About this plugin
Food Products for WooCommerce turns your WooCommerce shop into a food shop. It adds two
new product types – Simple food product and Variable food product – that work exactly
like WooCommerce’s own Simple and Variable products, with everything a food or grocery shop
needs on top: a nutrition declaration table, expiry dates, batch and supplier tracking, and
automatic handling of stock that is about to go off.
Nothing is replaced or overridden: your existing products, themes and payment gateways carry
on untouched. You choose the new product type only on the products that need it.
Nutrition declaration table
Every food product gets a Nutrition tab: a label/amount/unit table declared per 100 g or
per 100 ml (pre-filled with the EU-mandatory energy / fat / carbohydrate / protein / salt rows,
all editable) that is shown to shoppers as its own tab on the product page. Rows can be
reordered, renamed, indented as sub-nutrients, added and removed. Variable food products can
share one table across every variation, or let a single variation override it with its own.
Ingredient list
An Ingredients tab holding the ingredients in declaration order, each with an optional
percentage, sub-ingredients and one of the 14 EU-declarable allergens. The product page prints
the list as one sentence with allergens in bold, plus a “may contain” line. Per-variation
overrides work the same way as for nutrition.
Expiry dates and batch tracking
The Expiry & Tracking tab stores one row per batch, each with an expiry date, quantity,
batch number, batch date and supplier – so you always know which delivery a unit of stock came
from and when it goes off. Variable food products track batches per variation, matching how
WooCommerce already tracks stock. A full-price sale takes units off the freshest batch first, a
reduced sale takes them off the batch the shopper picked, and a restocking refund puts them back,
so the table reads as what is still on the shelf.
Optionally, the closest upcoming expiry date is shown to shoppers on the product page – always,
or only once it falls within a number of days you choose.
Expiry Dashboard and write-off
An admin screen listing every batch row across every food product in one place, sorted by
closest expiry date first, colour-coded by urgency, filterable by date range and exportable as
a CSV file for your stock takes and audits. A batch that has expired can be written off from
there or from the product itself, taking what is left of it out of the sellable stock – or you
can have that happen automatically every night at an hour you choose.
The batch table is the stock
Once a product tracks batches, its batch table is its stock. WooCommerce’s own stock
management is switched off for it while it tracks; the product is in stock while a batch in date
has units left, “N in stock” on the product page is the batch total, and a shopper cannot buy
more than the batches hold. Every sale comes off a batch – a full-price sale off the freshest
batch first, so the batch nearest its date is kept for the reduced offer – and a restocking refund
puts the units back. Stock past its best-before date is not sold at all unless you say so (see
below). Switch tracking off on a product, change it to a non-food type, or turn Expiry & Tracking
off in the settings, and WooCommerce’s stock management comes back as it was before – with the
batch total as its stock quantity, since every sale in between came off the batches.
Automatic Markdown
Offer a discount on batches close to their date, on a ladder of steps you set (for example
15% a week out, 30% three days out, 50% on the last day). The product’s own price is never
changed: the shopper opts into a reduced batch on the product page, choosing the date they want,
the discount applies to that cart line only, and an offer withdraws itself once its batch is sold
out or expired. A cap on units per batch, a price floor, a catalogue badge and a choice of whether
a product with nothing left to sell stays listed or is hidden are all yours to set, and any product
can opt out.
Where the law allows it, you can also choose to keep selling batches past their best-before
date: that adds a fixed last step to the ladder with its own discount and wording, and those
units count as sellable stock. A Markdown Earnings
screen reports what each marked-down batch sold, what it brought in, what the discount cost, and
how much expired unsold anyway. Sell-through is worked out from your current settings, so changing an
opt-out, the category scope, the ladder or expired sales later also changes the figures of past batches.
Email when expired
A scheduled digest email listing every batch that has reached its expiry date – or is about to,
within a window you choose – sent to the shop users you pick, daily, weekly, every 2 weeks or
every 3 weeks. Each batch is mailed once to each recipient, every send is recorded in an Email
Log, and a “Send one now” button lets you run it on demand. Individual products can opt out.
Automatic category switching
Have WooCommerce move stock for you: categories you choose (for example “Clearance” or “Last
chance”) are added to a product as it nears its closest expiry date, and categories are removed
– or every category stripped – once that date has passed. If a fresh, later-dated batch pushes
the expiry date back out, both changes are reversed automatically, and categories you assigned
by hand are never touched. An optional Switching Log screen records every move the nightly
run makes, with the product, the direction and the batch that caused it.
Built for real shops
- Fully translation-ready, with a choice of date formats for the dates it prints.
- WooCommerce HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) and Cart & Checkout Blocks
compatible (see Requirements below).
- No account, no subscription, no external service: the plugin never contacts a remote server
and sends no analytics or telemetry of any kind. Everything runs on your own site.
- No bundled third-party libraries – it uses the copies of jQuery and Select2 that WordPress
and WooCommerce already ship.
- Every file shipped is unminified, human-readable source. There is no build step.
Requirements
0 or later must be installed and active. The plugin will not activate without
it. If WooCommerce is later disabled: on a single site, the plugin deactivates itself with an
explanatory notice the next time an administrator opens wp-admin; on a network activation the
plugin stays active and shows a notice on sites without WooCommerce, where its features stay
off. 2 or later, is also required – the stock locks nest
named locks.
Privacy
The plugin stores the WordPress user IDs of the people chosen to receive the expiry digest, and a
log of which user was emailed about which batch and when, in your own database. It sends no data to
any external service. Both are removed when the plugin is deleted. Once a batch has been mailed,
its row on the product also lists the user IDs it has reached, so a recipient added later is sent
it too; that list is dropped when the batch is written off, and is kept with the product’s batch
data if the plugin is deleted.