Does your lot code qualify as a Traceability Lot Code?

Why this matters

The FDA's FSMA 204 Final Rule requires a Traceability Lot Code (TLC) for every food on the Food Traceability List when you initially pack a raw agricultural commodity, first receive a fishing-vessel food on land, or transform a food. The TLC must uniquely identify the traceability lot inside your records.

FDA does not require a GS1 barcode or a GTIN-based TLC. Any code that uniquely identifies the lot is acceptable to the agency. But retailer portals and supplier programs (ReposiTrak, Whole Foods, Costco, Wegmans) are increasingly built around GTINs. If your code is GTIN-based, your buyer's portal can parse it natively. If it isn't, expect a manual mapping step at every retailer that asks for one.

This tool encodes the failure modes practitioners run into most often: dates posing as identifiers, best-by labels posing as lot codes, sequential numbers that collide, and short codes that lose structure. It will not store your code, and there is no signup. For the longer-form explanation, see our TLC primer.