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One of the key benefits of digitalizing agrifood supply chains is being able to trace and track food products more easily, thus having more visibility of food supply chains. In lieu of food safety scares, food fraud and food sustainability, food traceability has become a prominent area of focus for many food industry players, food and health authorities, as well as solutions providers.

Consumers Want Greater Levels of Traceability

There has been a burgeoning focus on food journeys and origins as consumers now want to know more about the origins of foods they’re purchasing and consuming. A survey done by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation found that over half of US consumers surveyed indicated that recognizing the ingredients and understanding where food is from as key factors that affect purchasing decisions. In the UK, 8 in 10 consumers check the origin of their food when purchasing them – ensuring that their food originates from where it is advertised as coming from is important to them.

And the need for traceability and focus on food origins is likely to continue growing. The Center for Food Integrity predicts the number of consumers concerned about the origin of their food will hit nearly 50 million by 2021, with a significant number of them from the younger generation, who are typically more concerned with ethical food choices.

Information about origins and methods of production, with its storytelling ability, comes with huge marketing opportunities to shape the narrative of our foods. Research conducted by the University of Copenhagen’s Future Consumer Lab found that consumers tend to think food tastes better when they know where it came from and how it was made.

Thus, there is a real need for players in the food ecosystem such as food manufacturers, produce growers and suppliers, retailers to meet the demand for such information about their products.

Food Safety Concerns Continue in Asia

According to the FAO, food safety continues to be a concern in Asia. The infant milk powder fraud in China back in 2008, otherwise known as the melamine milk crisis, resulted in the death of at least six babies and a swift response to improve food safety regulations and practices throughout Asia. During the world’s first Food Safety Day in 2019, FAO said that the Asia-Pacific region has a poor track record when it comes to preventing foodborne illnesses, resulting in the deaths of 225,000 people each year, and affecting over 275 million people annually. This shows that there is much to be done still when it comes to food safety.

In Singapore, food safety is also top of mind. The government set out a 30 by 30 mandate in 2019, aiming 30% of Singapore’s food supply has to be homegrown to bolster its food security by 2030. A new statutory board, Singapore Food Agency, has also been created to focus on food safety and food security.

Food safety scares also carries heavy burdens on companies –  Food recalls cost companies an average of $10 million in direct costs alone and reputational damages. Consumers are wary to purchase products that were previously recalled or deemed unsafe for consumption –  A Harris Interactive survey shows that 16% of consumers would never buy a recalled food product again, and 17% of people impacted by a recall would not buy any product from the same manufacturer.

Challenges of Food Traceability Due to Globalized Supply Chains

Between 2000 and 2016, world agricultural trade increased more than threefold in value, rising to USD 1.6 trillion in 2016. While this burgeoning trade provides more food options on our plates, it also creates new risks. With longer and more complex supply chains giving rise to the “Messy Middle”, tracking from farm to fork requires increased scrutiny and accountability throughout the process.

The difficulty here is that each stage of the supply chain depends on one another for full visibility. One weak link could break the whole flow of information, which traceability heavily relies on. It is more difficult to ensure that ingredients and finished products are safe to eat when the responsibility for food safety is spread over many different business partners, as most do not know each other and information is all over the place, yet they all have to work as one to ensure food remains free from contamination at every stage of the supply chain.

Traceability Technologies

With the challenges of food traceability, several traceability technologies have popped up to tackle the problem. There are four aspects to traceability:

1. What is The Data Being Captured 

Details about the product information such as origins, company involved, product health certificates and certificates of origins should be captured.

At the same time, product information is closely related to trade information – i.e. purchase orders, sales orders, invoices all should be captured alongside the product information such that we can easily track and trace the movement of the product as it exchanges hands.

2. How is the Data Being Captured

It would be infinitely complex to try and capture all this information at every single stage of the supply chain. A clever way to capture essential information would be to capture the data at a point of aggregation in the supply chain. For instance, DiMuto helps packing houses to digitalize their fresh and frozen produce, and capture relevant product and trade information for each product and it has worked because packing houses would have the relevant farm information from the farms they purchase from.

DiMuto technology used at the largest Thai Durian exporter’s packing house

Then the question of how to efficiently digitalize each product and associate to the data that we are capturing arises. The operational aspect of tagging and tracking each physical item also comes into question as every company has different operations across the various markets.

Firstly, easy-to-scan produce codes have to be implemented to allow easy, digital identification of products. Universal standards have to be created and adhered to so that the identification code can easily be used and read by all partners in the supply chain, including consumers. For instance, GS1, the most widely-used supply chain standards system in the world, has introduced a GS1 QR Code standards that DiMuto has adopted.

