The Supply Chain Act poses additional challenges for the entire fruit and vegetable industry, but also enables new courses of action. To comply with this law, many German growers, traders, retailers, etc. will have to collect additional data and present it for verification. To cope with this large amount of data, the company AgriPlace offers a platform to transparently track supplier information from the entire supply chain.
Frederic Unger
Topics such as sustainability, food safety and social standards are not only important for retailers and suppliers, but are also increasingly demanded by consumers. In this context, AgriPlace cooperates with Global G.A.P., among others, as Frederic Unger told us: "The cooperation with Global G.A.P. is very important to us. Of particular interest to us is the automatic collection of social and sustainability certificates such as GRASP or SPRING, among others. These certificates can be used, for example, to verify social practices and water use of farms worldwide."
Information for and from retailers and suppliers
"We enable our users to automatically collect supplier documents such as food safety, as well as social, sustainability certificates, effectively manage and share them. Recently, our system also collects laboratory analyses, product specifications and supplier declarations completely autonomously for our customers. In principle, this is all relevant information that retailers need to obtain from their suppliers in order to be compliant and to be able to sell the products to retailers or the hospitality industry," says Unger. The data is always collected and processed in accordance with the EU Data Protection Regulation.
The AgriPlace Chain platform is mainly used by traders to obtain information and certificates from databases such as GLOBALG.A.P. and laboratories or directly from suppliers and producers. Farms within a supply chain that cannot meet the increasing requirements for food products will have difficulty marketing their products to retailers.
The Supply Chain Act as a major business opportunity
"We see the Supply Chain Act as a great business opportunity for retailers to prove themselves in the market and show how digital as well as transparent they can work and especially how much responsibility they can take for the supply chains of their products. It is understandable that it will be difficult for individual farms and producers around the world to compile so many documents, especially as there are many more requirements from the EU. However, we expect the opportunities to outweigh the challenges," says Unger. Along with this, AgriPlace's work will also adapt accordingly.
"Due to the high complexity and increasing risks for traders, we see the Supply Chain Act as an opportunity to optimize not only external transparency, but internal transparency as well, which means moving away from compartmentalized thinking, as information is available to everyone and more effective processes are made possible. Together with our AgriPlace Chain system, not only quality activities but also work processes in sales and purchasing can be optimized."
The company's ambition is to digitize the entire supply chain or digitally prepare the information behind it. "Users of our system can automatically retrieve information and validate supply chain data by e.g. GGN and chain of custody number. This drastically reduces manual work and the potential for errors, as documents and supplier information do not have to be constantly checked and updated." For producers and producer cooperatives in particular, the platform will make it as easy as possible to upload documents and integrate them into the supply chain.
For more information:
Frederic Unger
Agriplace
Oostenburgermiddenstraat 206
1018 LL Amsterdam
Niederlande
Tel.: +31 (0) 85 48 97 333
E-Mail: [email protected]
Web: https://www.agriplace.com/?lang=de