Food Products for WooCommerce

Food Products for WooCommerce turns your WooCommerce shop into a food shop. It adds two new product types - Food Simple Product and Food Variable 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. Food Variable 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. Food Variable Products track batches per variation, matching how WooCommerce already tracks stock. Every sale takes a unit off the batch closest to its date, and a refund puts it 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 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 the batch closest to its 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 the reduced batch on the product page, the discount applies to that cart line only, and the offer withdraws itself once the 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. 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 only ever mailed once, every send is recorded in an Email Log, and a "Send Notification Email 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.
• 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 WooCommerce must be installed and active. The plugin will not activate without it, and deactivates itself with an explanatory notice if WooCommerce is later disabled.

1.3.1

• Fixed batch expiry, category switching, digest retries and Markdown Earnings edge cases; improved performance for larger catalogues and made Food Variable controls more reliable.
• Fixed: two shoppers checking out the last units at once could both be sold them. Batch stock is now claimed while checkout can still refuse, in classic and block checkout alike.
• Fixed: switching batch tracking off, changing the product type or turning Expiry & Tracking off now gives WooCommerce its stock management back, with the batch total as the quantity.
• Fixed: sold-out and written-off batches no longer set the best-before date shown in the shop. Where automatic markdown can offer the stock, the date is shown on the offer instead.
• Fixed: saving settings no longer sends the expiry digest at once or moves its schedule.
• Fixed: removing the last email recipient or category from a setting now saves.
• Fixed: a negative batch quantity typed in the editor is saved as zero rather than as stock.
• Fixed: Mini Cart blocks outside the shop pages now style the batch and offer lines.

1.3.0 Correctness release. The headline fix is a race condition in how batch stock was written.

• Fixed: two customers checking out at the same time could both buy the last units of a batch. Every batch movement - a sale, a refund, a write-off, a product save - read the batch table, changed it in PHP and wrote it back, so the second write silently discarded the first one's deduction and the batch sold past its physical stock. Since the batch table is the stock, the product's sellable figure was wrong with it. All nine places that write a batch table now do so under a per-product lock. On a database with no lock support the write still goes through and a line is written to the error log, because failing to record a sale that has already been paid for is the same oversell by another route.
• Changed: a refund only puts units back on the shelf when "Restock refunded items" is ticked. Previously every refund restocked, even when the customer kept damaged goods. Refunds made before this release are treated as restocking, so nothing already in your books moves.
• Fixed: automatic category switching ignored quantity, so a written-off batch kept a product in the "expired" category every night however much fresh stock was behind it. It now looks only at batches that still have units, as the settings screen always said it did.
• Fixed: re-saving a product wiped its write-off history, zeroing the "Written off" column in Markdown Earnings.
• Fixed: weekly, 2-weekly and 3-weekly digests were never scheduled when the plugin was activated
• only when the settings page was next saved.
• Fixed: the digest emailed products that are no longer tracked, and batches with no units left.
• Fixed: a reduced price could show as the full price in the mini-cart and on block-based carts until the next page load.
• Fixed: refunding, cancelling or trashing an order placed while Automatic Markdown was on did not credit its units back once the feature was switched off. Deleting a refund, and trashing an order outright, now re-count it too.
• Fixed: on shops entering prices excluding tax and showing them including it (or the reverse), the batch picker showed a different "full price" than the one printed above it, and Markdown Earnings added two different tax bases together.
• Fixed: in "hide" mode, products taken off the shop still used up their slot in the product grid, so a page of twelve could render four.
• Fixed: a product switched away from a food type kept answering its stock from batches nobody could edit any more.
• Fixed: dates and times in the Switching Log could disagree by a day, and the date filter could miss entries from the day it was filtering on.
• Fixed: "Copy to a new draft" carried the original's category-switching state, so the copy began life as expired.
• Fixed: a nearing-expiry category could be left on a product after it had passed through expired and back out again.
• Fixed: opening a variable product marked every variation as changed before anything was edited.
• Fixed: a reduced cart line that dropped to full price, because its batch sold out while the shopper browsed, became a second line for the same product on the next add to cart.
• Security: the recipient picker no longer returns other users' email addresses, and the markdown unit cap is bounded.
• Quantities and packing dates are stored as numbers and dates rather than as whatever was typed.
• Documented in the FAQ: once a product's batch table takes over as its stock, WooCommerce's own stock figure for it is not recoverable after uninstalling.

1.2.0

• New "Appearance" settings tab: thirteen colours covering the ingredient list, the nutrition table, the batch picker, the "Reduced to clear" badge and the best-before line, with a live preview on a light and a dark theme and a WCAG contrast check on the pairs that carry text. Every field starts empty and empty keeps the shipped styling, so an untouched shop is served no extra CSS at all and keeps following its theme.
• The plugin is now called "Food Products for WooCommerce" wherever its name is shown.
• Automatic Markdown now offers every batch that is close enough to its date, each at its own step, instead of only the one closest to expiry. The shopper picks the date they want.
• The Expiry Dashboard's columns can be sorted by clicking their headings, and the CSV export follows the same order.
• The product page stylesheets now inherit the theme's font, size and colours, so the nutrition table, ingredient list, best-before line and batch picker read correctly on dark and light themes alike without custom CSS.
• Stylesheets and scripts are only loaded on the pages that use them: a non-food product page loads none of them, and the markdown stylesheet no longer loads on every page of the site.