Then, using our propriety DACky machines, DiMuto is able to assign a digital identity to every single physical produce, and are able to capture a photo of each carton and product before each carton is sealed, upload this photo and associate it to the specific sales order it was packed for. Thus linking the physical product to the relevant digital data for traceability of both product and trade.

3. Where is the Data Stored

Supply chain players have turned to blockchain technology as a new, effective way to build trust due to its ability to validate, record, as well as distribute transactions in immutable, encrypted ledgers.

DiMuto uses blockchain, AI and IoT in our Track & Trace platform to provide supply chain partners full visibility. It is important to note that blockchain does not prevent errors, but instead places responsibility on the supply chain players with regards to what they declare. What anyone declares, whether it is right or wrong, voluntarily or not, will be analyzed and processed thanks to the immutability of the source of each data. Thus, we are able to show who made the error, and what was the error, if any, in each trade.

4. How Can We Communicate the Data Effectively? 

At the same time, besides solving traceability amongst B2B supply chain partners, traceability solutions have to link back to the end consumers who are ultimately the ones demanding for higher transparency. This is where the easy-to-scan codes come in, as the DiMuto QR labels are easily scanned by consumers to access the relevant information about the product.

We also provide a consumer marketing solution that can help companies to brand their products.

DiMuto Consumer Marketing Solution

A Need for Applicable, Interoperable & Customer-Centric Solutions

At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that many companies will choose to adopt in-house solutions for traceability. However, given the interconnectedness of our agrifood supply chain, solutions that will work in a scalable manner will have to be interoperable and be able to speak to different systems while still maintaining the truth. That is why DiMuto solutions are interoperable, and we work with IBM Food Trust such that our customers can easily provide important information mandated by major retailers like Walmart and Carrefour while using the DiMuto system.

The application of traceability technology has to be well thought out. Data being captured, shared and verified with the blockchain, can now be used for a multitude of purpose – trade financing, data analytics, QR marketing, trading with new trusted partners and more. That is why DiMuto offers a 360 trade solutions so that we can help our customers better their trade from all aspects.

Food Traceability is a promising and exciting space. Allied Market Research has predicted that the global food traceability market will reach some US$22.3bn in 2025, growing 9.3% from US$11mm in 2017. Thus, it is likely we will see new developments in Food Traceability in the next few years.

If you are interested to learn more about how DiMuto helps create traceability for fresh produce, please reach us here or drop us an email at sales@dimuto.io.

“Disrupting Agriculture” is the theme for Start-up Day 2020, an event organized by Fruit Logistica, the largest global exposition for the fresh produce industry. With the boom in agtech innovation in the last few years, the produce industry is indeed ripe for disruption.

The wave of new technology trends such as vertical farming, agriculture robotics, smart farming is spurred by problems affecting the supply side of our food supply. Vertical farming has been seen as the next big solution to mitigating climate change and climate-related natural disasters threatening food security, while labour shortages have long plagued farmers prompting the adoption of mechanization and robotics technology – As many as 40% of farmers in California have regularly been unable to fulfill labour required for crop production for the past five years.

Export Fruit Trade as Key Driving Force of Agriculture Industry

While there have been many companies coming up with solutions to solve the problems mentioned above, it is also worth looking at the key driving force behind the global fresh produce and agriculture industry. According to a 2018 FreshPlaza report, the total export trade in fresh fruit and vegetables has developed more rapidly than the total global trade in goods in the past ten years. The international trade in fresh fruit increased by an average of 2 million tonnes per year to about 80 million tonnes in the past 10 years, and the five key trade flows pegs Southeast Asia as the growth market. Mutual trade flows in Southeast Asia performed best with the largest absolute growth in global trade flows of fresh fruit to almost 8 million tonnes worth of fruit a year, as well as rapid growth of exports from North America, Latin America and the rest of the world into Southeast Asia.

Apples, Citrus, Bananas, Grapes are amongst the top exported fruits. 

Trade Dispute: Huge Problem of Companies Doing Export Trade

The high growth of cross border trade in the produce industry has also magnified the problems of conducting produce trade. Problems like trade disputes over food quality can cause up to 5-10% loss per container of fruit exports. Food safety issues, a rampant problem of the industry, often result in entire batches of produce being rejected or destroyed, creating millions of losses. It is no wonder that the need for supply chain and trade transparency was one of the key highlights during Produce Marketing Association (PMA)’s 2019 Tech Knowledge event to solve the “Messy Middle” of global produce supply chains.

