Brand loyalty remains one of the biggest challenges for the retail sector across industries. Customers are willing to shift preferences faster than ever before in an increasingly digital world. This puts tremendous strain on brands to invest in tools that can help them drive brand loyalty, repeat sales, and increase the customer lifecycle value. In fact, as per the Loyalty Big Picture report, globally, brands spend close to USD 75 billion per year on loyalty management.
The food processing industry too stands at a crucial juncture when it comes to ensuring brand loyalty. In fact, customer loyalty has emerged as the top concern for the industry, with 52% of respondents rating it as a challenge, as per a survey commissioned by Cropin. Interestingly, the other top industry concerns – 44% of respondents said last-mile traceability was a challenge, followed by 42% voting for changing customer preferences – hold some of the answers to addressing the brand loyalty issue.
The downstream digitization opportunity
Customer experience, innovation, and traceability in agriculture are fast becoming critical factors when it comes to creating customer delight and driving brand loyalty. Given the complex and fragmented nature of the food processing industry’s supply chain, delivering on such aspects may seem a Herculean task.
In this context, digitizing the downstream supply chain can prove to be an effective game changer. Farm digitization can be deployed with agriculture supply chain management software and integrated with a digitized upstream supply chain. That helps to deliver a transparent, interactive, and personalized purchase experience to the customer. This is important when we consider how much customers care for ethical sourcing, authentic product information, high nutrition retention, and greater control over the food they consume.
At a business level, digitizing the downstream supply chain can make it easier and faster to adapt to changing customer preferences as well as drive cost-efficacy. By deploying an intelligent cloud platform, cost reduction by 19% can be achieved within two years and revenue improved by 16% over the same period, as per an internal Cropin survey.
An additional benefit of digitizing the downstream supply chain is that it helps companies align with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals owing to availability of comprehensive, easy-to-understand data that can be reported. With the food production industry among the top contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, companies that are quick to align their operations to ESG demands will be the ones who unlock success and profitability.
The farm digitization impact on brand loyalty
Agriculture technology solutions such as Cropin Cloud can help digitize the downstream supply chain and develop farm-to-fork traceability in an optimum and intelligent manner. Here are some of the key ways in which it positively impacts operations:
Develop end-to-end traceability that helps to connect with new consumers
Consumers are keen to buy food that belong to brands that understand environmental sustainability. As per International Food Information Council’s 2022 Food and Health Survey, there is a marked increase in preference for “natural” and “clean” products in 2022. To ensure consumers have this information, transparency has become a must-have in today’s hyper-competitive market. As climate change and smart farming remain consumer priorities, unlocking transparency with technology interventions like Cropin Cloud becomes integral to gaining customer loyalty. Cropin Cloud engages with farmers to ensure optimal use of agri-input resources and provides digital proof of adherence.
Learn how Cropin Cloud enables supply chain traceability and sustainability for cocoa in Ghana.
Track and eliminate cultivation malpractices to ensure food safety and integrity
It is not possible to achieve success if scaling compromises food integrity. Cropin Cloud helps monitor, intervene, and influence cultivation remotely across locations and geographies. This ensures rapid scalability, be it in terms of volume or variety, while delivering high levels of food safety and integrity critical to enhancing brand value.
Enable end-to-end traceability of the supply chain to retain consumer loyalty
End-to-end traceability of operations (grading, sorting, inventory management, etc.) was reported as the top priority for 85% of the supply chain respondents. Providing consumers complete information they need to build trust that the product is fresh/safe to consume is key to 81% of respondents. Control on timing, quality, and quantity of supply to demand was most important for 78%. Deploying innovations like Cropin Cloud helps to overcome these challenges. Cropin Trace (RootTrace) is a QR code-enabled supply chain traceability solution on Cropin Apps that enables dependable automatic data capturing and sharing across the supply chain to allow transparency and accountability.
Eliminate counterfeiting and other malpractices throughout the supply chain
As much as 30% of products in FMCG are counterfeit. What is worse is that 80% of consumers are unable to differentiate between authentic and counterfeit food products. Brands that can equip consumers with quick tools for distinguishing their purchases are the ones who stand to win their trust and loyalty. Cropin Trace’s QR-enabled, tamper-proof traceability stickers ensure that both food processors and their customers can be confident of the product.
Cropin aids to digitize downstream operation to build brand loyalty for food processors
Food processing companies must accelerate digitization of downstream value chain and integrate it with their upstream value chain for a balanced growth in the future. Cropin Cloud can unlock such business and customer-centric benefits owing to world-class technology and an approach that is rooted in agri-science. Together, Cropin Trace and Cropin Intelligence work to let food processing companies benefit from 22 artificial intelligence (AI) models developed using one of the world's most comprehensive agri-knowledge graphs to gain real-time data-driven insights and intelligence to meet consumers’ changing demands and win brand loyalty.
