreadsheets and paper records, these questions took hours to answer—sometimes days. With the software we'd built, they took minutes. That speed wasn't just impressive to auditors; it was essential when a supplier called to say there might be an issue with a raw material lot.

Forward traceability. Backward traceability. Instant answers. That's what Trace Swift delivers, because that's what we needed when I was the one fielding those calls.

Why Re-Platform Now?

After decades of use as a critical daily application, the technology underneath was showing its age. The core logic was sound—proven through years of real production—but the platform needed modernising.

At the same time, I realised something: the challenges we faced weren't unique to our business. Every small and medium manufacturer dealing with formulations, batch production, and regulatory requirements was fighting the same battles. Many were still using spreadsheets or cobbling together systems that didn't quite fit.

Enterprise solutions existed, but they were designed for large corporations with large budgets and large IT teams. SMEs were underserved—forced to choose between expensive overkill or inadequate workarounds.

So I rebuilt Trace Swift from the ground up using modern technology, designed it for cloud delivery, and priced it for the businesses that actually need it. The decades of domain knowledge and battle-tested logic remain; the platform is ready for the next thirty years.

What Makes Us Different

Our Principles

Based in the United Kingdom

Trace Swift is a UK-based company, with data hosted securely in the European Union. We serve manufacturers across the US, UK, Europe, South Africa, and beyond—anywhere that batch traceability and formula management matter.