It is Super Bowl Sunday here in the US, and as football fans gather to watch the big game around bowls of guacamole, chips, wings, and beer, it is important to reflect on nutrition and health.
Is Ozempic-as-a-Service a better option?
The company I worked for in the early 2010s was one of the earliest companies to provide item level traceability for a premium product like strawberries. Item level traceability is much more difficult and detailed than lot-level traceability, and it should only be applied where it makes sense in terms of the use case and the context.
In item-level traceability, each individual item or unit has a unique identifier, such as a serial number or a barcode/QR code that is specific to that single product. It is important in industries where safety, liability, and accuracy of records are paramount (e.g., medical devices, pharmaceuticals, high-value consumer electronics).
Our customer (a large strawberry grower) wanted to use item-level traceability to understand how supply chain and on-farm attributes impact the consumer experience with their product. Every clam shell of strawberries had a unique QR code, which was different from every other clam shell of strawberry grown, packaged, and shipped by them.
As a consumer, you could scan the QR code on the strawberry clam shell and answer a few questions about your experience with that clamshell of strawberries. Each survey was tied to the unique QR code for the strawberry clam shell.
Did you like the taste? Were they too sweet?
How did they look? Did they have any mold?
Did they survive in your refrigerator till you were ready to eat them?
On the back end, the unique QR code was tied to some critical information like - harvest date (when were the strawberries picked), variety of strawberries, farm and ranch where the strawberries were grown and harvested from, and some other attributes. All of the backend information was not visible to the consumer.
With a small incentive for the consumer, the strawberry grower was able to collect thousands of pieces of product performance feedback at the consumer level and link it back to farm and some supply chain attributes. The goal was to understand if we could uncover any supply chain or farm level attributes which had a statistically significant bearing on the consumer level performance of strawberries.
We often learnt surprising things that strawberries grown and harvested in California sometimes reached the east coast consumer faster than someone in Los Angeles, due to supply chain constraints! All else being equal (which was not easy to figure out), certain strawberry varieties lasted longer than other varieties etc.
It was extremely difficult to make claims with confidence as there was a large part of the supply chain which was not lit up with information as a clamshell of strawberries goes through multiple hops once it leaves the farm, with a large portion of its time spent in a wholesaler or grocery retailers distribution network across distribution centers, grocery stores etc.
The long term idea was to learn through this process, and then try to light up the middle of the supply chain to build confidence in some of the correlations, which could ultimately help with making different operational decisions across the supply chain.
The investment in a program like this is justified if you believe and hopefully show that the program gives you insights to provide a better quality product to your end consumer. The better quality product can bring brand loyalty, repeat and larger share of the wallet for the product category from consumers, and better supply chain performance from your ecosystem partners.