Friday, June 28, 2024

Top 5 This Week

Pursuing Some Predictability in the Volatile Fresh Produce Market

ProducePay, the Agtech company on a mission to transform the global agricultural industry into a more predictable, connected and sustainable supply chain, has officially announced the launch of a new solution called Visibility. According to certain reports, the stated solution comes decked up with an ability to provide fresh produce marketers and retailers full transparency of produce shipments, right from the field to all the way to their final destination. The idea behind doing so, like one might guess, is to ensure high-quality delivery for the produce, which is shipped from all across the world. Not just that, the solution also reduces rejection rates that have long undermined grower economic stability and led to significant food waste. Anyway, to achieve the objective in question, ProducePay’s latest brainchild combines best-in-class technology with on-the-ground agronomists, thus leveraging a critical capability to the company’s Predictable Commerce Program and giving customers greater control of their businesses in an otherwise volatile and unpredictable fresh produce supply chain. Talk about the same on a slightly deeper level, we begin from the promise of real-time and comprehensive information on produce quality, quantity, shipment status, and more. This information is captured by agronomists in the field and at shipment so to achieve high-quality produce deliveries in full, on spec, and on time. Extending the real-time theme is the option to track order in the given manner. The details one can track with such a feature include order progress, shipping conditions, and location. Furthermore, users can also come expecting a feature to access historical transaction data. Such a setup should go a long distance when the agenda is to unlock greater transparency compared to the experience in conventional produce transactions.

“Delivering high-quality produce across global supply chains is fraught with challenges, leading to high rejection rates, frequent disputes and disappointed customers – not to mention a staggering level of food and economic waste,” said Patrick McCullough, CEO of ProducePay. “We hear it from our customers all the time – more predictability means more profitability. By giving total visibility into quality and orders from farm to final destination, we’re bringing retailers surety of supply, empowering marketers to fulfill their commitments to deliver produce on time and in full, and giving growers greater confidence that their produce will be accepted after shipment.”

Moving on, ProducePay’s new product even brings to the fore end-to-end visibility, meaning multiple stakeholders can seamlessly manage order progress, including acceptance, adjustments, invoicing and rejections. This frees up a lot of time and resources for more effective planning.

Markedly enough, the development in question provides an interesting follow-up to ProducePay’s collaboration with Four Star Fruit, one of the world’s largest growers and distributors of table grapes. Formalized back in 2023, the stated collaboration was meant to pilot the company’s the Predictable Commerce Program. Going by the available details, the program was able to achieve less than 1% rejection rates in table grape shipments. On top of that, it also realized an 80% improvement compared to the standard rejection rate in traditional sourcing programs.

Making the entire development all the more important is, of course, ProducePay’s impressive track record. You see, thus far, the company has already traded more than $10 billion worth of fresh produce across 64 commodities, and it has done sp in 20 countries throughout North America, Central and South America and Europe. For this year alone, the company is expected to finance more than $2 billion in fresh produce transactions.