Supply Chain Transparency Solves The “Messy Middle”

Supply chain transparency has been little more than a buzzword due to the overwhelming complexity of food systems. While industry giants such as Walmart, Carrefour and Nestle have started implementing traceability solutions in a bid for more transparency, it has been difficult for supply chain transparency to gain more traction throughout the industry. There are limited players that have adopted traceability solutions. This is mainly because the produce supply chain simply involves too many moving parts and stakeholders, and no one traceability solution has been able to work for all the players.

Getting Supply Chain Transparency to Work

For supply chain transparency to work, it is important to target the meat of the problem – getting the data from physical produce.

What does this mean? Millions of physical cartons of fresh produce products are being moved every day,  yet there has not been a way to effectively and efficiently track them, as well as easily access information related to each carton, nor prove the quality of the produce. A key obstacle would be digitalizing the produce and the carton it is packed in. Without a digital identity, it would be extremely difficult to track. (We previously talked about digitalized produce here)

Operational aspects also need to be considered for digitalizing produce to be applicable.  They include being able to efficiently capture all the digital identities of the produce and cartons as they move through packing lines on the ground so that there are minimal disruptions to existing workflows. Not all packing houses are created equal – some are highly automated, while others are still largely manual. Thus for traceability solutions to work down to the product level, it is important to cater to the needs of different produce companies.

At the same time, digital identities need to be easily readable by all supply chain stakeholders. A good solution would be to adopt GS1 Standards for labels, a common foundation for business by uniquely identifying, accurately capturing and automatically sharing vital information about products.

Thus, a deep level of understanding about the workings of the produce industry is key in coming up with a solution that is truly applicable and scalable. That is why at DiMuto, we have developed different machines to capture product information at the packhouse that we call Digital Asset Creation machines (DACky). Our DACky machines are designed to capture a photo of each carton and each individual produce, associate it to the relevant trade that it is packed for so as to relieve the heavy burden of proof on suppliers when it comes to trade disputes.

Not only so, DiMuto is a GS1 Solutions Partner, and we use QR Labels following GS1 Standards for all our customers, as consumers are able to easily scan the QR code for traceability information related to the product.

DiMuto QR Labels

Maximizing the Data from Digital Supply Chains for Added Benefits

At the same time, the benefits of adopting traceability technology have yet to be communicated well to fresh produce companies. Traceability alone is not enough to motivate industry players to adopt potential solutions. The ability to do branding with QR Marketing, as well as direct consumer engagement, is also highly attractive to brand owners looking to build their brands in new overseas markets. The potential to capture more personalized consumer data can let producers and retailers understand more about their consumers and facilitate the matching of supply and demand on the consumer level.

Another advantage of digitalizing supply chains would be trade financing – Produce companies, traditionally, never had trade financing opportunities as many financial institutions often consider the perishable industry too complex, and too high a risk. With digitalization and easily accessible supply chain information, financial institutions may be more keen to provide trade financing opportunities to fresh produce companies.

That is why DiMuto offers a 360 trade solutions platform that solves the challenges of suppliers, traders, buyers and brand owners operating in the produce trade. The ability to reduce trade disputes, access to trade financing and the opportunity to do marketing are key motivators for companies looking to adopt traceability and digitalization. Learn how we have helped provide trade financing to Thailand’s largest durian exporter here.

It is well-known that Data is king in the era of digitalization. Armed with having trusted, quality data about the agrifood supply chain, then can we truly disrupt one of the biggest driving force behind the produce industry.

DiMuto is one of the twenty startups to be selected to participate in Fruit Logistica’s Start-up Day 2020. If you are interested to learn more about how DiMuto helps create traceability for fresh produce, please reach us here or drop us an email at sales@dimuto.io.

Queen Frozen Fruit is now able to obtain visibility for all their orders, tracking & tracing every single carton and every single individual Queen Durian for their 14 packing houses in Thailand.

• Location: Thailand
• Industry: Fresh Produce, Durians
• Thailand’s Largest Fresh & Frozen Durian Exporter 
• 14 Packhouses & 4 factories throughout Thailand
• Est. 400 containers of fresh durians sold to China every year

• Tagged 4 million Durians in 2019
• Helped finance US$2million worth of trades

With the newly added visibility of their trades, Queen Frozen Fruit is now able to have access to financing for their trades that they were unable to obtain before.

This is the second article in the series “The Digital Supply Chain”. This series explores what is digitalization, reasons for digitalization and best methods for digitalization of agri-food supply chains.

