AgVic Talk Season 6

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Exporting Australian houses and exporting food into Japan. There's more in common than you'd think. G’day, I'm Drew Radford, and some of that commonality is about understanding the local market, central to that is supply chain providence. David Lawson has lived this, firstly as an exporter, and now as Assistant General Manager in the Trade Division of Austrade, responsible for agriculture, food, and consumer products. David joins us for this, A Taste you can Trace Podcast. Thanks for your time.

David Lawson:

Good to chat, Drew. Looking forward to having the conversation.

Drew Radford:

David, you fascinate me because I'm interested in Austrade's role in traceability, but you've kind of straddled both sides of the fence because you got into the trade game, I understand, living in Japan.

David Lawson:

Indeed, I did. As a youngster, I was an exchange student in Japan, and that really changed my career trajectory. I just fell in love with the concept of selling things to the Japanese. I found Japanese host families really clever businessmen, and I thought, "Wow, I really want to engage with that." So from a young age I tried to build my own little trade consultancy, based myself in Japan, and was looking to find Australian suppliers of products that might be able to succeed in the Japanese market. I tried to focus on things that the Japanese would always want to buy, things like food, clothing, and shelter. I had my success in perhaps the least likely of those three options, and that was with shelter, housing in particular. So based in Japan at the time, I imported a house from Australia and built that as a model house. And then over the next five or six years, proceeded to help import into Japan around about 50 Australian houses, which we built all around Japan.

Drew Radford:

That's a fascinating career path as it is, and a fascinating insight because now you are helping people do, I guess, essentially what you were trying to do yourself. So you've walked the walk.

David Lawson:

I work for Austrade now. And I guess I owe a lot of my success in building my own little business in Japan to Austrade because back in 1992, Austrade opened some regional offices in Japan, sort of small operations, three people in these offices. I found that by engaging with Austrade and discussing the needs that I had as an Australian exporter, they understood what I needed and proceeded in finding potential customers for me. Then my job was to go and meet these potential customers and over the course of 6, 12, 18 months, in some cases, negotiate with those customers and make the sale and get these kit houses exported from Australia to customers in Japan. Later on, I needed to transition the business and decided to apply for a job with Austrade and I too became a trade commissioner first up in Japan, but then the courier has taken me via a couple of stints in Australia to roles in San Francisco, in Mongolia, as well as a couple more stints in Japan as a trade commissioner.

Drew Radford:

That's a fairly decent global view of different markets. What's your role now?

David Lawson:

Yeah, so I'm really privileged to be able to lead a group of export advisors both within Austrade, but we also have a network of trade start advisors throughout Australia. These folks are all similar experience to me, different sectors of experience, but we help Australian ag and food and consumer exporters work out how to get into export. So that could be working with small companies, making their first tentative steps into getting into export, or it could be helping major exporters diversify into new markets.

Drew Radford:

That's important help that you're providing. It must be a fairly large network that you're working with to help Australian and Victorian exporters in particular reach into national markets.

David Lawson:

Yeah, so Austrade's been in existence in one way or another since 1933. I guess the concept is that we place trade commissioners overseas to help conquer the tyranny of distance. And we've got offices in 68 countries now in Australia and offshore. There's about 1,100 people either helping Australian exporters. But we also help foreign investors who are looking to make foreign direct investment into Australia as well.

Drew Radford:

I imagine something that's got a lot more focus since the time when you began your career, David, is traceability. So how important is it for international market access?

David Lawson:

Traceability is really, really important. We take great efforts in Australia to ensure that we have a clean and green and safe environment for growing our produce. The benefit of being an island country is that we can protect our borders and make sure that disease and other nasties don't come in and impact on our produce. As growers of livestock and fruit and vegetables, we really spend a lot of time, money, and effort in making sure that we have such a safe growing environment for our producers. Therefore it's really important to trade on the benefit that we have and therefore demonstrating that our product is in fact genuine Australian produce and it has been grown in the pristine Australian environment is really important. It's a really important marketing aspect for Australian product.

A lot of companies claim that they have clean and green credentials, and many do, but I think the point of difference, the unique selling point as it were for Australian produce, is that we can demonstrate through traceability protocols and systems that in fact what we say we are selling is indeed the high value and clean, green product that we say it is.

Drew Radford:

Which leads me to the next point then, David. You're not then just saying slapping a sticker on it, verified, that it's made in Australia is good enough. I imagine [what] you're really getting at there is the need for systems that trace the movement of a product along every step of the supply chain is really important.

David Lawson:

My earlier experiences when I was in my own business and I guess trying to keep cashflow, in fact, I did some interpreting for Japanese vets who were coming down to Australia to do inspections of the HACCP [Hazard analysis and critical control points] systems within Australian, beef, sheep meat and pork abattoirs. I really got the firsthand deep knowledge of how critically important it is to be able to demonstrate that all the way along the value chain, there are systems which ensure that what is delivered on a plate in an overseas market, in this case Japan, is in fact the quality product that came out of a paddock number 25 on block whatever of a farm back in Australia.

We marketed that. We really leveraged the concept of paddock to plate. And the concept is that, that barcode on the cellophane on a wrapper of Aussie beef should be fully traceable back to the 24 months prior as that beast was grown, prepared for, slaughtered, packed and shipped across the equator. So that to me demonstrates the critical importance of understanding and being able to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the end consumer offshore that we have full control of that supply chain.

Drew Radford:

That must also become more and more a requirement for overseas governments. What are your insights on international government requirements in that area?

David Lawson:

Many people might sort of see traceability. You're referred to putting a sticker on... You put a sticker on every single navel orange that comes out of Mildura, so that's the cost. But look, the benefits are at the macro as well as the micro level because DFAT [Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade] does a lot of the heavy lifting for Australia in conjunction with DAFF [Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries] to negotiate access to our markets. We've just won a really profoundly beneficial free trade agreement with the UK. A lot of that stems on our ability to be able to demonstrate that we can articulate the provenance of the produce that we're exporting. It's not just a random bag of oranges that are going off to France, for example. We can demonstrate that to the satisfaction of the European customer that we know exactly where this orange was grown, we know exactly where it was packed, we know the temperature controls that were applied, whatever fumigation requirements might've been applied to be able to meet the import requirements.

So in the background, there's a heck of a lot of work that's been done by the government agencies to negotiate the free trade agreements. And I guess the added costs means that we can leverage the provenance that we can demonstrate to access the higher value by demonstrating that we are providing those oranges from the best country in the world. We can compete against South African or Californian oranges because we can trace it right back. So there's a cost, but there's also a benefit.

Drew Radford:

And as part of that cost too, David, it goes well beyond I imagine just a sticker because now you need a digital traceability system. So what challenges do producers, exporters and supply chain participants face when transitioning across to those digital traceability systems?

David Lawson:

Yeah, you're right. I mean there are costs, and I do understand that I've seen the cost impediment of packing sheds putting in near-infrared spectrometry so they can demonstrate the brix level of an orange or a piece of fruit, for example. That's a cost. But you need to look at it from the perspective also of the extra marketability that that cost generates. Trade is really fundamentally about deep relationships. You need to be able to build a relationship of trust with the customer.

For most produce exporters, they don't actually see the end customer, but the importers, going back to the Japan example, the big trading houses who supply into the big supermarket chains in Japan, it's all about building a relationship of trust. So if you can demonstrate the quality to the satisfaction of the importer so that they can proudly put on their supermarket shelves in Japan, the happy, smiling face of the farmer or producer of a product, it helps build that relationship. So there are costs, but I think that needs to be discussed when prices are negotiated with customers overseas to make sure that the cost is really leveraging the higher value that can be achieved by demonstrating the provenance of the product.

Drew Radford:

How then can producers overcome the challenges of transitioning to digital traceability systems?

David Lawson:

Yeah, so I think the best chance is about negotiating with your partners and just being upfront and honest. It's no use just arbitrarily deciding that you're going to put an extra quality control on the product and surprise the end customer with, "Well, it's much more expensive now. You're just going to have to pay for that." I think there's real value in building that relationship and communicating clearly with the customer and discussing some of these cost imposts.

I think if you've got an open and honest relationship and a relationship that you're building with a customer over years and perhaps decades, that conversation gets easier and becomes a better value proposition for that relationship. One thing that I should also point out that governments are aware and the Australian Government is aware of, a lot of the costs associated with shipping out of Australia and the Australian Government is working with something called the Simplified Trade System Taskforce. What they're trying to do is actually use better engagement with digitalisation of the trade systems, the paperwork associated with getting product to market, to simplify it. So over the next years, because I think it will take some time, through simplified trade systems, I think there'll be some real cost reductions, which will really help Australian exporters - and it just demonstrates the digitalisation can actually reduce costs as well as being quite an impetus for helping Australian exporters demonstrate the quality of their products.

Drew Radford:

I'm sure there'll be many exporters that will be relieved to know that that is on the horizon, and looking forward, you work for an organisation that's literally got fingers in every pie around the planet. What are you seeing on the horizon regarding technology changes and innovation in this space?

David Lawson:

I'm pretty excited about out the prospects of blockchain in relation to just locking in that deep relationship. I see a future in which someone can scan a barcode on a supermarket shelf in Seoul, and that would go back to a website perhaps that would demonstrate the happy smiling face of a farmer back in Shepparton who's proudly been producing this product. I think new developments and new technologies like blockchains could be really exciting future prospect for really locking in as it were, that paddock-to-plate concept, and I think that the customers of our high value export destination markets like Japan, like Korea, like Europe, including the UK, like the US where we can really demonstrate the care that Australian farmers and Australian food producers put into producing the quality product that we have just gets us better connected to our customers and means that we can extract the higher values of getting into those really important markets.

Drew Radford:

Well, David, it sounds like you and your team are doing quite an exceptional job of trying to get Australian exporters further access to those markets. For now though, David Lawson from Austrade. Thank you so much for taking the time and joining us for this A Taste you can Trace Podcast.

David Lawson:

It's been good to chat, Drew. And Austrade always looks forward to assisting Victorian exporters.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family.

Any advice given during this episode is of a general nature. Listeners are advised to seek professional advice before implementing a traceability system in their business. This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

We constantly hear the mantra of we need to increase productivity. What if I told you though, there's potentially a silver bullet? G'Day, I'm Drew Radford. And that solution has to do with simplifying the ledger, that information that's associated with verifying and tracking a product or a service. The productivity issue is that everyone has their own individual documentation and accounting systems and things like that. There's not a common language. This results in armies of accountants, lawyers, and managers basically checking and verifying. It's a lot of duplication. Jason Potts is Professor of Economics at RMIT University. He and his colleagues at the Blockchain Innovation Hub believe there is a solution. To discuss it, he joins us for this A Taste You Can Trace Podcast. Jason, thanks for your time.

Jason Potts:

It's great to be here, Drew.

Drew Radford:

Jason, I understand the Blockchain Innovation Hub's been running for what, over five years now? But can you just give some broad-brush strokes of what the hub does?

Jason Potts:

Well, we were founded as a university research center fundamentally to research frontier technologies in the digital economy. And when we were founded, blockchain was the main one that we were focused on. And what we sought to try and understand was just how this new technology would affect business and strategy and all the sort of things that a business school group of academics would be interested in. Then to try and help anyone we could with understanding that. We've done a lot of work with industry, with small business, with government and also other academics trying to do that. We're a group of economists, lawyers, accountants, political scientists, people working on logistics and supply chain stuff and all sort of have come together to try and do this. And in the past, like say a year or so, as of many others, we've also become increasingly obsessed with generative AI and those other types of frontier digital technologies.

Drew Radford:

You certainly are working at the cutting edge for want of a better description, but I just want to take it back. You said you're working with the industry. There's a broad range of people there that you're collaborating with. This podcast series is about traceability in Victoria's export food and fibre industry and that invariably involves really long and complex supply chains. Within those supply chains, can you just give some insights as to what some of the issues are that arise in those long export chains?

Jason Potts:

We've been interested in the impact of these technologies on supply chains right from the beginning. This was their very first thing that we looked at. The first point is an economy is made of supply chains. An economy is just an enormous sort of nest of supply chains all woven together. The second thing that we've really focused in on is that supply chains do two things. They move goods around, therefore moving physical things around that start in one place, often in an agricultural region and end up somewhere else often in the cities. But what they also move is information. The most interesting part of how these new technologies have affected supply chains, it's not the physical side, it's not the trucks and shipping and the physical aspects of moving goods around. It's the way in which information moves around in the sense of how it gets added, how it gets verified, how it gets audited, how it gets processed and moved with the goods that are travelling with it.

So what we end up with then is a kind of economic process of moving two types of things, physical stuff and information. And what blockchains and other digital technologies are doing is that they're massively changing the costs and capabilities of moving information around and adding to that. The significance of that is that information is also adding value to the final products. What we're interested in is understanding how these new technologies that are impacting and affecting supply chains are specifically changing the way in which information is added, formulated, constructed onto supply chains in an economy.

Drew Radford:

Jason, you described that really, really well and I can understand the separation there between the data and the physical good and you're saying, "Okay, well we need to deal with that data in a different way." How then does blockchain do that? I know you probably explained blockchain a lot and I've dealt with it over my career, but sometimes I just feel like I need a 101 every time I go back to it.

Jason Potts:

Blockchains are a new type of computing. What they do is they enable information to be verified from anywhere in the system. Instead of having a centralised computer or a centralised database or a central ledger technology, which is what we have in firms and banks and other sorts of things, a blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that enables information to be added and verified and audited and just all the processing we want to do with information in a distributed way. It exists upon multiple computers or multiple nodes.

That's the technical description of what it is, it's distributed computing. But why that's important, why that's interesting and adds value is that's another way of describing common knowledge a way for a group of people who might not be in the same company or might not have access to the same machines or databases to nevertheless share the same information about something. And when that something is a money, that's a cryptocurrency, when that's something is a good moving through a supply chain, what we've got is blockchains underpinning supply chains. Effectively it's a new way of enabling information to just work very cheaply at scale. That's the economic significance of blockchains.

Drew Radford:

I want to put myself in the shoes of a primary producer. I'm a citrus blockie up in near Mildura and I'm producing a couple of thousand tonnes of citrus that I'm exporting. How's that help me?

Jason Potts:

If the same company grew the thing and packaged the thing and shipped the thing and did all of that, we could use a single bit of information technology, we could use their own databases to keep track of all that information. That's simple and easy and enormously destructive for the economy because we don't have specialisation, we don't enable competition through that process. An economy works best when we've got lots of specialisation, lots of competition, lots of different firms doing different things across the different parts of the production process.

But the problem is that when you do that, information has to keep being handed off. We have to verify ownership, identity, provenance, all the descriptions of just what happened in the last step. That's almost trivial inside a factory or inside a company. But it's incredibly difficult across different firms and as anyone in this business will know, a lot of the time that you spending is just verifying that the thing you received is actually what is promised to be and you're verifying to others next in the chain that what you just did is actually what you just did. These are information trust problems and they're enormously costly in time and reputation and the consequences and costs of getting that wrong.

And we're just recognising that in a supply chain that information production verification is a significant cost to get truth and common knowledge into that. But if we can do that cheaply, that's a huge opportunity. That's a huge source of comparative advantage or a huge source of productivity gains. For any particular firm along a supply chain, the benefit of using this type of distributed ledger technology is that it massively lowers the cost of the information part of the business. And that's the case for why this technological upgrade or these new types of digital technologies should drive productivity into supply chains.