1.1.0

• The batch table is now a tracked product's stock. Switching "Track expiry dates and batches" on turns WooCommerce's own stock management off for that product or variation (and for the parent of a variable product) and hides the option; the product is in stock while a batch in date has units left, the product page shows the batch total as "N in stock", and a shopper cannot buy more than the batches hold. A product that was managing stock shows what WooCommerce held, so those units can be entered as batches.
• A full-price sale now comes off the freshest batch first, keeping the batch nearest its date for the reduced offer. A reduced sale still comes off the batch the shopper picked.
• Stock past its best-before date is no longer sold at any price unless "When a batch passes its best-before date" under Products is set to keeping it on sale, which adds a fixed last step to the Automatic Markdown ladder for it with its own discount and wording. The ladder's own steps now start at one day out.
• "When every batch has expired" is now "When nothing is left to sell", with two choices: show the product as out of stock, or hide it. The old "keep selling at full price" choice no longer applies and falls back to out of stock.
• What happens to a batch past its date is now one choice under Products - write it off by hand, write it off nightly, or keep it on sale at a discount - rather than two toggles on two tabs that ruled each other out.
• New Automatic Markdown: discount a batch automatically as its best-before date approaches, on a ladder of steps you set, with a live preview of what a shopper would be offered, a cap on how many units go on offer, a price floor, and a choice of what happens once every batch has expired.
• New Markdown Earnings screen: what each marked-down batch sold, what it brought in, what the discount cost, and how much expired unsold anyway.
• New Switching Log screen: every category move the nightly run makes, with the product, the direction and the batch that caused it.
• New Ingredient list, with allergens picked out in bold, shown as its own tab on the product page.
• New nightly write-off, and a write-off button on each batch, taking what is left of an expired batch off WooCommerce stock so the shop stops selling it. Pick the hour it runs at, on your shop's own clock; it starts at midnight. It never takes stock below zero.
• Batch quantities now follow every sale, not only the reduced ones: a sold unit comes off the batch closest to its best-before date, the way the shelf is emptied, and a refund puts it back on the batch it came off. Stock you have not put a date on is sold last. The Expiry Dashboard and the batch table therefore read as what is still on the shelf rather than what was put there, and an expiring batch is no longer written off stock that was already sold.
• Split the settings into a General tab and a new Products tab. Each dashboard is switched on directly under the feature it reports on, and is only offered while that feature is on: Expiry Dashboard and Switching Log on the Products tab, Markdown Earnings on the Automatic Markdown tab. The General tab is left with the date format.
• The Markdown Earnings and Switching Log screens now open on the last year, and their date filters are labelled From and To.
• The markdown plumbing an order line carries - the batch it came from and the amount saved - is no longer listed on the order screen. The Best before date and the Offer it was sold under still are, and the money is on the Markdown Earnings screen.
• Rewrote the option names, labels, tooltips and messages across every screen in plain English, with one term per thing throughout.
• The write-off and delete buttons on the Expiry Dashboard now name themselves on hover, so an icon-only action says what it does before it is clicked.
• Every switch in the Expiry & Tracking tab now carries a help tip saying what it does, on both a Simple Food Product and each variation of a Variable Food Product.
• The Best before date and the Offer a reduced line was bought under now sit on a line each in the basket, mini-basket and checkout, instead of running together into one sentence.
• Fixed a Variable Food Product adding its parent to the cart instead of the variation the shopper picked. WooCommerce chooses how to handle an add-to-cart by product type and only knows its own, so the chosen variation was being dropped - which also made a marked-down variation come back as "the reduced units have just sold out", the batch having been looked for on the parent.
• Nutrient table rows can be dragged by their grip again - jQuery UI was cancelling every drag because the grip is a button.
• Fixed the "Declared per" choices stacking on top of each other in the product-level Nutrient tab, so 100 g and 100 ml can be picked again.
• Dropped "Serving" as a declaration basis. EU FIC 1169/2011 wants the declaration itself per 100 g or per 100 ml, so a serving size is now simply printed alongside whichever of those is chosen, on both the product page and per variation. Products that had saved "Serving" fall back to per 100 g and keep showing their serving size.
• Fixed the Unit select being taller than the fields beside it, in both the product tab and the variation panels.
• Fixed the nutrient row buttons sitting top-left instead of centred inside variation panels.
• Removed the nutrient row counter and the customer preview from the editor.
• Nutrient tables inside variation panels are drag-sortable again. The handler that set them up listened on the wrong element for WooCommerce's "variations loaded" event, so it never ran.

1.0.2

• Renamed the plugin display name to "MFood Products for WooCommerce" so it matches the assigned plugin slug, as asked for in the plugin review. Nothing you have set up changes.

1.0.15

• Renamed the plugin slug and text domain from food-products-for-woocommerce to mfood-products-for-woocommerce, as asked for in the plugin review. The plugin name, its settings and all data saved on your products are unchanged.

1.0.1

• Prefixed every remaining global name (options, meta, hooks, cron schedule keys, script handles, page slugs, CSS classes) and removed the dynamic prefix concatenation.
• Fixed an unbalanced closing tag on the settings screens.
• Guarded product category lookups against an error result.
• Guarded a missing quantity value when building the notification email.
• Batched the email log writes into a single option update.
• Passed fputcsv() its delimiter, enclosure and escape explicitly, for PHP 8.4.
• Removed unused code and corrected documentation.

1.0.0

• Initial release.