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They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but does this also apply to food products?
Food traceability labels usually work better than advertising hoardings. The conscious consumer is more concerned with whether the tea they are consuming is really from Darjeeling, rather than the flavor of the day of the celebrity who is advertising the product.
While you may know exactly what it is that you are buying, the extra information that is printed on the packaging always helps you get a better idea of what you are really consuming.
The bond of trust between the consumer and an agribusiness is often built on these food traceability labels since it tells the consumer the complete story of the growing, harvesting, and production cycle.
But how can you as an agribusiness ensure that your labels are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Traceability in agriculture involves ensuring compliance with the strict measures of agricultural institutions across the world and it is not an easy task. However, once a business can present comprehensive data on all its processes, compliance can help a food product become an international sensation with consumers across different geographies.
Read on to explore how Cropin's traceability solution helped one of its clients tell the true story.
Establishing Farm-to-Shelf Traceability with Labels- A Case Study
The Client
We partnered with a leading farmer-producer company (FPC) in India, one of Asia's leading grape exporters that contributed 20% of grape exports from India alone.
The Challenge
A primary challenge they faced, however, was in meeting the strict requirements on food traceability, compliance, and quality control set by buyers in Russia, Europe, and southeast Asian countries, among others. This is where they turned to technology for the solution and decided to partner with us.
The FPC sought to achieve the following objectives:
- Traceability both at the farmer and warehouse levels
- Quality assurance for importers
The Solution
As a result of implementing Cropin’s farm management solution Cropin Grow (SmartFarm), the FPC could effectively capture critical traceability data points and images at all levels of production, from pre-sowing to shipping. This ensured adherence to Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and other international compliance standards. Cropin's digital crop management software also enabled them to eliminate several manual processes, thereby increasing their efficiency and productivity.
Digitalizing the production activities increased end-to-end transparency for the FPC. When the harvest arrived at the warehouse, SmartWare facilitated the FPC to tag each inventory item with a unique ID that included critical information about the produce's journey so far. The company could review inventory-wise reports to identify farmers with produce that adhered to the criteria and quality norms set by the importing countries/regions.
Barcodes were generated for each inventory unit, which, when scanned, granted the buyer instant access to this traceability information. It allowed a consumer anywhere in the world to trace each product back to the farmer and land where it was grown and verify for themselves whether the label was telling a true story.
What is the Importance of Food Traceability? Explore now.
Ensuring Food Traceability Labels tell the true story
Using Cropin's platform also improved the productivity and efficiency of warehouse processes. Using our platform made it convenient for the company to print the labels and stick them on the respective inventory. The warehouse staff could then scan the label using his smartphone then and there, for stock management and inventory transfers to other locations based on the requirement. So, on the move, the person can scan and manage the inventories with ease.
Today the company is selling fruits and vegetables to countries around the world. What is even better is that it has built its platform around food traceability, ensuring that the labels and products never compromise on quality and product information, regardless of whether the enquirer is a government organization or the consumers themselves.
That is visibility, transparency, and consumer knowledge — the cornerstones of building a better relationship between agribusiness and the consumer.
This bond was solidified thanks to SmartFarm and SmartWare.
SmartFarm is our flagship smart farming solution that captures crop data straight from the fields. SmartWare, on the other hand, is a digital pack-house solution that establishes farm-to-fork traceability, quality control, and compliance with international trade regulations.
Being hosted on a cloud-based platform, both SmartFarm and SmartWare allow key players in the agribusinesses to view farm and supply-chain activities in real-time and derive actionable insights that encourage efficient and dynamic business operations. The Web- and mobile-based applications digitized every activity that goes into producing and exporting the grapes, thereby bringing about transparency and accountability in the entire process.