Drew Radford:

Jason, you and your colleagues have been driving this and researching this area for some time and you've got fingers out into industry. Are you seeing it now being put into place in primary production in Victoria?

Jason Potts:

Over the past five, six years, we've seen a few small scale pilots and some of those have been variously successful, but mostly they haven't really scaled up. And what's interesting is the reason for that, and I think this is one of the main findings that we've had in this first wave of blockchain adoption and use and experimentation in supply chains is that the basic problem is, and many of your listeners will immediately recognise and appreciate this problem, is that the thing about supply chains is that you can't have them partial, you can't have part of the system working this way and then in different part working that way without enormous cost.

The benefit of blockchains is that they enable very, very low cost information verification and auditing and compliance and provenance and all of these properties, if everyone on the supply chain adopts the system. That's the crucial bottleneck is actually getting system-wide adoption of a technology, of a new technology that requires fundamental retooling of the administrative architecture and so on. And that's been the basic barrier is actually getting complete adoption across the supply chains in this. It's not one of these technologies that just one firm in the supply chain can adopt. The entire supply chain needs to adopt it. And this is the challenge of how do you coordinate industry level adoption of this technology? And for the most part that's where we've gotten stuck on this.

Drew Radford:

So what then do you think is needed to resolve that bottleneck? How are you going to get industry-wide buy-in?

Jason Potts:

That's a challenging question and there's a few possible answers. The early answers was we just have a significant large player just simply takes it and because of their scale and size and effectively induces other smaller players to adopt. By and large, that has failed mostly because of just reasonable fear about whether it's monopoly concerns or dominance of particular players in that. Another option is sort of a regulatory push where regulation mandates or requires particular standards that can only really be met through this technology. And that's how a lot of green technologies have solved various adoption problems is to get on that path. Other ones is just larger scale experimentation eventually joining up. There could be role for industry associations, particularly industry verticals around whether it's in horticulture or agriculture or seafoods or whatever, but particular industry associations driving this change.

But I think that's where we are now is just trying to solve that problem of large scale coordination across the full supply chain, right from initial primary production through manufacturing, which often takes place in different states or different countries and then onto final markets. That's a hard problem to solve. It requires going through multiple industry verticals, often multiple political jurisdictions around states and territories and countries and also through various supply chain logistic freight concerns. That's a hard coordination problem to solve and I think that's where we are, but I'd emphasise that what's interesting about that is that there's not a technological problem. That the technology is good, it works. This is what a lot of the experiments and trials so far have shown. The actual problem is institutional coordination of getting all of the pieces to fit together. That's where we are now is trying to sort of resolve that or find ways through that.

Drew Radford:

If you are at this point then Jason, does this potentially go side by side with something like the GS1 system? I know the GS1 system is really focused on products within the supply chain. You are talking about the ledger, they seem like two sides of the system and both things seem to be happening at once in terms of probity issue and trying to solve that.

Jason Potts:

Look, it's a good point, Drew. And I think the key thing to appreciate here is what we're dealing with as a digital tech stack. IoT devices and scanning devices and various optical reading things and so on are part of that stack that helps with the interfaces. The great thing about those sort of standards is that they're very adaptable and sort of use of mobile phones and other types of hardware that's widely distributed. But the role of blockchain is just the administrative information layers.

It's the way of having a digital record keeping layer that can sit across multiple computers and be verified and updated and audited at very low cost. How that information gets in requires another set of technologies, this is IoT type devices. How that information is then printed onto packaging or onto other sorts of material is another separate thing. What we end up with is this slow transition from an industrial era of paper-based information record keeping combined with physical stamping of machines and so on, and all of that which has been optimised over hundreds of years to this switch to a digital infrastructure that again, is not just one set of technologies.

So blockchain is a key part of it because that's the administrative record keeping layer, the common knowledge truth. But we also need hardware layers to get that information in. We need hardware layers to get that information back off again. We need to be dealing with digital privacy concerns. We need to be dealing with other types of issues and challenges that arise with that. But what we're talking about here is a fundamental revolution in the technological infrastructure stack of logistics and supply chains. The way to think about blockchain I think is it's a key technological trajectory or forcing function that comes into this that enables it to do the one thing that it could never previously do, which was be distributed and that sort of decentralised distributed information aspect. That's the core thing that blockchains do. And if they can do that when worked with other digital technologies, we have a revolution in the technologies of supply chains.

Drew Radford:

I like the description of revolution and obviously there needs to be, as you've described, some things to happen to get to that point. But starting all of this process, I'm guessing Jason, that it actually starts on farm, does it? That's where the original bit of ledger information is put together. The farmer's got some responsibility to get the ball rolling, I'm guessing.

Jason Potts:

I'm not sure about responsibility, but that is the logical place to start it because that's where the information first arises. Where was these seeds planted or where was this fish harvested? You've got physical geographical information, you've got timestamping, got the state of the thing at the time. You've got all the information that you can possibly add to that, and the more information that you can add that then travels with that product, the more valuable that becomes. The other key part of this is the motivation for the farmers or the primary producers to add that information is that information adds value. Whoever's at the end of that supply chain, when they put down their money and take possession of the object and the information attached to that object, a significant part of what they're paying for isn't just the commodity, it's the commodity plus all of the information that verifies its state.

Where did this come from? Who made it? What were the conditions under which this was made? How can I trust that? The more that the farmer can add that information or the producer can add that information, the more claim they have on the eventual value that's produced at the end. I think the logical argument here about why would farmers care about this is by adding, verifying that information is a way for them to capture more of the value created at the end of the supply chain. Because at the moment in an industrial supply chain where a lot of the branding and quality assurance and stamping and so on happens toward the end of it, whether it's in a restaurant or in the supermarket or whatever, that adds into the branding to it, which is quality assurance to the consumer.

They end up capturing the consumer value of that quality. And consumer farmers just end up in the commodity business where all they're producing is a thing that has relatively low levels of information in it. The farmers are in the business of producing information, not just food and fibre. And that's true of all primary producers. And this is a technology that can enable more primary producers to capture more of the value further along the supply chains. And that's the reason to adopt.

Drew Radford:

The question I have flowing on from that. You're saying yes, you're adding value. Have you looked at and sort of gone, "Okay, we estimate this would be a," I don't know, 10% productivity gain worth x billion dollars? Have you managed to drill down to that level?

Jason Potts:

It's a good question. It's a question that should be asked. Our estimates of what we're calling the cost of trust or just what is the cost that's being put into verifying that information is true. Solving this problem of how do you verify true information or create common knowledge across the supply chain. Our back of the envelope, and I'll emphasise that is a very approximate number, but it puts it about a third of the economy. And that's a huge number. What that means is one third of all of the value produced in the Australian economy is just simply checking each other's work. And that's the entire accounting profession exists just to verify that information about businesses and other activity is true. Much of the legal profession is just verifying that contracts are what they say they are and a lot of managerial functions are just doing that.

There's a huge amount of value in an economy is essentially verifying that information is true. The more complex, the more advanced that economy is or that product group is, the higher that information quotient.

If we take Australian agriculture or viticulture, the main way that we move up the value chain and create a more profitable industry is we move away from producing bulk commodities. And a commodity just means a product that has very low information content or is highly standardised to something that is boutique and bespoke and unique and has a large amount of information about its qualities and its provenance and so on. And that's a direction you want our industries to go in, but to go in that direction, they need a technology that can support that higher information load. And that's the digital tech stack.

Drew Radford:

That's a remarkable productivity gain. We constantly hear, "Oh, we need to improve productivity," and it sounds like the technology is there. Crystal ball gazing, you and your colleagues, where do you see this in 10 years time?

Jason Potts:

Look, if you'd asked me five years ago, I thought we'd be here already by now. I think we will eventually get there. But the fundamental challenge is this is a coordination problem across industry and that means that we need to have some way with some event or something, phenomena, that enables in a particular industry of radicals to come together and just shift all is one to a new technological platform. But that's going to be hard to do. But I think there's a significant role for government in leading this or facilitating this or trying to sort of understand how this can happen.

But there's a lot of ways it could happen. It could happen through consultancies, it could happen through large scale industry players effectively using their power to do that, could happen from consumers demanding this and it working its way back through the industry. But I think this is the challenge we have right now, and I think once a few industries make this transition, others will be able to follow it. I'm sort of very curious about which ones go first.

Drew Radford:

Jason, I'm pretty curious as well because this sounds like a very different playing field and some great gains that can be made through it. You've described it really, really well. For now though, Jason Potts, Professor of Economics at RMIT University and co-founder of the Blockchain Innovation Hub. Thank you so much for taking the time and joining us for this A Taste you can Trace Podcast.

Jason Potts:

My pleasure, Drew.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family.

Any advice given during this episode is of a general nature. Listeners are advised to seek professional advice before implementing a traceability system in their business. This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

When we buy food in Australia, we expect that it's not going to make us sick, and that's not just because it's a bad business model. It's largely thanks to a whole raft of standards and a body that enforces them.

G'day, I'm Drew Radford, and that body is Food Standards Australia New Zealand, or otherwise known as FSANZ. On those rare occasions there is a health and safety issue with food, traceability is fundamental to FSANZ quickly responding and protecting the public. To understand how this works a bit better, I'm joined for this A Taste you can Trace podcast by Dr. Adele Yates, Food Safety Response Manager with FSANZ. Adele, thanks for your time.

Adele Yates:

You're very welcome, Drew.

Drew Radford:

Adele, you're a scientist by background, aren't you?

Adele Yates:

Yes indeed, I am.

Drew Radford:

And you focus now on food standards. What's the crossover?

Adele Yates:

Well, a scientist at heart. Originally my background was in microbiology, so when I was looking for different job opportunities, a position came up at FSANZ in the microbiology team where they assess food and look for microbiological risks. So, I've worked in that area for quite a number of years and I've more recently still using my science experience, I've moved more into the response role. So, I head up all food recalls and incident response.

Drew Radford:

With that background, you sound very well suited for a position like that. Can we just take one step back though? For those that are unfamiliar with Food Standards Australia and New Zealand, can you just paint a bit of a broader picture of their role and how they work?

Adele Yates:

There's a food standards code, which has a whole lot of standards, which are regulations that need to be followed by food businesses and there's all sorts of different ones depending on what sort of food you're making. There's labelling standards, there's all sorts of things in place to make sure that things are made to the correct standard, they have the correct information, and that food is safe.

Drew Radford:

There's a couple of important points here too though, because you only look after food that's for sale, don't you?

Adele Yates:

That is correct. Yes, it's food that is sold in stores.

Drew Radford:

You're also unique though, because you're a Trans-Tasman authority, you straddle the ditch.

Adele Yates:

Yes, we do. Most staff are based in Canberra, but we also have an office in Wellington, New Zealand, and quite a lot of our teams have members both in Canberra and in New Zealand. We are, I believe, the only Trans-Tasman agency.

Drew Radford:

Now let's focus on what your job really is about, and you manage both food recalls and food incidents. What's the difference between a recall and an incident?

Adele Yates:

Food recalls we do quite regularly. On average, we coordinate about 80 a year. So a food recall is when either the business or perhaps it's the local jurisdiction authority has become aware that a food is potentially unsafe. So this could be through testing, it could be through a customer complaint. So they realise that the food needs to be removed from sale. So the job of FSANZ is we are the coordinator, so we work with that business and also with the local, state, and territory authority as required and we help that business to recall the food. So we get all the information together, we do up a recall notice, which is published on our website. It's also provided to the business who can then provide it off to their customers to say, "If you have this food, if it's in your local supermarket, don't buy it, bring it back in so you can get a refund." Just sharing the word. So that's a recall.

An incident is something a lot bigger. An incident is when we've got multiple people getting sick across multiple states and territories around the country. So it's when we need a national response. Now as part of that national response, we may do a recall or two or three, but yeah, that's kind of the way to differentiate between the two. And luckily, we have a lot less incidents than we do recalls.

Drew Radford:

It sounds quite involved to say the least. And at the heart of this, I imagine is having a traceability system in place. What are the risks if you don't?

Adele Yates:

Certainly when we're doing a recall, one of the things we ask is who have you provided your product to? So you need to provide us with a distribution list which says who you've sold it onto. So you really need to be able to trace where your product has gone. So where have you sold your product on to? And then it depends on what the product is. So a company should have good traceability in place because their product, it might be an ingredient that's used in all sorts of different things. You really need to have good traceability in place.

Drew Radford:

I imagine in your 15 years you would've seen a lot of change in terms of how that can be executed. I mean, once upon a time, people wouldn't have had that great of idea of what went in and what went out.

Adele Yates:

Well, we've certainly moved to a lot more electronic records. And we used to do recalls many years ago, there was a lot more manual. Now everything... A lot of people have electronic systems. That being said, as long as you have a record of your things, handwriting's fine as long as you have good record-keeping

Drew Radford:

That though will impact on the speed and impact on your business as well, I'd imagine?

Adele Yates:

Yes. If it's all electronic, obviously then you can just put it into an Excel spreadsheet and press send otherwise, but we work with businesses for whatever level they're at because the most important thing is to get the unsafe food off the shelves.

Drew Radford:

Well, that is core of it. And let's look at an example to explain how it works a bit. So in December 2022, there was a serious issue with baby spinach leaves. Can you tell us a little bit about that incident and also traceability? How important was that in resolving it?

Adele Yates:

Yes. The spinach incident is a very well-known thing that went all around the world in fact just around in time for Christmas too. So the worst time for the poor spinach industry because normally Christmas is when people buy all sorts of nice food. So what happened with the spinach incident initially there were some people who got sick and went into hospital. So they had people from different households who were all coming in with similar symptoms. So they worked out that it was food related. This is when our public health colleagues, they assist and they talk to the people who are getting sick. Or if they're too unwell, they would talk to their family members or friends and they have a set of questions they ask and try and work out a little bit like a detective work. What is it that these people have eaten that could have caused whatever these people are now suffering from?

So they worked out that all these people had eaten spinach and then they're actually able to work out which particular brand. They tracked back where that spinach had originally come from. And that particular farm who were very helpful, they were obviously quite devastated. Because they had good traceability, that farm could actually say, "Of all of our farms," I believe they had multiple properties, "it is this particular farm and this location." And in fact, they could even say, "It's in this particular field," because they had such good records of when they harvested their different fields.

This incident, there was quite a series of recalls that took place over a few days of different branded products because they knew and they had great traceability systems in place so they could say, "Our spinach, we've sold to this company, we've also sold it to company X, Y, and Z." And then company X said, "Oh, okay, yes, and we've done this with it," and they've put it into this product. So having good traceability meant that we could then recall all the affected products and stop people from getting sick. So in total, I believe there was about 200 people that did get ill with the anticholinergic syndrome. 200 people is a lot of people, but it could have been so much worse. So the fact that they had good traceability systems in place made a massive difference.

Drew Radford:

And what was the source of contamination?

Adele Yates:

They identified that there was a weed that when they picked up the spinach, they'd also harvested some of this particular weed. But because it was a very juvenile form of the weed, it was very challenging to identify. It's a type of Jimson weed. So once they knew that, that then matched exactly with the syndrome that the people had.

Drew Radford:

I'm having a look at your release and the number of stores and the number of products. Everything from chicken cobb salad, right through to kitchen roast pumpkin, through to feta and walnut salad to smoky Mexican salad. One source, but it ends up in a lot of different pies for want of a better description.

Adele Yates:

Yes. Obviously they make a large amount of spinach and spinach is in a lot of things. People like spinach. It's healthy, it's good for you, spinach goes everywhere.

