John Bailey on Hacking the Food System: The “Interoperability” of Data Systems

Hacking The Food System — By on September 28, 2011 2:36 pm

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The same product item number that is required by wholesale buyers for traceability or food safety, can also provide marketing benefit for a product by connecting consumers with producers through social media. This direct connection enables disruptive technologies such as the barcode scanning app ShopSavvy to pass through proprietary data silos, and re-establish data connections later in the supply chain. This is how a consumer and a producer can both check retail pricing using ShopSavvy.

This “interoperability” between data systems is the key to hacking the food system, since GS1 standard data formats are used between proprietary systems where agricultural products are marketed. This does not require adding a second barcode, like a QR code, to the product packaging.

Top 10 Produce LLC launched our brand “Top 10″ in 2009, to test a theory that we could create brand value by assigning the same 14 digit product number to a single person (the farmer), place (the farm), and thing (the product).  This allowed the product to be 100% traceable from farm to consumer, and provided this data to the consumer at the point of sale.

We  investigated this theory using a USDA funded SBIR grant and concluded that consumers were willing to pay a price premium as high as 30% for source identified produce grown by an independent local grower, as compared for identical produce from that same grower available in the same store. We later developed this idea in 2010 to allow for interoperability to link independent databases to a single produce code.

For example, if you scan the attached Locale brand label with ShopSavvy, you should see a map of the farm, and learn more about the grower who grew the strawberries that carried this label. You can also link to websites where you can learn about the Salinas Valley Rodeo, the National Steinbeck Center, or you can see Youtube video about the Locale.  The idea behind this place-specific data augmented branding is that certain products, like Salinas Valley Strawberries, or Locale Chesapeake grassfed beef, have regionally specific characteristics that are highly valued.

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John Bailey is an attorney advocate for a national network of independent farms.  In 2009, Bailey founded Top 10 Produce LLC to serves as a brand holding company for three transparent brands: Top 10, Locale, and Grower’s Reserve.  Each of these three brands gives producers access to their own supply chain data, with the help of disruptive technologies partners like ShopSavvy, Inc., so that producers are able to communicate directly with consumers.

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  • http://twitter.com/Steve_Holcombe Steve

    Notwithstanding GS1 data standard formats, GS1′s vision of
    interoperable “discovery services” remains unfulfilled. Data is data
    but it still remains “different” because it is characterized as
    consumer data, producer data, RFID data, bar code data, etc. But the difference
    in data is not in its categorization per se but in its proprietary nature. The
    ag and food industry exhibits a strong prevalence toward slow, rigid, “one-up/one-down”
    data sharing in supply chains. Even the Food Safety Modernization Act does
    little to shift one-up/one-down toward real-time, “whole chain”
    information sharing. But the use of open source mobile software applications
    (like Shop Savvy), the ability to introduce consumer access to traceability (as
    through Top 10′s traceability brand), and the increasing demand for supply
    chain transparency by consumers, set the stage for change.

    Top 10 is in fact participating in a just funded USDA
    National Food Safety Initiative (NIFSI) pilot project that will demonstrate how
    an open source approach to increasing interoperability between enterprise data
    silos (buttressed by metadata permissions and security controls in the hands of
    the actual data producers) will provide new “whole chain” ways of
    looking at information sharing in enterprise supply chains and consumer demand
    chains.

    The vision of this pilot project is that consumers could opt
    for retailers to automatically populate their accounts from their actual
    point-of-sale (POS) retail purchases. Consumers could additionally populate
    accounts in a multi-tenancy social network (like Facebook or Google+) using
    smartphone bar code image capturing applications. Supplemented by
    cross-reference to an industry GTIN/GLN database, the product identifiers would
    be associated with company names, time stamps, location and similar metadata.
    This could empower consumers with a one-stop shop for confidentially reporting
    suspicious food. Likewise, consumers could be provided with real-time, relevant
    food recall information in their multi-tenancy, social networking accounts, and
    their connected smartphone applications.

    Whole chain traceability is a vision for saving lives with
    supply chain and POS information that is either not being shared, or not being
    shared in real-time. This is a vision that goes well beyond the projects being
    piloted by the FDA under the auspices of the Food Safety Modernization Act.
    This is a vision in which Top 10 is playing a critical role.

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