Page 38 - Food & Drink Business Jan-Feb 2020

Want to know where and how your avocado was grown? Brisbane tech company Fresh Supply Co is creating digital food identities on a global network it’s calling ‘the internet of food’. Stuart Ridley writes.
Establishing identity: telling a product’s story
WORD-OF-MOUTH can be a blessing and a curse for anyone in the food business. Sure, it’s fantastic to see customers enthusiastically promote your products in their social networks (eye-to-eye in the case of photos on Instagram), negative views can spread peer-to-peer like wildfire.
And every claim you make about doing ‘the right thing’ is open to judgment in the messy court of public opinion.
So, what can you do about it? Give your consumers – and their social connections – something positive to talk about, suggest David Inderias, CEO of digital food identity business Fresh Supply Co (FSC), which launched in November 2017. “Frankly, most of the digital experience of food sucks,” he says. “As consumers we want connectedness between our physical and digital experiences but when it comes to food there’s often no payback with things
like QR codes on a piece of fruit.” Too often food companies
simply point to a website from a tiny call-to-action on the food label and then expect customers to dig for answers, warns Inderias.
Worse, the label only displays the brand name. Or there isn’t a label.
DIGITAL FOOD IDENTITY
Just because a product isn’t sold in a box with bold type calls-to- action doesn’t mean the label can’t trigger a customer-centric digital experience, he explains.
Fresh Supply Co helps food producers across Australia and Asia make the most of even the smallest labels to trigger a meaningful mobile content experience. Actually, that’s the easy part.
“You’ve got a consumer already interested in a specific product: they’ve actually picked it up,” he says. “Now they’ve engaged they want their curiosity satisfied. It’s like, if I walk into a car dealership
and say ‘Tell me about the Mustang’, I don’t want to hear ‘Go to our website’.”
Yes of course people want to ‘see under the hood’, he adds. Consumers often expect digital content that helps them discover interesting ways to enjoy a product. And they certainly relish recipe ideas from food brands, though recipes are just the baseline now, suggests Indieras.
Consumers are increasingly interested in the identity of food: they want to know how it was produced that makes it so special, where it came from, who was involved in its production, and even the end-to-end supply chain history.
But they see through marketing claims about food and will turn to their social networks to validate – and air – their opinions.
“I am the finicky millennial consumer constantly on social media,” Inderias says.
“If a product says it’s produced sustainably, I’m going to look it up. I’ll also see what other people have said about it on Twitter, Instagram etc... So, I’m happy to pay a premium for a good product, but I want to know why it’s worth it. Either way, I’m going to tell other people about the experience.”
DATA INSIGHTS AND BLOCKCHAIN
The major value FSC
gives its clients is end-to- end food traceability by helping them harvest data throughout the supply chain from farm to consumer.
This data can include weather and soil conditions on the farm, information about the producer and which sprays they applied during the growing process, plus data for inventory management including
grading results, and times and locations at each stage of the product’s journey.
38 | Food&Drink business | January-February 2020 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au