Drew Radford:

And that's the thing too, isn't it? It ends up affecting the entire industry, but I imagine those stores will be able to say, "Oh, hang on, we've isolated what it is because we've got good traceability. You're okay to eat this spinach. It's from a totally different source."

Adele Yates:

Yes. So part of that and doing the recall is to get the information from the company exactly what product is it, exactly which batch codes or which best before dates because you only want to pull off the shelves or recall the affected product. We didn't need to pull off every single spinach from the whole country. It was only the particular product lines that had been associated with this particular one field. So it's really important to have good traceability to know, well one, so they could find out that it was from this field, but then to know where has that product gone, what can we narrow it down to so we minimise the damage. We only have to recall these ones and we know that all our other products are safe out there.

Drew Radford:

Well, yes, a lot less product recall and a lot less damage to businesses. That's really, really important as well. So this sounds like a complex web of relationships to make this happen though. So can you step us through how national and state government agencies and organisations work together when dealing with food incidents?

Adele Yates:

We have a network, it's called the Binational Food Safety Network, or BFSN for short. We love abbreviations. This has representatives from each state and territory in Australia, and also we have colleagues in New Zealand who join in as well because as you would know, Australia and New Zealand share quite a lot of food. And we also have representatives from people like the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the Department of Health. So when something is brewing, people are starting to get sick, we're getting concerned about things and we start sharing information. And then we get together as a group and if it looks like a national response is required, then we actually have a national food incident response protocol which is triggered and that means that everybody, we get together, we have regular meetings and we coordinate how we're going to do everything, and it just sort of formalises the process.

It's a great setup. Everyone has been working together. Many people have been in this industry for many years. They know their stuff, they're brilliant, they're such a pleasure to work with. And everyone wants the same thing; we all want to protect public health and safety. What do we need to do? So as part of that process, FSANZ we do what's called a risk assessment or a rapid risk profile. Short and sharp, "Okay, spinach, we've got people getting sick, do we know what they're getting sick from?" And you work through what is the risk, what can we do? Then as a group, the BFSN, the key representatives from all the different states and territories work out what are our next steps, what do we need to do? What risk management measures need to be put in place so that we can hopefully get less people getting sick sooner?

Drew Radford:

I want to talk to you about another incident. Back in 2018, there was a strawberry tampering incident. Can you tell us about that situation and how it was different in that the entire strawberry industry was impacted?

Adele Yates:

Yes. With the strawberry incident, it's quite different because it was a deliberate contamination. So often without other incidents, part of it is almost trying to work out what's going on, a bit of a detective work from the food regulatory system side. With the strawberry incident, someone was taking deliberate actions to actually insert the needles into the strawberry. It got more complicated because there was quite a lot of media about it and there was quite a lot of copycats.

There was actually three different brands of strawberries that were removed from sale, but because it was very challenging and the food regulatory system worked very close with the police. So the police were doing all their criminal investigations while the food side are trying to just pull off food that needs to come off the shelves. And the whole strawberry industry was hugely impacted because people didn't feel safe buying strawberries at that time because they didn't know what was going on. And so then we actually got a whole lot of media messaging to try and promote strawberries. It was don't cut them out, cut them up, I believe the message was, because if you cut up your strawberries, then you could see if it was a needle. No needle, then you're all good to eat. Because it was something done deliberately, people were getting more concerned. So it was quite a challenging one to deal with.

Drew Radford:

Lastly, Adele, have you got any final thoughts or observations about the benefits to businesses when they have a good traceability system in place?

Adele Yates:

My advice to businesses is please, please put good traceability systems in place. If something was to happen, nobody wants a food safety issue to occur, but unfortunately they do occur on occasion and we generally can't predict that they're going to occur. And if you have good traceability in place, it means that should you need to do a recall or something along those lines, you will be able to do it a lot quicker, a lot more efficiently. You'll know what products, you know where they have gone, and you can just get those ones pulled off the shelves and really minimise any damage rather than having to pull off every single product that you make.

If you know it's only one particular product and where it's gone, it makes a massive difference and the whole process can happen so much quicker as well. The quicker you get the food off the shelves, the less likely someone is to consume the product.

Drew Radford:

Well, Adele, I think they're great words to finish on, and thank you to you and your team for doing what you do because literally we take it for granted. We can go to any shop and buy food without a second thought. We know it's safe. I've travelled a lot around the world and you just can't always take that for granted wherever you go. So Dr. Adele Yates, Food Safety Response Manager with Food Standards Australia New Zealand, thanks for joining us for this A Taste you can Trace podcast.

Adele Yates:

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback. So please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family.

Any advice given during this episode is of a general nature. Listeners are advised to seek professional advice before implementing a traceability system in their business.

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Traceability. Forget about the technologies, it's really about ensuring that food arrives at the end of its journey in the best possible condition. G'day, I'm Drew Radford, and that's the view of Luke Wood. He thinks traceability is helping turn back the clock to when we were closely connected to where our food comes from. However, for Luke, this is more than just nostalgia as he is the CEO and founder of Escavox, an organisation which at its core is focused on connecting the producer and consumer, and he joins us for this, A Taste you can Trace podcast. Luke, thanks for your time.

Luke Wood:

Absolute pleasure, Drew.

Drew Radford:

Luke, food wastage, we hear a lot about it, but it's a huge issue and I'm not sure people always associate that with traceability. How are the two intermixed?

Luke Wood:

Food wastage is a complex problem. It happens from the farm right through to the fridge at home. There's lots of different reasons, we're all involved, and the supply chain and traceability has one particular aspect which really is around the shelf life and the quality at home. What happens before you buy it determines how long it's going to last with you, and if we don't treat it right in the chain, then the life is slightly shorter than you were planning. Therefore, the chances are that you'll throw it out before you get chance to consume it yourself. And that's really where traceability and food wastage interact, and part of the work we're trying to do to solve for.

Drew Radford:

We're going to drill down into that work in a moment, but that supply chain, that's massively long now compared to what it was, let's say, in our grandparents' day?

Luke Wood:

Yeah, it's huge. We've spread out. Over the last 40 years, we measured success almost purely with dollars. We score efficiency by price. And like all things, if you consolidate production and you consolidate transport and you do things in bulk, things get cheaper, therefore, "It's more efficient." So we see these huge mega farms, we see monocultures, we see this, and so what we've done is we've separated. We grow thousands of hectares of tomatoes, we grow millions of acres of certain crops in one area and then transport them around the world. So we are both physically separated from our food; and emotionally disconnected as well. So yeah, these chains are getting very long and almost by default, very complicated, so we have separated. My grandmother would know the farmer where she bought the food from. She could talk to the green grocer where her supplies were coming from, and that relationship has been stretched and broken.

Drew Radford:

So in terms of fixing that relationship, I understand that's kind of a part or role of what you do at Escavox. Can you elaborate on that? What does Escavox really do?

Luke Wood:

So Excavox, we tried to distil it in the name, actually. Escavox literally is Latin for "voice of the food". When we looked at supply chains and we looked at the length, we said, "We're not going to change that culture of how and where we grow, but that doesn't mean that we can't find the information and understand and rebuild that relationship." So we really said, "Let's tell the story of the food. If we understand the journey that the food's gone on through the eyes of the food, we can start making much more informed decisions. How far have you travelled? What condition were you in when you travelled? Is that a good condition? Is that bad? What's that done to your shelf life? What's that done to your quality?" And that allows us as consumers or even wholesalers or anybody else in the chain to make an informed decision about how they buy and what they buy, and being able to create and give the members of the supply chain that data is incredibly powerful and allows us to make those active decisions as the food moves along the chain.

Drew Radford:

There's a lot to pull apart there, Luke, and we'll drill down a bit further, but first of all, why is it important to track temperature, humidity and GPS location of, let's say, an avocado that's been grown in Swan Hill, that ends up being exported to somewhere in Southeast Asia?

Luke Wood:

We all actually intuitively know this answer. We've all got a fridge at home. We all know we buy food and we go home, and the first thing we do is we put it in the fridge. I don't need to educate anybody on the value of keeping stuff cold. You might not know the science behind it, but you know the reality of it. And all we're really doing when we talk about cold chains and movement is trying to protect that product. And so, an avocado left on the kitchen bench at home in the sun is going to be nowhere near as long a life as the avocado left in the fridge. And all we're really doing is we're applying the science of that across the chain.

So if I grow an avocado here in Australia, move it to India over a period of two or three weeks, we want to make sure that it's kept in the right temperature, kept in the right way, so that A: we don't spoil it or ruin it before a consumer can get to it, and also to make sure that we present it to the consumer in the best possible way, because the best food on the shelf is the food that gets consumed. And if we can always make sure we're getting that best food, that's how we stop wasting food. And so, this is part of that interrelation between the two. Understanding the condition allows us to make better quality and pricing decisions along that chain.

Drew Radford:

So how do you do this then, Luke? I assume there's some hardware involved, and then there's a truckload of data that that generates and pulled apart.

Luke Wood:

As a business, we do all three things. We have to solve three problems. The first one is, how do you capture the actual information? How do you know what temperature it is? How do you know where it is? All of those details. Is it hard? Is it cold? Lat-long? Getting its GPS location. So that's job number one. And we have a little blue box, as we call it, which in all honesty is a cellphone without a screen. It's got a bunch of sensors, it takes a bunch of readings, and on a periodic cycle about every 15 minutes it in essence makes a phone call and sends us the information. We then have computer programs that look at that, that absorb all of that data. We then run some pretty smart algorithms across that and start presenting that back as a journey to the relevant players that says, okay, your piece of fruit has moved from here to here. It's at this condition.

We understand that an avocado that's sat at 10 degrees for 10 days would've lost five days in shelf life or whatever it might be, and then we present that information to the right person at the right time. So then the next step of intelligence is, who do we send that to? Who do we tell? When do we tell them? How do we tell them that this one's important and the other bit's not important? So there's a bunch of software going on in there as well. Then the third layer is a layer of analytics. Was that good or was that bad? Was that better than my last trip? Was that in line with the quality I expected? So we do a lot of work capturing information. We do even more work collating and managing that information. Then the final piece is the analysis that actually lets people make a decision on that information. So we're a bit of a hardware company, bit of a software company, bit of an analytics company.

Drew Radford:

There's a lot going on there, to say the least, Luke. So with that information, let's say for example there's an issue with the temperature in a bin on a wharf somewhere, how's that going to be enacted upon?

Luke Wood:

There's a number of ways you can act on that. Let's say it's the wrong temperature, it could be too hot, it could be too cold. There's very simple decisions that can be made there. Turn the fridge on, turn the fridge off. So we can do a very mechanical, "Hey, you're just holding that at the wrong temperature." And that's very simple, it's very obvious. We all understand that. We've already got rules for our carriers, "Hey, please carry these at a certain temperature." So you get told that in real time, you can make that decision, you can adjust for it. There's another slightly more advanced that says, let's see how long you've been out of temperature. Well, actually you've been warm for a day or maybe too long, that means your life has degraded slightly faster than planned, so maybe I want to make a pricing decision on that.

I want to make sure it gets sold, so maybe I'll adjust the price by a few percentage points and I'll move that one through the chain ahead of time. We call that stock rotation or stock allocation. No longer a first in, first out. Let's get the stuff out that's going to expire first so that we can move that through the chain. And then really on top of that, there's what we define as more strategic decisions that says, "This port always causes me problems, therefore I'll maybe look for a different channel to market," or, "This carrier is always handling my food superbly. I'll give him more work." So then we've got business decisions which is not just the there and then for that avocado in than bin, but also for the nature of the business so that we can actually improve our chains as we go forward.

Drew Radford:

Your device that's capturing all of this data, I imagine there's technological evolutions going on with this all the time. Is there new hardware coming online to do this? Because I assume at the end of the process, you've got this effective dumb mobile phone device, you've got to get it back somehow and there's a cost associated with that. Where's this heading?

Luke Wood:

We've looked at this a lot, and my hope is, frankly, there is already some smart kid somewhere with something faster, better, cheaper, smaller, slightly less intrusive on the environment, so we separate the two. So the device and the data collection is one piece of our business, and the data and how we use it as another. So right now, we have these big devices. We have a collection model. In fact, ours are spread across Asia and the US. Wherever you send the device, we can arrange collection and get it back and reuse that device. In time, we have a great vision that says, how do we ultimately get rid of these devices? How do we still have the data without them? And there's really two channels to that. There's the physical side. Is there technologies? There's very emerging technologies now where you can have what they call intelligent labels, essentially non-battery powered devices. It's got copper spun into the paper and you can read some technologies, very new and emerging. We're looking at some of those.

And on the other side, we're looking at virtualising it. Well, if I've got one device, how do I echo that data across the entire container load and I make mathematical decisions? How do I start doing this with modelling and AI rather than physical data? If I know the container and I've got the container reading, can I infer from there? So there's going to be a little bit of both. Part of our role really is a constant piece of R&D as we're looking at different ways of doing this. There is a trade-off between physically having a device and the risk associated with losing a device versus the risk of losing 20 tonnes of food, and we're constantly marginalising across that. So, it's an exciting space. Eventually we hit the laws of physics on how far you can transmit signal and so on. It'll be a combination of the physics of the device with telco, so things like 5G are really powerful for us, and as we see more and more communication technologies deployed, we will start leveraging against those.

Drew Radford:

Luke, I get the impression also, this technology is quite important in terms of associating with point of origin and validating the source of the food. Does it tie in any way with blockchain?

Luke Wood:

It can. And so, when we talk about provenance, or where did my food come from and can you prove it, and counterfeit and so on, really there's no one silver bullet that solves for a provenance equation because trust is built up through multiple layers. You might have the DNA sample to prove, you might have the certificate of origin, you might have these different things, and data like ours is often one of the many layers that gets put into that. And because we have literal lat-long, where were you in reality, not where did the invoice say or where did the freight forwarder say, or where did the purchase order go from? We've got the actual physical movement. You can infer a lot from that. If I'm selling Australian strawberries, I'd better have some lat-long points in Australia, for example.

So we are often a source of information into these provenance systems and we work with a bunch of different players in that space. And then a lot of those provenance systems subsequently use a blockchain technology, which is a security technology, to ensure that they are protected information sets. So we in and of ourselves are not a blockchain technology because it's inapplicable for us, but we feed a lot of them. My personal opinion is that's a space that will grow over coming years. If we see it, in average commodity-level foods, probably not for a while yet, but we'll certainly see it in the higher end, some of the top wines, the very finest grapes, some of the seafood and so on.

Drew Radford:

This seems to me to be distilling down to adding visibility to the supply chain. I've seen a phrase you use, "CCTV for your produce."

Luke Wood:

Yeah. Well, I've worked in supply chains most of my career, and amazing things happen when you can see complex networks in one place, when you can see the whole thing. And we all understand this, it's no different to a control tower at an airport, it's no different to any of these things. When you can see it all interacting, you can see pressure points, you can see bottlenecks, you can understand how the chain is working. And the hard part commercially is rarely do you deploy one to solve a particular problem, but once you have a holistic view of what's happening, you understand problems that previously you didn't realise were related. And in our food chains, we see that really expanded because food is quite unique in that not only is its value changing as it moves along the chain, but there is very, very little vertical integration.

The guy growing the food or producing the product is very rarely the guy selling the product at the consumer angle, so almost nobody has accountability across that chain. And so when we started, we said the producers probably have the smallest view. Product leaves their farm gate and that's it, they're blind. But it's their brand, it's their product on the shelf, and they're the ones getting punished for it. So we said, let's just show them what's going on, and when they start to understand that, then they can understand their path. And that visibility, that understanding, that uncovering and demystifying these chains is really potent. In fact, we all know this, you order a pizza, you will love to see the map of where your pizza is because it demystifies and it gives you understanding of what's going on, and it changes your approach to the problem.

