Hi all,
Been struggling with this for a bit, wanted your input:
I work for a sausage casing company, we make the outsides of sausage, basically the animal intestine that the ground meat is shoved into. After cleaning and processing the casing is stored either in dry salt, or in a 90%+ brine solution. This makes an environment so hostile to microorganisms that the shelf life of the product is basically infinite. At least the industry hasn't determined an expiry range because their experiments took upwards of 5 years.
The casings are graded by quality and by diameter and strand length. This creates a huge amount of variation among the casings each of which could be in demand by different customers.
So my question is this: when the product is sold on an almost infinitely granular basis and has no logical expiration date, how does one deal with FIFO? When we can we do use the oldest material that the customer will accept, however most of the time we're selling material that was purchased to fill a specific order for a customer. Extras (and there always is) end up on inventory until we can sell that specific gauge and quality.
Thanks!