Managing agri-food supply chains is notoriously fraught with challenges. Today, global agrifood supply chains are extremely complex,  as agricultural products such as fresh produce often pass through many different stakeholders and cross international borders before finally reaching the end consumer.

The current modus operandi of modern agrifood supply chains often means that information stored at one layer of the supply chain remains accessible only at said layer. For instance, information regarding the sorting and packing process of fresh fruits into different cartons often stays at the packers – meaning only the packer knows how were the fruits sorted and what was packed and shipped for each carton.

This often results in a disconnected visibility of the supply chain where companies are unable to track products as they move across borders – creating what we in the industry call the “Messy Middle” where miscommunications, misinformation and trade disputes thrive due to the lack of data and information flows. Due to this lack of transparency, packers and suppliers find themselves facing heavy burden of proof when it comes to proving that they have packed produce of order-specified quality to buyers and retailers.

The Messy Middle of agri-food supply chains

The Unspoken Challenges of The “Messy Middle”

Operating in the “Messy Middle” is a giant nightmare for both buyers and suppliers alike. Currently, the information flow for each trade is all over the place, made more complicated with the onslaught of country-preferred instant messaging applications. Sales teams often communicate through both messaging applications and email threads, making transactions prone to miscommunications and misinformation.

Without a single trusted platform acting as a unifying depository of sales and product information categorized according to each trade conducted, internal company resources like manpower and time are predominantly allocated towards coordinating, tracking and tracing sales orders, shipping documentation, and financial payments.

With the different communication channels, there is no way to verify, find and share information in a timely and efficient manner.

This becomes a huge problem when quality disputes over goods received are raised. A Chinese apple supplier receives a quality complaint for a container order of Fuji apples from its buyer in Indonesia – “there’s a problem with the apples for order number 123, they are of poor quality”.

Now the apple packer faces an overwhelming burden of proof in trying to show that they have indeed packed their apples to the specifications of said order, as all the information regarding the trade is all over the place, and this trade dispute resolution process is only beginning to happen after the packing, transporting and receiving has been done.

Because suppliers often find it difficult to prove what happened at the point of packing, professional quality control groups are often hired in order to provide a “fair” evaluation of the quality of the products, adding yet another cost of doing the trade.

Disputes often translate to a drastic loss of margins of up to 5 – 10% per container, amounting to as much as $2,500 to $5,000, which is why such a problem is often swept under the rug. Nobody wants their competitors to know they are not doing well or there was a supposed problem with their product. Hence, a key unspoken challenge remains for players navigating this “Messy Middle” nightmare

Hear our founder explain the problems of the produce business here

Blockchain Touted As Revolutionary Supply Chain Technology

That’s why blockchain technology has come under the spotlight recently for its application to the supply chain industry.

Blockchain can publicly validate, record, as well as distribute transactions in immutable, encrypted ledgers.

With its ability to upload immutable trade documents, blockchain has the potential to share verified documents relating to each trade in a secure and efficient manner.

This means that that custody of truth is no longer with one single party within each trade, but instead, trade partners now look towards the blockchain as a source of truth and verified information.

This is also especially valuable when it comes to entering new markets and working with new buyers and suppliers. Having a single, shared platform where information on it is trusted by both parties significantly reduces the friction of conducting business.

With blockchain, buyers and suppliers can now see and agree upon the order specifications that was finalized between both parties, as well as access to relevant product information such as health certificates necessary for exports.

DiMuto goes a step further beyond blockchained trade documentation by providing physical asset digitalization – meaning we assign a digital identity to every single physical produce, and are able to capture a photo of each carton and product before each carton is sealed, upload this photo and associate it to the specific sales order it was packed for. (We previously explained what constitutes a digitalized produce here)

Our proprietary Digital Asset Creation machine, affectionately named DACky

The moment a physical asset like fresh produce can be digitalized, businesses can easily track not only the movement of the product but also critical product information such as quality, health certificates, certificate of origins, product photos tagged to the specific individual product, as well as relevant trade documents surrounding each supply chain transaction.

2019 was the year the world saw more public awareness on climate change.

Locally, 90% of Singaporeans surveyed are aware of climate change and 79% are prepared to do more to combat it. It is clear that the public’s sentiments on climate crisis are also echoed worldwide, with an eight-country poll conducted by showing global citizens prioritizing climate change as an emergency over migration and terrorism.

