The challenge
Scaling and growing food export value
When it comes to exports, trust is one of the most valuable assets that buyers can look for in the supply chain. While Australia has a strong reputation for food quality, producers are faced with complex and costly regulatory processes to meet market access requirements. Current systems are inefficient with many manual steps and reporting duplications.
This makes it difficult to scale and grow Australia’s agriculture and food export value and capture higher premiums across commodities. The vast amount of supply chain data collected are often disconnected from systems or located in different databases and typically only satisfy point-in-time compliance assessments.
Our response
Growing trust by streamlining reporting
Streamlining compliance and quality assurance requirements by digitising, connecting and enabling permissioned sharing of data is critical to reduce the regulatory burden and unlock further insights and opportunities for food processors and producers.
We have created a digital platform that collects data sets from across the supply chain and inputs into a dashboard. The dashboard allows for a continuous flow and real-time information updates, while simultaneously generating required compliance checks.
We’re partnering with the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), state regulators and working with beef processors such as Australian Country Choice (ACC) and Teys Australia, with funding support from the National Agriculture Traceability Grants Program and Meat & Livestock Australia.
The results
Turning data in to real-time analysis
By connecting the data, the digital ecosystem can inform meat processors about their performance, compare trends, and reveal areas of improvement and opportunity.
For example, when tested in ACC’s spray-chilling facilities, the data showed a small percentage difference in overnight carcass weight loss, a key factor in affecting the market value. The data identified areas in the chiller with greater moisture loss, indicating that carcass location in the chillers is an important consideration for businesses. Preliminary calculations showed the potential for $5-$7 million in savings per chiller, per year. ACC has 12 chillers, so this equates to a potential saving of up to $60 million.
In addition to making food safety compliance more straightforward, streamlining activities have the potential to deliver significant time and cost savings while improving reputation, quality, and safety in agricultural exports.
Although we have started with food safety compliance, this approach has potential to be used across biosecurity, quality, provenance, and enhancing sustainability credentials.