We've seen this with airlines when they tell you, "Well, the inbound aircraft is delayed here," it changes your attitude to how you solve problems. And so that's all we're really doing, this is the power of visibility and the power of location. And we've realised that the lat-long, that the actual is so different to the paper transaction. Visibility 20 years ago was, my buyer for Woollies was in Sydney and my purchase order was issued from my head office in Melbourne, but the product moved from Katherine to Brisbane. And so, this disconnection as we've sort of siloed our workers across the years, we used to deal in these things, and we're just bringing that back to the front page to say, let's talk about the physical really what's happening out there.

Drew Radford:

Does this also then help avoid nasty shocks for the producer? Like, oh, we're going to downgrade your produce because it turned up here in X condition, and it's 3,000 kilometres away or in another country, and it's very difficult to argue that point, I would imagine?

Luke Wood:

It does. It changes the conversation, it changes the tone of the conversation. Invariably, if you want to avoid conflict in any situation, if you're all working to the same dataset, what you're not arguing is about the data, you're arguing about the outcome, and so giving these guys a chance to have an informed conversation. We've heard horror stories of Australian product arriving in ports across the world and being rejected or downgraded or prices changed on them, and these poor guys have got nothing to hang on. They dispatch 24 pallets of the most perfect cherries and some guy in China is saying they're not great.

Who does he shout at? Who does he go to? Is it the carrier? Is it the shipper? Is it the container company? All these different things. So we are seeing that data change those conversations because now you have a data-led conversation with your partners, "Hey, it seemed to get too hot at the port. It was too cold here. It spent too long wherever it was." And now you get a response, and it allows people to act. And so by unveiling that, it absolutely gives them a seat at the table and it changes their outcome. Now they can make better demands of their partners, they can have a more honest conversation with their customers and hopefully give them a bigger seat at the table to give them the value that they're already creating.

Drew Radford:

Luke, as a country, we're certainly focusing on this through things like the National Agricultural Traceability Strategy which outlines challenges for traceability, including alignment of standards and system interoperability. Is this a pressing challenge in your area of work?

Luke Wood:

Yeah, it's a huge challenge because we are a net exporter. We produce so much food and so much good food that we have to be planted on the world scene, and we need a coherent strategy to take us out there. And there's a really interesting problem here that the data and the traceability requirements for red meat, for example, a huge export, is almost wholly different to dairy, which again, is wholly different to horticulture. So every industry's got their own unique challenges, every category's got its own unique attributes, which we need to be aware of.

Yet as Australia, we want to be trading as a country, as a block, so the strategy really needs to be focusing on the interoperability of the data. What is the data packet that we need? And standardise how we exchange data across these different systems rather than worrying about the system itself. There'll always be better, shinier software, but there won't be a constant change in the information that we want. So that interoperability of standards is key for me, and having a cohesive cross-country model for that is really key. That will give us an advantage on the global stage.

Drew Radford:

Luke, you've alluded to this in a few other areas, but lastly, can you tell us what you see is some of the main challenges for traceability now and into the future?

Luke Wood:

I think the first one we've got to hit, and if you've done your study over the years, it's a tragedy of the commons problem in that we all feel a bit of the pain from having a lack of traceability, but none of us feel the win from solving it or the direct win. We've got to shatter that myth. We've got to start showing the smaller guys the ROI (return on investment), the value proposition associated with this. And we've got to give the producers, the carriers, the retailers an incentive to go do. That's going to be a critical function. We know that those guys doing it do see an advantage in the market, and we've got to really foster that education and show where that is. And that's going to be challenge number one.

And then challenge number two I think is, where is our model going to be relative to the markets in which we're competing? And some countries and jurisdictions are doing this under a safety angle, so they're enforcing and regulating. Some are doing it under a market access, therefore being a little bit more open and free. Some are not enforcing anything at all, just letting the market decide. So we have to find our path as a country through there and make sure that we've pitched that about right. We've got an industry on razor-thin margins who don't want or really can't be investing into huge tech or process changes, and we've got to give them an opportunity to develop their model so that we retain the brand, Australia. We retain our premium pricing for our premium products without really putting them down on it. It's not an easy journey, but I think it'll be worthwhile if we can actually thread that needle.

Drew Radford:

Well, Luke, I think you're doing a great job of helping thread that needle. You're certainly lifting the horizon and showing the advantage through conversations like this. But for now though, Luke Wood, CEO of Escavox, thank you for taking the time and joining us for this, A Taste you can Trace podcast.

Luke Wood:

Absolute pleasure. Thanks, Drew.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family.

Any advice given during this episode is of a general nature. Listeners are advised to seek professional advice before implementing a traceability system in their business.

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Trying to tell the story of a piece of fruit is not that easy a thing to do. After all, there's only so much information you can label an apple or something like a bunch of grapes with. Traceability though, changes all of that.

G'day. I'm Drew Radford.

And recently the Australian Table Grape Association did a deep dive into that change by undertaking a traceability trial program for an entire season. One of the key partners in it was Result Group. To understand what it involved and the insights gained, I'm joined for this, A Taste you can Trace podcast, by Michael Dosser, Group General Manager.

Michael, thanks for your time.

Michael Dosser:

No, thanks for having me. Very excited for the discussion.

Drew Radford:

Well, Michael, you're a great person to speak to because you've got a career in this space in terms of packaging. But before we go much further, can I just get a bit of a better understanding about Result Group? What's the kind of work that you do so we can better understand how that applies to primary produce?

Michael Dosser:

Well, you get a bit of practice at this one standing around a barbecue and people going, "You do what?" So, let's start with this. The Result Group's operates under four business units. The first one's product identification and we sell coding and marking, labelling, string sleeve equipment, print and apply systems. So anything that's used to primary brand a product with a label or a code and then put traceability information on that at a unit level, at a case level and a pallet level across all sorts of industry sectors. Food and beverage, agriculture obviously extremely important and rapidly growing area, right through to farmer and even industrial markets, etc. from there. A lot of work in warehouse and distribution.

The second business unit is what we call value added packaging. And in value added packaging we do a lot of value adds, so reseal and reclose systems as well as things like promotional activations, any on-pack promotion or consumer engagement piece.

The third one is self-adhesive materials. So, we supply label stock to the self-adhesive label printers and also RFID and NFC tags.

And our last business unit is process automation and in process automation we're doing our vision and our software development and those sorts of things. So well-rounded 24/7 service support infrastructure in place and operating right across Australia and New Zealand.

Drew Radford:

That's a fairly broad scope to say the least Michael and obviously very well situated to be a partner in this table grape pilot program. Before we delve into that, traceability, it just sounds like that's in your DNA doing what you do as a job.

Michael Dosser:

Yeah, absolutely and it's funny you use the term DNA, any of our advertising, we've actually tried to bring that theme on those four business units together. Because in order to deliver it in the marketplace and like what we did, we need to tap into the expertise in each one of those business units. The materials that we're using, the technology for printing and all those sorts of things become very important. So yes, it's vitally important and I'm lucky enough to have been in the industry for 35 years and surrounded by a bunch of people here at Result with a similar background. And we've tapped into every bit of that 35 plus years, meaning couple of hundred years’ experience from a team point of view to be delivering what we do.

Drew Radford:

Supply chain, that term has become much more common parlance probably since COVID, but traceability has become a bigger thing. People want to know where their food comes from. What do you see as the key benefits to traceability?

Michael Dosser:

There's just so many, but the one that sticks out more than anything else is the engagement with a consumer. For a brand owner to be able to engage directly with a consumer and actually share so much more information for working around label printing and film printing and all those sorts of things for so many years, the biggest challenge that any brand owner has is we can't fit it on the pack. We can't tell the consumers everything. Traceability delivers that and it also delivers that authenticity piece. Very important for export markets, maybe not so much here in Australia.

Protecting brand Australia is a massive one. Australian produce particularly is considered the best in the world and we need to make sure that we communicate that. So traceability enables us to do it. The use cases are very different and broad, and it enables us to be able to take that out into marketplace without tipping a manufacturing, or a processing, or a packing environment upside down. That's extremely important.

Drew Radford:

You paint a good picture there in terms of how that works, and you've worked in the table grape pilot program. It's not the sort of thing you walk into a supermarket and see wrapped in plastic or anything like that. So I imagine getting involved in this project, did you have to start thinking outside the square in terms of applying traceability to grapes? It doesn't come naturally to mind.

Michael Dosser:

Yeah, and I guess the first thing is to build a level of understanding though. You're 100% right. What do I know about grapes? I know there's green ones and I know there's red ones and I like them both, and I know they get turned into wine as well. But all jokes aside, table grapes have got a very different harvesting process to a lot of other fresh produce. They're picked and packed in the field in a lot of cases, not in all. So integrating into the current systems and building a traceability platform that didn't turn a current process upside down with the grower that we worked with across multiple farms was extremely important. I remember the operations manager said to me, "You slow my business down, I'm going to lock you in this fridge, you'll never get out." And he was dead serious. So we actually sat down and it's the first step and said, "Let's understand what the process is and then how do we go and integrate into that?"

And that's where the materials knowledge and the machine knowledge come into play. And we didn't supply a lot of equipment in that particular pilot. We were able to tap into the existing equipment that the grower had. So we didn't put a big capital burden on them either with the project, and that was something that was extremely important.

So step one is to understand what the product is and how it goes through that process, and then how do we integrate it without tipping it upside down? I keep saying tipping it upside down because it's vitally important. We don't want to add cost to a product at all.

Drew Radford:

So you start going on property, the growers made it very, very clear, "You better not slow me down." What happens then? You've identified, "Okay, we need to what?" Put in this machine, that machine, what happens next?

Michael Dosser:

The next part of it, and it's not just what happens in the field, it's actually understanding where we can get the data from. So we've got to be able to link what's picked from what farm, from what plot, from what row, on what day, by what picker, and then we've got to be able to follow that through the customer's business and link it through. That means we need to understand what software systems that they're currently using, the picking software, their warehouse management systems and their ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning Solutions), and then build it so that we can actually extract or harvest the data that we need from their existing systems with a cloud-based system that sits across the top of it. So essentially what we're doing is not just a process allocation or a fact-finding mission, we're actually doing an IT fact-finding mission as well and making sure that we can pull that together and then integrate with all of those systems.

So we walk away from the farm and then we go away and we talk to the guys that developed or run the picking software and say, "Okay, can you share this data with us in this particular way and can we connect to it?" And then all of the other software partners as well. Then once it gets out in the supply chain, it's all linked and it's following standard mechanisms. The importers were able to use their existing scanners, that transport depots were able to use their existing scanners. So we didn't change the supply chain, we didn't ask the supply chain to change. We've worked within the existing systems.

Drew Radford:

Standing back, Michael, I'm looking and going, "Okay, well you're looking at a harvested product," but you're also looking at data harvesting as well. So you're trying to bring all of these things together. Where then does that data end up sitting? Do you manage that or is that the Australian Table Grape Association? Does that all go there? Because I've gone on the app and had a look at the QR code and remarkable what it produces. But who looks after that data once you've drawn it all together?

Michael Dosser:

That's resolved in our system. So we have a cloud-based application that sits across and grabs all of that data and then turns it into the microsite that you see the consumer or the supply chain partner would scan on the QR code. So everything is interlinked based in that cloud system. So a digital identity is created when the product is picked and then everything is allocated to that digital identity for that particular packed product, whether it be a case, or a bunch bag, or a clamshell, or whatever it might be.

Then that goes through an aggregation process so that the units are linked to a case which are then linked to a pallet. And then when a pallet's broken up and broken down the systems to be able to automatically capture that breakup and break down if something has to go via air freight versus sea freight or something along those lines. So, all of that control system that sits across the top of it, that's our tech.

Drew Radford:

It's a remarkable amount of tech, Michael. So how long did the pilot run for?

Michael Dosser:

It ran for the entire season, and that's something that I guess we're really, really proud of. It ran for the entire season. It was across 15 export markets, predominantly in the Asia Pacific area. So it went into Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and everywhere in between, also over to New Zealand as well. So, it's well over 800,000 cases of product that went out into the marketplace right across the Asia Pacific for the entire season.

Drew Radford:

That's quite amount of products. So what have you learned from it and what do you think the industry's learned from it?

Michael Dosser:

The learnings from the industry are quite interesting. I mean, we learn a lot about consumer engagement, it varies very much upon the particular market. The level of engagement or consumer engagement in New Zealand versus the level of consumer engagement in Japan was vastly different. So that was the first thing.

And the other thing was that I guess the biggest takeaway for the industry was we can walk into any table grape producer or brand owner, and say to them, "We can roll out a traceability system and you don't have to change any part of your business. You don't have to change a piece of software. You don't have to put a new process in place." We were able to deploy within an entire industry sector when that time comes.

Drew Radford:

That's pretty comforting knowing that you're not going to be locked in the fridge anywhere across the country to say the least, Michael. But you can actually respond to that. And more importantly, you said there when the time comes, I imagine that's coming quickly.

Michael Dosser:

Vic Ag have done some amazing work, which was done on the back of the pilot as well, to create a return on investment calculator for industry that's readily available on the Vic Ag website so that the industry can actually start to look and say, "Okay, am I going to get a return on investment actually deploying traceability?"

The evolved brands or the leading brands are going, "We need to do this," and they're working through that deployment stage now. But everybody else is maybe looking at it a little bit like, "I have to put a use by date on my product. Do I have to do traceability?" If you're exporting, I think you're nuts if you don't. That's what the industry keeps saying to us. That's what these offshore markets are saying to us and the work that we're doing as we have discussions like this. So it's an interesting one.

And then you've also got a lot of work being done by DAFF at a federal level with traceability strategies and all those sorts of things. Personally, and I think it's not just my view, it's the view of many in the industry. If we don't move quickly, we risk damaging or losing the reputation of brand Australia. Other markets that we're exporting into, whether it be North or South America are also exporting into those markets and they're potentially further advanced than what we are in this process. And the consumers in those markets want to know where their product came from, and they want to know that its authenticity is there and it's behaved itself through the supply chain and all those sorts of things. So, if we don't move quick as an industry or as a country, we risk brand Australia being damaged, to be candid.

Drew Radford:

That's a very honest and candid assessment there. And you are talking there from the consumer's perspective. But I'd imagine many of those overseas markets, there's regulatory pressure coming as well.

Michael Dosser:

A 100%, FDA in the US have already benchmarked and set timeframes for traceability to be in place for any food product. Other markets throughout the Asia Pacific area are moving to do the same thing. There's a massive movement toward traceability being that whole process, importing and exporting, being tied into it. Recyclability and sustainability being measured against it, all those sorts of things are coming.

So, the smart brands that are actually deploying this stuff will actually create a platform that in their businesses that can be scaled to add other value or enable them to deploy other regulatory or non-regulatory things going forward.

Drew Radford:

Michael, you mentioned there was a vastly different consumer response between New Zealand and Japan. What sort of consumer-level feedback came back and has it been used?

Michael Dosser:

This is the great part that we built into the system. There's obviously different stakeholders that look at a traceability system, but more importantly, the consumer feedback. There's the marketing level. What did you think of the grapes? So I've mentioned the green grape and the red grape before, but prior to that, that's how they're marketed. But do we know that they are a Thompson Seedless or another variety? No, we don't. We were able to share that information with the consumer and then actually they were able to provide some basic feedback. Did they like the colour? Did they like the crunchiness? Did they like the sweetness? Those sorts of things.