Problems of Climate Change – Food Security and Sustainability

A big part of the problem with climate change is that warming temperatures threaten food security. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), food security will be increasingly affected by future climate change through yield declines -especially in the tropics – increased prices, reduced nutrient quality, and supply chain disruptions.

Source: AFP

The ongoing Australian bushfire crisis has resulted in closed roads that meant food supply running low all over Australia, threatening food security. In Perth, Coles and Woolsworth have warned consumers to expect food shortages.

Experts believe that while bushfires in Australia are an expected natural occurrence, the intensity of the latest fires were aggravated by hotter and drier conditions associated with rising temperatures, exacerbating the crisis.

In lieu of changing weather conditions associated with climate change, we can expect that global food supply chains to be greatly affected.

Thus, there is a need to improve food security and consequently the sustainability of our food systems.

Food Security and Sustainability Challenges in Asia

Asia is often heralded as the fulcrum of our global food system, being both as a producer and a consumer of critical commodities including but not limited to rice, wheat, oil crops, cereals, livestock, root vegetables, and aquaculture.

Despite this, food security is a mounting concern as farmers in Asia actually produce less food per hectare than other regions –  with the exception of Korea, no country in Asia exceeds the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) average for staple crops such as rice, soy, and corn.

Increased frequencies and intensity of climate-related disasters in Asia have been reported by the FAO to cost a staggering loss of US$48 billion. In Southeast Asia, the agriculture sector is exceptionally vulnerable to the impact of climate change due to its location in the tropics.

Source

Natural disasters worsen food security through reduced food production, which can then cascade down to the entire food value chain, affecting livelihoods and causing economic and agricultural loss. Disasters can impact the agriculture sector through a loss of assets and rural infrastructure, and through increased disease outbreaks.

This is compounded by the fact that Asia will grow exponentially in the next ten years, adding further demand pressures on the food supply chain in the region. By 2030, Asia will have an additional 250 million population, representing a whopping 65% of the global middle class population. In ten years time, Asia will also have doubled its spending on food, amounting to over US$8 trillion.

AgriFood Tech Opportunities in Asia

One of the ways to tackle the challenges of the Asian agricultural sector would be through investing in innovative technologies that help transform the food supply chain.

The recent Asia Food Challenge report jointly produced by Temasek, PwC and Rabobank estimates that a cumulative investment of US$800 billion above existing levels over the next 10 years will be needed to grow Asia’s food and agriculture industry to a sustainable size, in order for Asia to feed itself. The majority of these investments – around US$550 billion – will enable key requirements around sustainability, safety, health, and convenience.

“Efficient Marketplaces, Digital Adoption and Greater Traceability” is cited in the report as one of the five key areas of new technologies that can solve Asia’s food challenge.

Food supply chains in Asia are complex and opaque, with disconnected visibility of data. With digitalization and a marketplace platform, various agrifood industry players including smallholder farmers are able to connect the dots and have access to more information that can better match supply and demand to reduce food waste and improve efficiencies of the supply chain.

For buyers and relevant food authorities, visibility of the supply chain allows for the identification of issues in a way that was never possible before, allowing for targeted intervention in areas such as food waste. At the same time, suppliers can also get access to trade financing due to this new data.

Consumer involvement through scanning of QR codes to access food provenance and safety information allows data to be obtained, supporting growing consumer demand for greater sustainability.

2020 & Beyond

Agri-food technologies are on the rise, and more collaboration from all stakeholders ranging from corporate investors, government agencies and private businesses can be seen.

In Asia, more government policies have also focused on food sustainability.

The Malaysian government has also announced in 2019 the Agriculture and Agro-Based Industry Ministry 2019-2020 Roadmap in a move to look at revitalizing the agricultural industry and strengthen food security. Five key action plans have been raised, including increasing agricultural trade export and spurring agriculture modernization.

In Singapore, the government has set out a 30 by 30 mandate, where 30% of Singapore’s food supply has to be homegrown to bolster its food security – a new statutory board, Singapore Food Agency, has also been created to focus on food safety and food security.

Given the pressing need to revolutionize Asia’s current food systems and regional governments’ push for better food security, food sustainability innovation in Asia is definitely an exciting space to watch this year.

[Press Release]

[Announcement]

DiMuto takes another step towards food safety with its involvement in the PMA Gold Circle Campaign

• DiMuto commits to raising the bar for food safety and a healthier world through the Produce Marketing Association Gold Circle Campaign for Food Safety
• The trade technology service company joins over 350 fresh produce industry players to promote food safety, strengthen consumer confidence, and support increased demand for fresh produce worldwide