Consistency, and keeping the lot link unbroken

The chain you need

Supplier and their lot, with the pressing or harvest date, linked to the date you received it, linked to your batch code, linked to the bottles that went out and roughly where. Each link is trivial to record at the time and impossible to reconstruct afterwards.

Why it is the difference between a case and a season

If a problem comes from upstream, the question is which of your bottles contained that oil. With the chain intact that is a lookup. Without it, every bottle you made in the relevant period is implicated, and the cost of not having kept a notebook is measured in stock.

Consistency is mostly a sourcing question

An oil varies by harvest, by region and by season, so two deliveries from the same supplier can differ noticeably. A buyer who ordered a repeat expects the repeat. That argues for fewer suppliers, longer relationships and an honest conversation when a delivery is different.

Infusions drift more than the base does

Botanical material varies more than oil does, so an infused product moves on two axes at once. Fixing the ratio by weight and the infusion time by the clock removes the half of that you control.

What a buyer will ask

Whether the next delivery will match this one, and whether you can trace a bottle back if something goes wrong. The first is answered by your sourcing and the second by your records, and very few small bottlers can answer either confidently.

Code the bottle, not the case

A code printed on the case is gone the moment a retailer unpacks it, and a complaint arrives as a single bottle on somebody’s counter. The code has to be on the thing the buyer is holding, which usually means on the label or inked onto the bottle at packing.

References