Because we were actually able to carve that data up, we were actually able to give it back in a dashboard format to the operations team that said, "Okay, the consumers are actually liking the Thompson Seedless out of this farm over that farm." Maybe you might have a look at what those processes are that you're incorporating in both of those farms and look at what those differences are. So you're getting operational data back from the system. While the marketing team were actually able to get overall consumer satisfaction type information about what varieties were liked more than others in certain markets. So carving up that data was a really exciting part of the process and actually being able to turn it into marketing and operational useful tools.

Drew Radford:

That's a fascinating insight that primary producers would never really get. It might go through a wholesaler and they go, "Yeah, people are liking it." But to actually get that directly back and then trace it from one property to another is remarkably powerful I'd suggest.

Michael Dosser:

Yeah, look on what we learned very quickly and when we went into the process, particularly in the export side of things, and this is through that consultation phase, is that in a market like China, for example, the box of grapes goes into an import partner and then they sell it off to somebody else. And the deeper that it goes into China, there's a business-to-business transaction and the proof of authenticity in that B2B transaction is just as important as the consumer so that the resellers of the product through the supply chain actually want to know that they're getting an authentic product. So the level of engagement at a B2B level was just as important as what it was as a B2C.

Drew Radford:

And Michael, you deal with a wide range of products. You're obviously helping people get products into overseas markets, so you've probably got a bit of a view of how the country's functioning. Where does Victoria sit in terms of traceability in the international market? How's the state progressing?

Michael Dosser:

I think the work being done by Vic Ag is simply sensational in leading the space. I hope I don't get myself in trouble with other state governments around the country, but Vic Ag have been very extremely proactive in getting these pilots out that have been turned into real programs and taking a deep dive and not just going, "Okay, this is a pilot." But these are full season pilots. These are pilots that are turning into real deployments.

Drew Radford:

It is a remarkable forward-looking approach. Lastly, Michael, what are your top three recommendations or tips for businesses that really haven't dipped their foot into the whole world of traceability? What do you reckon they should focus on?

Michael Dosser:

Step number one is to not be scared. The whole traceability thing, everybody thinks, and we've banged on a bit about it through this discussion, but it's vitally important, particularly to a fresh produce grower. They don't need to reinvent their business. They don't need to put in a whole heap of IT infrastructure. There's ways and means of being able to do that. Result Group, we're really proud about what we do, but we're not the only supplier of traceability solutions, and those of us and our peers that are out in the marketplace are doing some remarkable work. So there is a whole infrastructure of being able to supply, so don't be scared of it.

Tip number two is standards are vitally important and they exist right now, and they've evolved and morphed into the digital world being the GS1 standards of the global location number and the GTIN that's on every product now that makes it go beep at the supermarket. Those standards have been expanded and turned into a GS1 digital link, which all of us are using, and that enables the next part of the process, which is interoperability. If I need to with very strict protocols and performances, of course, share data with different people, we can do that in a standards based world, which makes it a lot easier and a lot more cost-effective.

The third takeaway is to be bold. This is something that you can't wait five or 10 years to deploy. This is about brand Australia particularly as an exporter, and there's a heap of benefits around being able to deploy other elements and other regulatory and non-regulatory tracing systems within your business if you get this system right at the deployment. They're probably the top three.

Drew Radford:

Well, Michael, there are three fantastic pointers I think to finish on and certainly taking away being bold, don't be afraid. And thank you for demystifying this and talking us through the pilot as well. For now though, Michael Dosser, Group General Manager with the Result Group, thank you for joining me for this, A Taste You Can Trace podcast.

Michael Dosser:

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family. Any advice given during this episode is of a general nature. Listeners are advised to seek professional advice before implementing a traceability system in their business. This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

The demand for produce traceability is something that continually increases. And while there's many solutions being sold, how do you know what's right for you? G'day, I'm Drew Radford, and there is help at hand and it's impartial and it's via the Implementing Food Traceability Program, which is an initiative of Deakin University's Food Traceability Lab. To delve into the help that's on offer, I'm joined by Rose Elphick-Darling from the Centre for Regional and Rural Futures at Deakin University. Rose, thanks for your time.

Rose Elphick-Darling:

My pleasure.

Drew Radford:

Rose. Supply chain logistics are such a hot topic at the moment for so many reasons, very central to everything. But before we get into the nuts and bolts of that, I understand you actually come from a farming background, so you know a little bit about, well, what comes off the land needs to go somewhere. Where did you grow up?

Rose Elphick-Darling:

I grew up in the Riverina, Southwest New South Wales. I was born in Gundagai. My family owned properties in that district and wheat and sheep is the background.

Drew Radford:

Now, you work in freight logistics areas now and you help organisations in that particular space, but you focused on primary production?

Rose Elphick-Darling:

Yes. AgriFood supply chains is where our focus is.

Drew Radford:

So Rose, you work in supply chain logistics at Deakin University. What's that work involve?

Rose Elphick-Darling:

Our role is to support businesses across regional Australia. Therefore, a big part of that is AgriFood production and supply chains. We look to help them perform better and to support them to not only export, but in domestic supply chains to be the most efficient and cost-effective that they can be.

Drew Radford:

So drilling down into that a little bit further then, Rose, I understand you are the Project Manager for the Implementing Food Traceability Program.

Rose Elphick-Darling:

Yes.

Drew Radford:

Can you explain that program? What's the purpose of it and who's involved?

Rose Elphick-Darling:

Well, it's led by the Food Traceability Laboratory, which is made up of people from individual businesses, peak bodies, and government. We work together on supporting the implementation of traceability in food supply chains. Traceability by its nature is collaborative. You can't only do it yourself, it has to be with your partners. Otherwise, it's not tracing a whole chain of events and activities. So because it's complex, we formed this lab. And it's really something that we work on together. The lab was formed in 2018.

Drew Radford:

Rose, the timeline for this lab overlaps a fairly pivotal time really where supply chain logistics have almost become part of the common language around COVID and following COVID. It's quite a topical environment to say the least and we've all learned how crucial it is.

Rose Elphick-Darling:

Yes, in some ways, COVID is a gift in terms of people understanding a little bit more about supply chains. On the other hand, it's a bit of a curse because supply chains have been so badly impacted. But a pandemic's not the only impact on food and security of food and supply chains. We've had a range of climatic conditions. The drought in the eastern states, bush fires, floods. There have been many impacts across our agricultural space and our food production space. So it coincided with a time when there was a need for greater visibility. Things like food fraud were becoming more prevalent, issues around being able to control inventory. These are all things that were becoming issues. And then with COVID, it certainly highlighted them.

Drew Radford:

Well, it certainly did highlight them. And more recently, you've had the announcement of a National Agricultural Traceability Strategy. So does that sit in parallel with you or is it something that falls under what you and your team does?

Rose Elphick-Darling:

Look, there's a big overlap and we are so pleased that the Department of Agriculture in two respects, biosecurity and trade and the need for more information about the origin of products in our international markets, has seen fit to take up this issue. We were involved from the get-go of the development of what's now the National Agricultural Traceability Strategy and soon there'll be an implementation plan out. Most states have brought out biosecurity and traceability plans. So it's been a very exciting time. We are involved beyond the farm gate and in domestic distribution as well. So we have a slightly wider remit than only the production or the export end of the business.

Drew Radford:

What are some of the basics in that area that you deal with and how's it relate to Victoria?

Rose Elphick-Darling:

We had a number of regulators in international markets saying, "You must be able to trace back to the origin of this product or else you won't be importing it into our country. So, a number of international developments have really influenced this. There's also been a number of biosecurity threats that also mean that Australia needs to ensure its guard is up. One of the ways to do that is by tracing products more diligently that we import into the country as well. So lots of reasons for this and consumers are asking for more information about the circumstances of a product, it's origin, and whether it's been produced sustainably and safely.

Drew Radford:

Rose, you help bridge industry and government relations on supply chain issues. Can you talk to us about what kind of issues exist and importantly how you can help manage them?

Rose Elphick-Darling:

There's this balance of trying to meet all of the needs and requirements of the market, all the needs and requirements of the regulators. One of the things that we try to do is to help producers/processes to meet those in a way that's affordable. We look at how you might approach traceability with your supply chain partners. What are the priorities? Where's the most risk? Really looking at how you can benefit and how you can share in some of the benefits from traceability. Those may not necessarily be things like a premium price, but sometimes they are. Other times it's about finding greater productivity through being able to trace things like farm inputs, chemicals used, what levels of feed are producing. So a lot of this is about things that farmers in particular want to do already, but it's how to do it efficiently without a huge cost burden on the business.

The other thing that we do is to help them to negotiate, I suppose, the arena of solutions. Most farmers are approached constantly from solution providers with some really useful ag tech, which is terrific. But knowing what you need to ask for and knowing where to start and how to judge those offerings is really important for farmers to be able to get the most effective system going with their partners in the chain. So we encourage working together and deciding together where you're going to start the journey, where's your weak points, where's your elevated risk, how do you work that out, how do you work out a return on investment.

One of the things that we are doing at the moment is researching for different stakeholders in the supply chain where these claims can be supported. So if you are told you can better manage your inventory, if you are told that you will get a better return, where's the proof? How much is that worth in your business? Farmers have to manage every penny. So we try to work with them to help them make those decisions, to give them useful guidance about where to start, how to approach this, how to navigate this field, which can be quite crowded. So they're the types of things that we do with growers in particular, exporters, manufacturers, retailers to help them get a grip on this thing and start to move forward.

Drew Radford:

Rose, that sounds like very valuable and impartial advice that you and your colleagues can give.

Rose Elphick-Darling:

Yes. I guess that one of the important things is that we are independent. We're not actually selling anything. We don't have a financial stake in this. We do get industry sponsorship. But it's really important that we can give the best information based on good research and give it in a way that's understandable for those in the field who don't have time to run about doing this.

Drew Radford:

Rose, I'm just wondering if we could delve a little bit further then. So what's the relationship between the work you do and the traceability systems used by, let's say, Victorian producers such as stone fruit growers?

Rose Elphick-Darling:

What we do is encourage a grower to really look at what's out there. We have over a hundred solution providers registered. Some of them have conducted industry demonstrations. And we can point to those and the learnings from them. You can get on and have a look at those and learn about the experiences of others and find out about the sorts of solutions that they had a look at. You can get connected to solution providers. We don't recommend we make the information available and it's up to the business to then go ahead and engage themselves with solution providers. So we're quite neutral about these things, but what we say is, "You really need that data to be able to move between systems. Here are the kinds of data standards that you can use to help you to do that."

And when you put out a request for quote from solution providers, make sure you tell them that they need to have a data standard that is able to allow data to move between businesses, and that's hugely important. It's not much good having something that's bespoke when you can't share data. Also, for your product, what kind of data? What are the data points? What are the critical tracking events that you need to provide information on? And what of those data points do you need to share? Some you'll keep in your own business, others you're going to need to share so that ultimately consumers can learn about how well you've treated that product and how careful you have been.

Drew Radford:

So in terms of getting started, what sort of advice would you have for producers and businesses involved in the export supply chain, who they themselves are just getting started in their own traceability journey? What advice would you have for them?

Rose Elphick-Darling:

We have produced guides, and those guides are free. What you can do is to have a look at your supply chain. One's a general guide. We've also produced a red meat guide, a guide for organic produce, a guide for seafood. There'll be others coming along so that the peculiarities and the requirements for your product are all set out. All the regulations are laid out in relation to traceability. And you can go in there and you can have a look at every stage that you might be involved in. It might be processing, it might be transport.

So depending on what your risk is or what you need to address, then you can go to a section of the guide and find out all about what's required. So if you are sourcing services or products, then you can learn what other things you need to know about who's supplied you. If you are using packaging, what do you need to know and record about that packaging? So all of those things are in these guides and it's a great way to start. We also are developing at the moment e-learning modules, so you can do that online training and awareness. There are videos, there are organisations and people who you can make contact with. And it's really great that Ag Victoria has established a community of advisors and professionals and we are in that group to help anyone who makes contact with the department. So wherever you are coming from and wherever you need to start, there will be help for you.

Drew Radford:

Well, Rose, it sounds like you and the team provide a remarkable service in terms of supporting people going on their own supply chain journey. For now though, Rose Elphick-Darling, research fellow with the Centre for Regional and Rural Futures at Deakin University, thank you so much for joining us for this A Taste You Can Trace Podcast.

Rose Elphick-Darling:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family.

Any advice given during this episode is of a general nature. Listeners are advised to seek professional advice before implementing a traceability system in their business.

This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Australian citrus fruit is in high demand here and overseas, and consumers are demanding more information about where their fruit has come from. G’day, I'm Drew Radford, and the nation's peak body for the citrus sector, Citrus Australia is aware of this only too well, consequently they’ve run the Citrus Traceability pilot project and this involves everything from box labelling, through to QR codes and even the use of isotope testing to protect Australian brands from food fraud.

To discuss the findings, their CEO, Nathan Hancock joins me for this, A Taste you can Trace podcast. Nathan, thanks for your time.

Nathan Hancock:

Thank you for having me.

Drew Radford:

Nathan, your organisation has a really broad remit representing growers, and part of that involves access to markets. I imagine though, traceability is becoming more and more important in that process.

Nathan Hancock:

Yeah, absolutely. Traceability is something you don't realise you need until you need it, and been a lot of effort being made outside of industry to improve traceability. I think for our industry that's very export focused. We have about a third of our production goes to export markets, and a lot of our production is also consumed in Australia.

I think being able to trace back to the farm and through the processes that got the fruit from the farm to the retail wherever it is in the world is becoming a more and more important aspect of what businesses need to be aware of and doing.

Drew Radford:

What level of detail does that come down to, Nathan in terms of, is it being able to trace to the extent of, X piece of fruit came from Y tree, or is the remit a little broader than that?

Nathan Hancock:

It's not down to the actual fruit going into the bin, but it's the fruit that was picked on a certain day in a certain orchard. That's the closest we've been able to achieve so far.

Drew Radford:

That's still a phenomenal amount of detail and a phenomenal amount of data, I would imagine that goes with that.

Nathan Hancock:

Yeah, absolutely. Remember, this is a pilot. We're looking at just focusing in on trying to find within the pilot, what are the hurdles, what are the things we needed to find workarounds for across this spectrum of information that's needed, and ways to capture the data, and record it, and report it when necessary.

Look, I'm not, by any means saying we have been able to roll this out across the whole industry. What we've been doing in the pilot is trying to test and learn. Find out, if our objective is this, how do we get to our objective? The partners that we work with have been really helpful in navigating that so, partners like Trust Codes and GS1 have been very important in the traceability side of things. Then we've done some other work on actually understanding the makeup of citrus fruit and whether it's measurably different from other parts of the world.

Drew Radford:

Nathan, that's a really interesting point there. You're basically saying, is our fruit chemically different? Because this is not just about traceability, a sticker on a piece of fruit, but you're talking, I guess there, or alluding there to fruit fraud for want of a better description. How can you prove the provenance of a piece of fruit?

Nathan Hancock:

Yeah. I mean, the weakness in any system is, there's a chance that it could be duplicated, or modified, or altered in some way. Stickers can be removed, they can be copied, box labels can be copied, and there's things that we've built into our QR code system, for example that try to stop that and identify that.

