Agribusinesses face a number of major challenges when it comes to exporting food produce. Two of the most prominent ones are:
- Ensuring adherence to the set quality and food safety standards during the entire crop production cycle and supply chain.
- Maintaining transparency to earn and retain the end-consumer’s trust.
While keeping every step of the agribusiness supply chain transparent addresses the former challenge, food products with labels stating comprehensive information about the product helps build the consumer confidence. Food safety is a growing concern across the globe. With more and more consumers becoming conscious about what goes into their food, it is of utmost importance to assure them that the end-product matches their needs. Some of the other difficulties agribusinesses that seek to overcome when looking to export globally or source from farmers and agents include:
- Supply chain inefficiency
- Building brand credibility
- Ensuring organic and sustainable produce
- Facilitating quick recall
- Monitoring production and harvest
- Adhering to export compliance
- Logistics traceability
- Achieving fair trade and social compliance
- Implementing recommended package of practices
- Building trust between consumer and supplier
Traceability allows monitoring of the product’s journey from sowing to selling. The purpose of traceability is to enhance security and safety in the food value chain. A prerequisite for exporting food is to meet the strict requirements on traceability, compliance, and quality control as specified by GLOBAL G.A.P. and other international compliance agencies.
Here are the ways that traceability can address specific problems for the agribusinesses that is sourcing from smallholder farmers for export:
Improved Supply Chain Efficiency
The capability to incorporate transparency to a product value chain will go a long way in ensuring economic benefits. Industry studies estimate that businesses incur avoidable losses amounting to 3% of sales due to lack of supply chain transparency. The visibility of supply chain inventory enables businesses to manage demand effectively and efficiently, reducing waste in the process – all this, by being location agnostic.
Effective Recall Recovery
Traceability mechanisms ensure that businesses revert to normalcy faster than usual, after a recall. And, of course, it significantly reduces the recall costs and recall time due to the ease of tracing back the exact contaminated batch.
There are also insurance providers who require product tracing capabilities to underwrite policies. According to the Grocery Manufacturers Association in the US, the financial impact of a recall is quite significant: 52% of all recalls cost over $10M and 23% cost over $30M.
Strengthened Brand Reputation and Consumer Confidence
Modern day consumers like to make informed decisions and want to know where their food comes from and how and when it was produced.
Traceability offers businesses an opportunity to share this information with their consumers, thus improving brand reputation and adding value to the buying process by creating strong consumer involvement and improving consumer communication.
Elevating The Export Game
Agribusinesses can level up their export game and widen consumer reach by presenting detailed data on all its processes. These businesses can meet the international compliance standards like GAP and ALP on a global scale and take on the mentioned challenges by digitising their farms and standardising agricultural operations with cutting-edge technology. In other words, they need a technological solution for agriculture that is both efficient and simple enough to be used by field officers and farmers. The need of the hour is to adopt food safety and traceability as a proactive measure – rather than as a reactive one.
How CropIn ensures Traceability?
CropIn captures total and near-real-time data across the supply chain so that the management can monitor processes on a single interactive dashboard. Let us assume that a farmer in Vietnam is harvesting rice that will be exported to Guatemala and the agribusiness is using SmartFarm to digitise the entire process.
First, information regarding the seeding process and the farm inputs (such as agrochemicals, machinery and farm implements) the farmer would use will be recorded in the app. Through the crop cycle, the application’s satellite imagery capabilities will provide authorised users in the organisation with insights on how the crop is faring across the total cultivated land.
The application will then estimate the yield for the season, which can be compared to the actual yield when harvesting is done. Thereafter, the crop is taken to the warehouse for storage. Instead of maintaining documentation on pen and paper, CropIn’s solutions will enable the collection and storage of this data in a cloud system to ensure minimum data loss and maximise process efficiency.
This also streamlines the supply chain to reduce wastage and enables timely transport. When the crop eventually makes its way to the exporter, they will have comprehensive data on the package of practices, inputs used, alerts raised, crop quality, lab reports, and every other aspect of the crop to ensure compliance with internationally accepted standards.
With the help of a unique barcode, the end customer in Guatemala will also have the ability to trace the end product back to the farmer who had sown it in Vietnam, thus achieving complete farm-to-fork traceability.
Source: http://www.cropin.com
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