When it comes down to it, looking at the isotopes within the fruit, that is what we're looking at as being our final say. When it comes to it, if there was a major food fraud or a major human health risk, then we could potentially turn to that as a way to differentiate our fruit from fruit that's not grown in Australia.

We're able, also to get down to the level of saying which region were different from each other too, which is, I think, also helpful. It's a very interesting part of the puzzle. It wouldn't be your go-to card immediately. I think there's other mechanisms that you could use in traceability, but when you needed to final say, I think there's very good signs that this is a good way that we can go about proving, ultimately whether our fruit was grown in Australia, and down to what region it was grown.

Drew Radford:

I assume then, Nathan, that means you got to build up a very large database, or am I overemphasizing that?

Nathan Hancock:

We're at the very beginning of that. I think even globally there's not a lot of records of citrus isotopes being kept. When I've come into this pilot scheme, I wanted to make sure we were using any existing, internationally recognised protocols, and that applies to the way QR systems work, as much as it applies to this isotope side of things. We wanted to have open and transparent information available so that we can test and learn with other countries as well.

So, we're essentially starting the database here in Australia, and proving that the methodologies are sound and that they can be repeated here in Australia, but also overseas.

We focused on oranges in the initial pilot, but we'd like to look at mandarins and lemons, limes, etc to see if there's any marked difference between the isotope prints, between varieties. Also, just to keep building those numbers up so we've got more and more evidence of the isotopes.

Yeah, it's groundbreaking in that regard, and we welcome other industries around the world to get involved in this, to build a database that is usable for everybody. It's an interesting place to be at.

Drew Radford:

Nathan, I may have jumped too far down into the detail there because really, sitting above this, as you've alluded to are QR codes and GS1 standards. I imagine that's an entire process to be set up.

Nathan Hancock:

As much as people get annoyed about fruit stickers and those sorts of things at the supermarket, coming from that level of providing fruit-level or carton-level traceability, there's a lot of work that goes behind the scenes to hold that all together.

I mentioned earlier that we attempted to provide traceability from the orchard and the picking bin through to the packing house, and from the packing house out through the distribution channels. There are a lot of data points involved there, and there's a lot of points along the way where you've got to collect information and add information that is held in a dashboard that Trust Codes built for us.

That was one of the key things we wanted to make sure we were able to communicate to industry, is that it still remains your property and it still remains for you to negotiate with customers, how much information you want to share. At the end of the day, if you've collected the information, then your traceability is a lot stronger, and you're able to sort through results and data to prove whatever point you're trying to make based on the inquiry that's come in.

So, that was a really key learning that we wanted to get across, is that you own the data and you share it as you see fit.

Drew Radford:

It's a really interesting education process, Nathan, because not only are you talking about producers there, but you also alluded to consumers there in terms of, I've heard those frustrations, "Oh, sticker on a piece of fruit," but there's a bigger story there to be told.

I was given the example recently by somebody else talking about the food scare and strawberries the other year with metal contamination. It caused massive damage to that sector because of lack of traceability and damaged consumer trust.

Nathan Hancock:

Yeah, and these are the sorts of things you don't know what is down the pipeline. We've all had experiences and heard of things along the line, but new and interesting ways of needing to rely on traceability keep coming to the fore.

Yeah, I think part of any response to that, sort of thing is being able to trace information back to original sources. Look, the other angle from a consumer perspective is, we've used QR codes in this pilot to show that we can entice the consumer to activate the QR code and find out information about where the product is grown, or more information about the company that they're buying the fruit from.

That, also adds to the level of data that we collect right through to the end consumer to see when it was purchased, what part of the world it was purchased in, down to what store it was purchased in, etc. So, the consumer activates the QR code and receives some sort of reward. In this project, we motivated them by creating a fun game to participate in.

There's other ways to use this as a marketing tool for the companies that get involved, but in return we receive information that helps us understand where on the supply chain the product has been activated on the QR code. So, you've got to look at all the different angles to see how to motivate people and collect the right information as you go along.

Drew Radford:

That's a really fascinating insight, Nathan. What sort of response did you get from consumers?

Nathan Hancock:

The game was very popular with the markets that we activated it in. On that point, you can activate these sorts of things by market, and change the language that they're communicated in, and those things. Yeah, great response to using that. Great click-through to seeing what information was being shared by MFC (the company we were working with), who was packing and distributing the fruit. There was a good uptake in the use of the codes.

I think our earlier pilot, people weren't quite used to activating codes to access information, which meant that the points that we were actually able to collect data from the consumer side was limited, but we saw a much bigger increase in activations this time, which was fantastic.

I think we're learning on the go and finding new ways to motivate people to, or entice people to activate those QR codes for whatever purpose they're looking for. It was positive to see the number of activations increase. That was one of our objectives in the project.

There's no point going through all of this, if at the consumer end there's not engagement. I also want to see in the future, activation of QR codes being part of business as usual. So, stock coming into a wholesaler, for example, we use the QR code to bring that stock in, and then use the QR code to distribute it to the next part in the supply chain.

I think that will also boost the number of activations we see the use of the QR code across the supply chain, which then means more data and more information for traceability.

Drew Radford:

It's also a fascinating feedback loop for the producer, to actually see that their fruit is being picked up in a store on the other side of the country, or potentially the other side of the world.

Nathan Hancock:

That's right. I think it's a really positive thing for growers to see the fruits of their labour, pardon the pun, arriving in the market somewhere, and also receiving positive feedback. There's a feedback loop available for people to fill in and describe their experience. Whether that's good feedback or bad, it's good to get feedback, and then you can work with that.

Drew Radford:

In terms of accessing overseas markets, there must be considerable pressure to ensure that systems like this are in place. I mean, we've seen over time, various countries, basically block importation based on biosecurity concerns, whether they're true or not. So, I imagine having all of this in place is crucial to ensure that ongoing access?

Nathan Hancock:

Yeah, look, it's a very fluid space, biosecurity protocol markets, food safety, all of those things. From my point as the CEO of Citrus Australia, it was important to get involved with the pilot project to see what the pitfalls were, what the hurdles are, what the opportunities are, and be able to communicate them to industry so that they can make some more informed choices with relevance to their own industry.

Sometimes it's hard to translate information from some other primary or secondary industry, where you try to work out how that might apply to you. I thought it would be very beneficial to get involved at this level and be able to communicate to industry, how it really affects, and what are the issues within the citrus industry and the supply chain.

Drew Radford:

Nathan, you've mentioned it's a project, so where to from here?

Nathan Hancock:

Look, there's a number of recommendations that have come out of the pilot that we'll look to follow up on. I mentioned one of them already about building a bigger database of isotope information and broadening that from just oranges to other varieties of citrus.

I think there's still more work to do in bedding down traceability in terms of collecting data along the different points, from harvest right through to distribution and beyond. Each business is going to need to look at the results of this project, but also be engaging with someone to help them understand what some of the barriers might be in their own individual business because every business is different. There's no two businesses that are exactly the same in the citrus industry.

I think that makes combining, getting the right level of international standards, but then having bespoke ways of connecting to that is really important. That's some of the things that, I think resonate in the reports that we've put out about the pilot project, and I think there's a good opportunity for growers and integrated businesses to be looking at how they, in their near future start to adopt traceability technologies.

Drew Radford:

Nathan, is there a timeline for a traceability system to be in place for the citrus industry?

Nathan Hancock:

No, nothing set in stone. I think this is one of those issues that it's better to be informed about now, and be ahead of the game rather than having to react when you're under pressure. I think that key message I said earlier about not having to share every data point that you collect is really important because if you are able to collect data points and engage with a company that can build you a dashboard, and you feel comfortable with the level of information you're collecting, when the spaghetti hits the ventilator, so to speak, you've got an opportunity then to trawl back through that information and prove your case.

Otherwise, it's a lot of paperwork trail, it's a lot of documentation and interviews and those sorts of things that can be quite trying. If you're already dealing with a crisis, you want to be able to lean on the tools that you've created. Having a good traceability system, I think is an important one in that aspect.

Drew Radford:

I think that's a great point to finish it on Nathan because, at the end of the day, the pressures are coming from various directions. It sounds like you and Citrus Australia are doing quite a remarkable job to prepare and be on the front foot for that.

For now though, Nathan Hancock, CEO of Citrus Australia, thank you so much for joining us for this Agriculture Victoria podcast.

Nathan Hancock:

Thank you. Can I just say thank you to the team at Citrus Australia, who are involved, to the people at Mildura Fruit Company, Trust Codes, GS1, Caroline at Agriculture Victoria, who is sensational in keeping us on track, and her staff as well, and GNS Science who were our partners in the isotope testing. They did amazing work for us.

I'll point out, a lot of this work was done through the pandemic, and it was quite difficult to be on-site, and those sorts of things, but I think there are some really great reports available on our website and in other places on the internet that will show you just how valuable this project has been. Thank you to everyone and thanks for the opportunity.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family.

Any advice given during this episode is of a general nature. Listeners are advised to seek professional advice before implementing a traceability system in their business. This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

The supermarket's the final link in the traceability chain for consumers. It's the endpoint for a huge amount of data for products often made up from many different ingredients which have traveled myriad of supply chains. So how's all that information managed? G'day, I'm Drew Radford and a person who's very focused on that question is Ram Akella who works with Woolworths as their head of business solutions own brand convenience and product traceability. And he joins us for this AgVic Talk podcast. Ram, thanks for your time.

Ram Akella:

It's my pleasure, Drew, to having this chat.

Drew Radford:

Ram, your role at Woolworth's, it's a long title to say the least. Importantly though, for this podcast, it has the word traceability as part of it. So just in a broad brush stroke, what's your work actually involve?

Ram Akella:

Sure, Drew. Before I introduce myself, please allow me to do two things. First, I'd like to share with you that I'm actually joining you today from Darug Nation and I pay my respects to the elders past, present and emerging. Second, I'd actually like to congratulate Agriculture Victoria on launching the Traceability Hub back in December. It's a landmark event and actually they're one of the key government agencies taking the much needed steps to lead on those traceability efforts. So I really wanted to congratulate that. So back to the question, who am I and what do I do at Woolworths Group? I actually look after the business solutions for two of the very important businesses within the Woolworths Group. One is Woolworths Metro, and you might have already shopped at a few of the metro stores. We have them running on the eastern seaboard, primarily in the big cities.

And then the second one in my portfolio is to also look after the business solutions for what we call internally Woolworths Food Company. What it does is actually is to create the own brand products or the private level products. An example for that is the Woolworths Macro brand as you see it on the supermarket shelf. Those products come out of food company and it's an internal business division within the Woolworths Food Group, and I have the privilege of looking after their business solutions for past few years. Alongside that is the topic of the day, which is the product traceability. So for the past close to three and a half, four years now, I'm heading up the product traceability for the Woolworths Group. This kind of extends beyond food that gets discussed primarily at various events, but it also covers the cotton traceability, for example, which is an important part in our apparel business, which is Big W. So I have the opportunity of actually heading up traceability. Alongside that, I'm also a co-chair of the National GS1 Traceability Advisory Group.

Drew Radford:

Ram, you've got a lot going on. I'm not really sure when you actually have time for lunch or dinner with those sorts of responsibilities. That must be tens of thousands of products, surely.

Ram Akella:

Indeed, Drew. I think you're hitting that button straight away. On any given day for all our customer's convenience, we have at least 80,000 products that we range to our stores. Of course, we're not going to trace every product there because we're not talking about brooms and mop sticks and those kind of what we call it as a household items. We're talking here purely about food and that actually to your point, yes, we're talking about thousands and thousands of products. So it is complex.

Drew Radford:

Extremely complex. And Ram, often those products are made of many different components. So it's not as straightforward as tracing, let's say an apple that's come from an orchard, is it?

Ram Akella:

No. Wow, that's super cool, Drew. That's where the complexity comes out slowly. So to put it in that equation of simplicity to what could be the medium complex to the extremely complex, I always prefer to take one good example here, which is watermelon. And if we're talking about the melons in general, tracing a melon back to its origin in the farm is I would put it as a simple traceability equation. Well, that itself is hard to prove by the way, but what makes it medium complex is we are talking about how watermelons, let's say sitting in a cup of a fruit salad or a cut watermelon that comes out. So that itself is complex.

Then if we want extend the complexity beyond, we are talking about let's say juice that's made up of multiple components of different fruits. Now where do we track where that watermelon that has gone into the juice bottle? It is complex and if we talk about the food products as we talk about that we actually sell, it comes from multiple different sources, not necessarily all the things would come from Australia alone. We might have sourced it from different parts of the globe. That raw material might have travel distances and have reached the processing manufacturing facilities. And then from there on it gets into this product. So yeah, it is definitely complex, Drew.

Drew Radford:

Ram, you're clearly passionate about this. So what key benefits of traceability or what problems do you think it can help solve in the agricultural supply chain?

Ram Akella:

Yeah, I get asked this question quite regularly, both inside my organisation, Ram, what are we trying to achieve and why? And this is again a very pertinent question that gets asked in the industry as well. And we are trying to solve this collectively with a number of different industry associations as well as recently with the Commonwealth Government stepping into this plate. And one of the pressing challenge is the value. So whether we call it benefits or value, the benefits come into two categories. One is what can traceability do to remove pains that we have in the supply chains today? And the second one is what can traceability do to create gains or that extra value add that we haven't got today in the businesses? So removing pains and creating gains, it's like a two-pronged approach. To actually add a bit more context, so removing pains, we deal with these food safety and biosecurity risks and for the past decade we have FSANZs which is a food standards Australia and New Zealand.

They got a great deal of actually communicating with various stakeholders about how can we efficiently, most importantly, quickly do product recalls when there's such a food safety and a biosecurity incident. What traceability does is that most important thing to actually resolve some of these issues. It doesn't resolve or it doesn't remove the food safety issues or biosecurity incidents from its grassroots. So that's not what traceability is about. What traceability does, and this is the clear benefit, is it provides the ability to identify the affected batches where exactly it's happening all the way back to the source. Then provides sustainability for those right participants in the supply chain to quickly isolate those affected batches. The opportunity here is that unaffected batches can still travel in the supply chain all the way to the consumer no matter where the consumer sits. That is a significant benefit.

That is what I call it as transparency. The transparency the traceability brings to the table to these businesses gives that opportunity to continue to sell the unaffected products, which we don't have today. A classic example, Drew, is the news in the strawberry incident. Every strawberry, every punnet of strawberry was recalled and discarded. We're talking about the whole strawberry industry coming to a standstill as a result. Now with this in place, at least we can quickly isolate and say, what is a problem? What is not a problem? Where can we solve? So I think that's where we got that first quick advantage of removing pain. Alongside that, of course, auditability is most important. So with respect to any biosecurity incident, food safety practices come into play. Every entity in the supply chain needs to have a set of demonstrable practices that they need to actually show it to these auditors.

And having an electronic record in a digital file clearly provides a much more cost effective way to do the audits. The other part of the benefit bucket, which is I call it as creating gains, here we're talking about how can we leverage traceable to demonstrate let's say the quality? We are fresh food people and that's what Woolworths transfer. How can we actually use traceability as a means to demonstrate that to our customers? And then the sustainability equation we talk about on top of that. So I think these benefits we talk about goes in those two big categories, Drew.

Drew Radford:

You mapped that out very clearly, Ram, and you've taken this beyond your day-to-day job because you're also co-chair of the National Traceability Advisory Group at GS1 Australia, and I'm imagining you're able to take your daily retail experience to that advisory role and help develop policy for the country. How did you get into that role?

Ram Akella:

That's a very interesting question. I need to do a bit of a time travel and recollect how it all happened, Drew.

Drew Radford:

Well, a brief version then Ram.

Ram Akella:

Yeah, definitely. That's what probably I'll do. Look, I think this is super important question. Simple. Woolworths, we sell thousands of products through both our brick and mortar stores and an online business. This effectively means that we need to participate in number of different supply chains and also we have to work with different trade partners as well and primary producers across the globe. So that itself lends a lot of complexity. Now, if we have to solve traceability, I cannot put solutions for every different supply chain. That's not practically possible, it's not going to happen. So how can I solve where I can put one solution, which is a traceability solution that can address all these combinations of supply chains we work with and a combination of trade partners? I quickly realised that is called interoperability. So I need a solution that is interoperable. It's not just interoperable solutions because I'll be talking with these different trade partners and suppliers and primary producers in the journey.

That means I need a common language as well. That is where the standards come into play. So I need a solution that is interoperable and adhere to a set of standards. That's where I stop at GS1. So GS1 is a key partner of Woolworths Group for a number of different standards that we already work with, and naturally it's a good extension for me. So when I had chats with Maria and Marcel at GS1 Australia, that's created the pathway for me to be able to actually do this. This is not something unique for Woolworths alone. This is something that every industry, every sector within that needs to worry about. So why don't we set up something called these National Traceability Advisory Group and then Ram, it will be great if you can start the journey. Well, that's where it started, and then fortunately I'm in my third year of that. So it's a privilege to be able to lead that discussion with various industry associations, Drew.

Drew Radford:

I've seen a quote from you, Ram, where you said, without partnerships, traceability is nothing. So what does a traceability partnership look like then, Ram?

Ram Akella:

Partnerships in the supply chain should have a very close association beyond what we do today. So we're not talking about ordering a product from our supplier and supplier getting it from a primary producer, let's say farmer, a grower, somewhere up there. This is about taking the partnership to the next level to be able to share a bit more information than what we do just for the sake of business alone, but for the sake of moving the product and selling the product. So this goes back all the way to what happens on farm? How was the product grown? Where did the seed come from? How was it served? We talk about responsible farming practices or animal welfare practices. So it's about sharing that information to the next person in the next person's supply chain. And it works bidirectional, Drew, so it's not about information flowing all the way only from the farm up to the retailer like cars and to the customer.

It's actually sharing the information backwards as to, hey, this is the feedback that we received from the customer. They loved your product. They know that these tomatoes are really juicy or these berries are wonderful. They're ripe, they're perfect and they lasted enough for them to be able to feed their family. So we should be a position to share that feedback and where it's not really meeting those quality standards, where we believe that there are issues, we should be able to openly share that information all the way back so that if that lends to improving their farming practices, yielding techniques, I think this is where we're talking about partnerships. I want to conclude that answer by saying that that means it's actually trusted partnerships and that is the real key here to unlock traceability, not just dumping data from one entity to other entity. This is about the trusted partnerships.

Drew Radford:

What advice would you give to someone in the agricultural supply chain that's not currently focusing on traceability?

Ram Akella:

I'll be very surprised, Drew, first up after three years in the journey, I'm referring back to the very original call from the Department of Agriculture on the need to put in the full end-to-end product traceability that there are still entities missing out there on the communications, but still it is possible. The first advice, if I have to pick and choose, is to start from joining the Department of Agriculture, which we call it as DAFF, which is a Commonwealth Government. And also there are state agency journeys that have already began. For example, AgVic through this podcast itself is one such opportunity, but there are many different avenues out there through the form of trials and the investments made by AgVic. Again, I think they have done wonderful job on citrus trial, on grapes trial. I think these are real classic examples where one who is still fairly new or still waiting to be called into should be able to have a sneak peek. What is this about? What are they trying to do? And get a better understanding of traceability and what it can offer.

I think that's probably the starting point. Or alternatively, obviously they can reach out to organisations that work in the supply chain itself. For example, if there are any primary producers out there that work with the retailers like Woolworths, I think we'll be first, we'll take that opportunity straight away and start talking about and sharing what we have learned so far. So there are multiple pathways here, Drew, that I would recommend for sure. In saying that, my conclusion to your question about that was I'd probably say that in reasonable timeframe, maybe let's put it three to five years timeframe, if things flow this way in the right direction, traceability will become a business as usual activity. So there is that expectations right from the customers that they will actually share more about the product and therefore the expectation flows backward all the way to the primary producer. So every participant in the supply chain will automatically become a, hey, this is a BAU, we should start talking about this much more openly and give this information. Be prepared for that is my word of advice.

Drew Radford:

You've said BAU, they're business as usual. So is there anything else businesses in the agricultural supply chain should be preparing themselves in the traceability space over the next few years?

Ram Akella:

There are number of avenues I would refer to as I called the NGTAG or the National GS1 Traceability Advisory Group. Happy for them to reach out to the NGTAG. There is a website out there that would definitely help, which means that I'm happy to be part of the discussions and then help prepare. We can have a dialogue or a discussion. But probably I'll refer to this one thing, part of the Traceability Hub launch back in December by AgVic, they've also done a wonderful thing called the quick start guide that's on their website. That is actually a terrific starting point too because it actually provides a pathway to assess where they are in the journey and how to progress on the journey. That means knowing how to trace, what to trace first, how to trace in the sense what data should I collect and how do I share, etc. It's a beautiful start. It may not give you all the answers that everybody seeks, but it gives that starting point. Therefore then go and reach out to the right audience and then ask those questions.

So I think that is definitely another avenue. Probably I'll conclude with one more, Drew. Recently it has picked the momentum, which is the Commonwealth Government Traceability Initiative. It's called the Australian Agricultural Traceability Alliance Group, AATAG. It's quite a mouthful, but I don't think it's hard. If you jump onto the department website, there is an active number of things that are out there in the website that would actually help for someone to be jumping on and starting their journeys too. This all results in one thing, it's called the modernisation of trade. So the business model, the operating model is going to be stepped up. That's exactly what traceability does in your organisation, no matter where or what they are in the supply chain. That is through adoption of multitude of these new technologies that every participant can exploit. So I'm so looking forward to everyone's participation there in the journey and in my capacity both from Woolworths as well as from the NGTAG. I'm happy to be there helping them out.

Drew Radford:

Ram, thank you for giving us an insight to traceability, not just from the perspective of the supermarket, but also in terms of policy for the entire sector. Ram Akella, thanks for joining us for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Ram Akella:

Thanks a lot, Drew, and I thank AgVic actually for setting this opportunity for me. It's my pleasure and as I said, I'm always available to have a chat, so I appreciate it.

Speaker 4:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family.

Any advice given during this episode is of a general nature. Listeners are advised to seek professional advice before implementing a traceability system in their business. This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Traceability, it's a lot about meeting compliance and regulation. It's also about telling the story of where the produce comes from. G'day, I'm Drew Radford, and for a relatively simple word, it covers so much. And for a producer it can be daunting in terms of where to start.

The person who's worked extensively with both government and the private sector to simplify this, is Jayne Gallagher, CEO of marketing company, Honey & Fox. She joins us for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Jayne Gallagher:

My pleasure. I'm excited to be here.

Drew Radford:

Jayne, before we start pulling apart where to start on your traceability journey, I've got a question about your business name, and I suspect it sheds some light on what we're going to be talking about. Your company's called Honey & Fox, but I don't see anyone called either Honey or Fox working there, so where does the name come from?

Jayne Gallagher:

It comes from the approach that we take to storytelling, or working with businesses. We work with businesses to first of all discover what their sweet spot is, so what they have to offer and how that matches with what consumers want, or customers want, so that's find the sweet spot, that's the honey.

And then being really smart about using the technologies and storytelling to find and connect with those customers in a way that makes money.

As I keep saying to everybody on our team, this is all about the money, the businesses need to make money and we need to show how this technology and how storytelling will help them do that.

Drew Radford:

It's a clever name as it says so much about traceability. So how did you get involved in this area?

Jayne Gallagher:

We started 2015. The founders worked for the Seafood Cooperative Research Center where we looked after product to market development. In that role we managed a budget to help the seafood industry in this particular instance, access and grow markets.

And it is through that exposure that we first came across traceability, provenance, storytelling, all of the things that we are now talking about in regular conversations, eight years ago was still in that innovation research space.

When the CRC finished in 2015, we started a company and we've never looked back. Our first client, in fact was the pork industry, so coming out of seafood, we quickly realised that what we were doing was equally relevant to the other agriculture sectors, and food businesses generally.

Drew Radford:

Well, why was it relevant? What were you doing particularly with the CRC that was so important to the fishing industry in terms of traceability, and why is that transferrable?

Jayne Gallagher:

Well, I think over the years there's been increasing interest in traceability in particular because of the benefits it provides right through the supply chain. Firstly to the business so businesses can be more efficient in their use of resources, but also right through to the end user or customer.

Whether that market be in Australia or overseas, increasingly you can get so many benefits from traceability. You have to meet your regulatory requirements such as food safety, biosecurity, proving sustainability, getting efficiencies through the chain, as I said.

And importantly, and more recently, this is really coming into play, particularly since Covid, is it really adds steps to marketing and branding.

Particularly people who are consuming food, buying food, consuming food, they really, really want to know who produced the food, where it's come from, how it got to them. And even more recently, are they purchasing something that's doing good for the planet or at least not harming the planet?

There's all these messages and things that you can convey to consumers and your customers, using a really good traceability system. It's when you combine your provenance story around that, around where the food has come from, who produced it, how, you've combined that with a really good traceability system and you can authenticate and prove your claims

I read something recently, around 90% of consumers in some food categories buy their product or choose the product they're going to purchase based on the claims that that product is making. But it goes beyond that, traceability and authenticity enables you to prove your claims, and I think that's why it's become so important.

Drew Radford:

It's such a big space. I look at it and I'll go, "Where do you start?" And indeed, you've just recently done some work with Agriculture Victoria in terms of trying to help solve that problem. I understand you did some work on developing a quick start guide for them and some decision trees, can you outline what they do?

Jayne Gallagher:

One of the areas that we are particularly interested in and where we work, we work at the coalface, we work with the businesses trying to do this stuff. We're not in the policy area, we're not in that research space.

We're really trying to help people run their businesses and market their products. What we found when we would start to have conversations about traceability and provenance, is that there was a lot of overwhelm out there. As you said, it's a big space and a lot has been written, and there's a lot of technology out there.

So knowing where to start and knowing what might suit your particular circumstance as a business can be really overwhelming.

And let's face it, if you're running a business, you want to make sure you're making money, and you're busy, so most people that we work with haven't got the time to go and look at all the options and try to make sense of it.

So we started several years ago actually, starting to work on, well, how can we make that decision-making process easier for people? How can we take them through a decision-making process so that it helps them make that decision, instead of feeling overwhelmed and not able to move, really?

A lot of people know that traceability could provide benefits to the business, but just don't know where to start. So we did some work for AgriFutures actually, in 2019. We developed a series of books and guides around provenance storytelling and authenticity technologies.

We then went on to build a short quiz-based thing called the Traceability Chooser. And then from there we've taken what we learned through that process to work with AgVic to create this quick start guide. We came up with it by talking to lots of people in industry.

This isn't just things we think need to happen, this is based on practical experience and helps people who are in business, to work through the process.

Drew Radford:

Jayne, you've given some great examples as to why producers should focus on traceability, and also pointed to some great resources about how people in the agricultural supply chain can get started in traceability. So what are some of the challenges producers need to be aware of when going down this path, and how do they avoid them?

Jayne Gallagher:

Yeah, that's a really, really good question. And of course the answer is, well, it depends. But more broadly speaking, the first thing that we talk to people about is don't start with the tech. Don't start thinking, "Oh, I've got to get some technology." Go before that and be really clear about what you want to achieve, and focus on one thing. It's very tempting when you read about this, and why people are feeling overwhelmed is they think they have to do everything.

So it could be one thing. It could be you just want to get better at your inventory control within your business. You just want to have the confidence that you could quickly do a recall. So choose one thing that you want to achieve as a business. That's the first bit.

And then once you understand that, then the rest of it is following things like you can get down into the detail about what you will trace, how you'll trace it, what data you might need, who might need the access to that data. But that's really about doing your homework. And again, a traceability system can be as simple as a pen and paper, you don't have to go the full technology.

But of course technology's improving all the time and the technology that helps you do things is good technology, but it is about fit for purpose.

So we encourage, when we're working with companies, is to help write the specifications, what your needs are, how does it all need to fit with your existing operations? What resources and skills do you have available? It's no good getting a really complex system if you don't have the skills to do it.

Things like can it be scaled as you grow? You might grow as a business, can the system that you are looking at, or the traceability system be scaled? Does it connect with your partners? Does it need to? And what training and backup support do you have?

If you've put all that together, you come up with your specs. Once you've figured out what you want as a business, then you go and look at, well, what's the kind of traceability system that would fit that spec?

A lot of people do it the other way around, they might see some traceability technology or systems and they think, "Oh, that's the one for me." But really you need to make sure that it operates within your operating environment.

For example, in a wet fish processing factory, will the technology work there? Do you sell bulk binned products or individually packaged products? Because different technologies work in different situations. So really understanding what you need will make all the difference as to whether a traceability system will deliver what you want it and need it to deliver. Like I said, you can build on it over time, you don't have to start with everything.

Drew Radford:

Jayne, you said that sometimes people see something and start from the technological end, and then worry about the other stuff. Is that like looking at your competitor and going, "Oh, they've got barcodes or they've got QR codes, I need to be doing that," rather than approaching it from a business plan?

Jayne Gallagher:

Absolutely. Don't start there. With all of our clients and people we work with, we start from the business end first. And we go with what's practical, so I was talking to a group of people the other day and we were talking about QR codes, but the question comes, "Well, where is the QR code going to be applied?

At what stage in the process will it be applied, and what will it be applied to? Will it be every bin? Will it be every fish? Will it be every apple? Where will that QR code or barcode, or whatever you decide to use, where will that fit into your system?" You'll notice there that I use QR codes, barcodes, it's all different kinds of technologies and different parts of the traceability system.

The traceability technology providers, really they love it. We work with the technology providers as well to help them understand the different business needs. They love it when a business comes along and says, "This is my process. This is how I need this to work. Can you help me make it work?" Sometimes they say, "No, this isn't a good fit for you."

And that's an important thing to learn as a business, is that the technology that your competitor might be using may not be the right one for you.

But you won't know that unless you start with your business, what you want, how much you can invest in it, how much time, resources, people, skills, versus the benefit? We talk about what's the benefit? We also, when we work with people, we say trial a little bit first.

Baby steps are really fine with this stuff and you can just do bit at a time, and when something works, you can add something on.

Drew Radford:

Jayne, what do you reckon is the difference between a good and a great traceability plan?

Jayne Gallagher:

Good one always starts with the business needs, and a great traceability plan is one that has a real business case that sits behind it, so you know how much you're investing, what your expected return on investment is.

And you set up some milestones along the way that tell you whether you're on track or whether you need to change, or make tweaks to your system. I think a great plan has that flexibility built in because you have to be able to learn as you go.

A lot of this stuff is still new, it's still untried in a lot of areas, or not built to the extent that it could be. So just being able to have that flexibility built in, I think is really important.

Drew Radford:

Jayne, I get the impression you really dig deep to understand the primary producers that you work with. Is incorporating their story also part of the difference between a good or a great traceability plan?

Jayne Gallagher:

My interest is absolutely with the producers and really helping them tell their story. I think this whole traceability plus a great provenance story just takes it to the next level. That's because the traceability technology now comes with all of this capability to tell your story and to prove your credentials.

But a lot of people we work with just really don't know how to tell their story, or how to say it in a way that engages with the customer, but when you get that right, it really starts to soar.

Drew Radford:

So a lot of what you do is actually storytelling, isn't it? Or help people tell their story, I should say?

Jayne Gallagher:

Help people tell the story, that's right. We keep saying, "No one knows their story better than they do," but it's interesting in the work that we do, when we're working with tech providers, they have this capability to tell the story. And when it comes to the business actually providing the photos and the story, the copy and all that, they're not ready.

They don't have it, so that's a lot of what we are doing. In fact, from the agribusiness work, we're turning that into a bit of an online course, again to help producers get ready for that. Because people are asking for it, and if you get asked for your story and you’d know this as a storyteller, if you get asked to tell your story and you go, "Um, um, uh..." Or they gush and talk about a lot of stuff, there's that line about understanding what the consumers and the customers want to know and telling it in a way that's engaging.

Drew Radford:

Jayne, you mentioned earlier that sometimes the technology people are looking for doesn't actually exist yet. Which then raises the point of what happens when the supply chain technology doesn't meet a producer's needs?

Jayne Gallagher:

That does happen, and sometimes you're not going to know that until you try it. That's why we suggest to everybody, start with something contains... You can't be good at something immediately. Nothing in life allows you to do that.

You have to give it a go and you have to see what works and what doesn't work. The important thing around that is that you do get started because this is a rapidly moving area and technology is getting better all the time. But as I keep saying to people, it's not just the technology, it's the people in the chain that need to work with this technology. It's that interface that really needs to work.

It goes without saying that if you are going down a technological route, that you make sure that whatever you do, communicates and dovetails in with someone further up the chain. Because if that interoperability or communication between systems isn't there, it'll break down. So knowing those things ahead of time, talking to the supply chain partners, what systems they use and how they use them, is also part of that fit for purpose discussion.

Drew Radford:

Jayne Gallagher, some great insights there and some really good pointers for organisations starting down this path. Jayne Gallagher, founder and CEO of Honey & Fox, thank you for taking the time and joining us for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Jayne Gallagher:

My pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family.

Any advice given during this episode is of a general nature. Listeners are advised to seek professional advice before implementing a traceability system in their business. This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to AgVic Talk, keeping you up to date with information from Agriculture Victoria.

Drew Radford:

Not so long ago, farmers grew produce and when it went past the farm gate, well, that was pretty much the end of the story for the farmer. That though is no longer the case. Consumers want to know where their food came from. Regulators and retailers want to know details about how it was grown, how it was transported, and so much more.

G'day, I'm Drew Radford and meeting those needs requires produce to have information attached to it. How though is that done in a way that is useful to everyone in the supply chain?

A person focused on this is Peter Carter, Director of Solutions and Innovation with GS1, an organisation that's focused on providing the how. Peter, welcome to this AgVic Talk podcast.

Peter Carter:

Well, thanks Drew. It's a pleasure to join today.

Drew Radford:

Peter, before we start drilling down into your role with GS1, I understand you are from a farming background though.

Peter Carter:

Well, originally, Drew, yes sir. Corrkwell New South Wales. Son of a potato growing family, certified seed potato. And I've had the good fortune of doing a few different roles. Currently with GS1, but previously with CSIRO and trained as an agricultural economist and have always been very interested in a supply chain and agricultural food systems.

Drew Radford:

It's quite a relevant background, isn't it? You start with dirt on your boots for one of a better description, and then all the way through the process. So you understand the importance of tracing where a product starts and where it goes.

Peter Carter:

That's right, Drew. I had the opportunity, particularly when I was with CSIRO to dive quite deep into supply chains and issues around authenticity of products, providence, but also all of the various claims that we often make about the great farming systems that we have in Australia, the clean green benefits that our environment provides and I believe it's a really important time for us to be able to make sure that those credentials are well represented to support farmers and processes and exporters, it's becoming a really critical factor to make sure that we've got access to the markets that we need.

Drew Radford:

Well we'll drill down into that a little bit further in a minute, but the organisation you are working for now, GS1, that's their core focus. So what is GS1?

Peter Carter:

GS1 is probably one of Australia's best kept secrets, Drew. The GS1 system of standards is about 50 years old. In fact, it came about really when Neil Armstrong was standing on the moon. That's how long ago it goes back. It's a system of identifying product globally to support trade, and it really came about after the Second World War when containerised movement of goods between countries grew dramatically and the Americans had a numbering system, the Europeans had a numbering system. Obviously that was never going to work.

So GS1 is a global non-for-profit technology agnostic, if you like, neutral provider of identification keys to make trade possible because it's very difficult if you've got the same thing with the same name. And in Australia, GS1 has got about 120 people that are very focused on supporting supply chains and throughout the world there's another 114 member organisations.

GS1's got a bigger footprint than the United Nations, but again, it's almost invisible. But that's perhaps changing at the moment given the very significant focus on supply chains.

Drew Radford:

It is a very significant focus and you said a moment ago about substantiating the claims that we make about Australian agriculture. I'm assuming you are getting at clean and green, but these are essentially numbers, barcodes to products that are proven to be clean and green and everything else in-between. So you can know it's provenance. Is that correct?

Peter Carter:

It's very simple. Yeah. The allocation of numbers helps business partners communicate, ordering goods or locating them on shelves or paddocks even. So that's one part of the puzzle is identifying the products, the things that we buy and sell. But GS1's also very active in supporting industry and government identified locations critical for traceability, but also assets and documents. So what you see when you walk into the supermarket and you see those little zebra stripes, those barcodes on products is the tip of the iceberg.

Underneath that is a very mature global language that industry uses to communicate. And when I say industry, I'm talking millions of global businesses and tens of thousands of Australian companies.

So it's not new at all. It's deeply embedded in our systems of commerce. And the primary production sector is just realising there's an enormous opportunity to tap into that, avoid reinventing new systems, but simply accelerating the pace that the business moves so that we can participate in some of the amazing opportunities that are coming our way.

Drew Radford:

You touched on that a moment ago in regards to accessing markets, and I'm assuming you're saying there, unless this is in place, then you're going to be locked out of markets and that's why agriculture's really starting to cotton onto this so much.

Peter Carter:

Yeah. Well, great example, cotton. We'll talk about that in a minute, but you're right on the money. In the last 12 months, we've seen the United States put in place new traceability rules that impact Australian producers and exporters.

We've seen the European Union introduce a thing called the digital product passport. In the last two weeks, Germany's introduced a supply chain Act. All of these changes are requiring producers and processors to declare more information about the products that they are presenting to market and the processes and how those products were produced. And Australia is in a remarkably strong position and cotton was just mentioned.

We are the world's most efficient users of chemical and water. Our genetics are advanced and evolving very rapidly to reduce the amount of nitrogen we need to pump into the soil.

Those stories are not really getting through in the way that the Australian industry need them to get through. So whilst you might hear lots of concerning messages about markets becoming harder to access, if we can get traceability well established and if we can communicate scientifically verifiable facts around the way we produce things, we're going to be in a very strong position. It's looking very positive actually.

Drew Radford:

Peter, you've painted the big picture really, really well there. So let's drill down to the farm gate and behind that. What advice would you give to someone in the agricultural supply chain that's not currently focusing on traceability?

Peter Carter:

Drew, traceability is interesting because it has a different meaning for certain people. For a primary producer, it might be seen as a bit of an impediment or a bit of regulation that they're having to navigate. Well, if you're a strawberry grower in Queensland and you'd been impacted by what happened with needles a few years back, 2018, or if you were impacted by say, listeria, the current practice is that industry is almost shut down when those incidents occur.

So from a farmer's perspective, the benefit of enhanced traceability might not be immediately apparent, but if you have been impacted by a biosecurity event, families have lost their farms and that has tragic implications. And again, the cost to society and hundreds of police officers involved in that particular incident.

So if you're a retailer, you might be looking at things in a different way. If you're government, you'll be looking at traceability to deliver different sorts of outcomes, maybe less complexity and regulation. And if you're a consumer like you or me, you're probably just wanting to make sure that our kids are being provided with food that is actually being produced in the way that it's claimed to be.

So being clear about what your goal is, is really important. I think that's one of the critical things and Victorian agriculture are doing some great job producing material to help producers make their way through this sort of traceability puzzle.

So the first thing is really be clear about what you're wanting to achieve. The other thing that's really important when it comes to traceability is that it's not just about what you do on your farm or in your factory. It's often about the things that you choose to do with your business partners.

There's no point you redefining the way you identify your products or even name your paddocks if it's of no relevance to someone else who you're working with.

So a traceability conversation inevitably involves parties that are working together, and I certainly encourage anyone we're working with to say, "Come together with your business partners, talk about the benefits that can be mutually derived by everyone working in a similar way and sharing traceability data." Here is where we're seeing some really significant steps forward where industry are saying, "We need to improve traceability in our processes in order to access the markets that we're targeting, but let's not invent the wheel. Let's take advantage of all of the standards that exist today, but let's put together a framework that makes sense for everyone in our supply chain."

So I suppose the biggest message is that it's not about what one individual party does. It's really a collective action for mutual benefit across that supply chain that makes a real difference.

Drew Radford:

You've mapped the reasons out very, very clearly and ask yourself what you should be trying to aim to achieve? Once you've done that though, where's the first practical step beyond that to start getting involved in the framework for one of a better description?

Peter Carter:

There's a huge amount of resources available online. I mentioned that Victorian agriculture, the hub that's recently been established, industry organisations are increasingly making available information to assist producers and processes navigate traceability.

I don't think you need to read very much to realise that the world is changing, particularly around customers wanting more information about the products you produce and how you produce them. So we're seeing lots of examples of say, QR codes on packets that link the primary producer to the end consumer, and that's a really powerful mechanism. That wasn't available up until quite recently.

It's not just providing the consumer with more information. It's also providing the producer with direct feedback. Were they satisfied with the product? Is there some way that they could improve it? And that's proving to be a real opportunity for farmers who are making such a significant commitment to produce the best possible product, but they're not always getting the feedback that they would like.

So I think taking some small steps and focusing on how simple, inexpensive, and not very complicated technologies can deliver some rapid benefits. Everyone's looking for that return on investment quickly, and we would strongly argue that it doesn't need to be a complicated technology if we start with some simple proven standards and take advantage of lessons that have been learned in other industries.

Very quickly we are seeing some significant benefit realisation, often in industries that have been traditionally very conservative and some might say slow moving.

Drew Radford:

Peter, it sounds like there's great resources out there and a lot of lessons to be learned from other industries as well. Are there common pitfalls that producers should be aware of to try and avoid?

Peter Carter:

Yeah, there are a few. There's been a huge focus on traceability the last five years and lots of experiments, lots of pilots, government have issued lots of grants. I think one of the things that we have learned is that it's very easy to be tantalised by technology.

Often the first thing that people think about is a new shiny silver bullet solution. And I think what we've learned is that exciting, certainly big opportunities with new technology, but if the underlying standards are not in place that are make that technology helpful or useful, then there's been a lot of disappointment.

So certainly trying to understand the language of supply chain, and that's where organisations like GS1 can help. And again, the traceability hub is the simple principles. What is it that your supply chain partners need? What it is that they already do? Freight forwarding messages as something that maybe primary producers aren't that familiar with unless they're at a larger scale.

What's the standard vocabulary that is used? And once you get an understanding of that language, which is very, very simple, is that all of a sudden you're in a much stronger position to make some strategic decisions around the choice of technologies, trying to avoid creating islands of data or choosing to do things your own way that might make sense, maybe in Victoria or Queensland, but perhaps not for the rest of Australia.

So wasn't that long ago, we had different size rail gauges between New South Wales and Victoria, and that came about because each state thought that they were doing things the right way. Well, ultimately there was a need to standardise things because the cost became an issue. And the same thing applies at an industry level and even at a farm level.

The last thing I'd probably say is navigating some of the new market access conditions does actually require businesses to act now. There is no doubt that rules are changing around the world. There's huge pressure which has seen the Northern Hemisphere summer, one of the hottest on record.

There are a very significant number of countries who are changing the way their trade and market regulations work to address issues around carbon emission and global warming and modern slavery. And again, I think Australia is in such a strong position, but we need to put the standards in place and then leverage those to be able to tell our story. A silver bullet solution won't get us across the line here. We need to be strategic and we need to be systematic.

Drew Radford:

Peter, what's coming for Australian agriculture in the traceability space?

Peter Carter:

Good question because there's a lot coming in the next 12 months, actually. It's been 50 years or so since those barcodes started to be used initially on a packet of chewing gum in America back in the 60s. Well, as a consequence, not just of COVID, but many other developments, we're seeing widespread use of what we refer to as 2D or data embedded codes.

You've all seen the QR codes. We're seeing a very significant shift away from the traditional barcodes towards these 2D codes. And this is important because those codes provide a jump point or a link to much more information than we've been able to provide in the past.

Think if you're a dairy producer and you've traditionally provided milk to a processor and a retail outlet, it's got a use by date or best before etc. How much product are we currently wasting because it's used after the date shown on the... How many of the retailers are restocking and presenting product so that they're optimizing, so that customers like you and I, when we go into the shops, we're not disappointed? So these 2D codes are carrying much more information that's useful for not just retailers, but for consumers.

This also includes links to credentials and stories about those products. So one of the biggest things that's happening the moment is the migration from 1D to 2D codes. You'll all see it and that has huge benefits because it allows consumers to link back to producers and for producers to be able to provide more information to consumers. That's one of the most significant changes we'll see in the market in the next few years.

Drew Radford:

Peter, that begs the question for me, who creates these codes? Is that kind of the role of GS1 and the databases associated with it? It seems like a vast amount of information held in many different locations.

Peter Carter:

Yeah, it's one of those mysteries, isn't it? GS1 doesn't own any of these codes. As I mentioned earlier, it's a non-for-profit business. It's actually directed by industry. So our board is made up of industry representatives and GS1 doesn't do anything that industry doesn't require it to do in that regard. So the issuance of keys is a primary role for GS1. So big part of my organisation responds to requests from businesses that have got a new product going to market, or even identifying their carton of apples or in some cases even individual items of fruit. That's a big part of what we do.

GS1 as a standards body, it's a little different to other standards bodies, work as part of the ISO, the International Standards Framework, but also with Australian national standards bodies. And one of the things that makes GS1 slightly different is that in addition to developing and publishing and making available the standards, GS1 also assists its members implement those standards.

So if you've got a product that you want to get into a retail supply chain, is there are national databases of products that allow you to publish that information that retailers can then access? And that's really important because once you have those databases, then all of a sudden product recall can be managed much more effectively.

So GS1's primary business is issuing and maintenance of those keys, those numbers that are used throughout supply chains globally. And then industry will build capabilities around those services. Some of those might be delivered directly by GS1 on behalf of its members.

And in other cases, solution providers will develop systems to support particular industries or solve particular problems. It's a vast network, Drew, and for anyone who's interested in more information, there is a colossal amount of webpages out there to support any of the questions you might have, but we're always happy to help. That's what GS1's here to do.

Drew Radford:

Peter Carter, it's a very big and important space, you and the GS1 team working. Thank you for taking the time and joining us for this AgVic Talk podcast.

Peter Carter:

My pleasure, Drew. Thank you very much.

Speaker 4:

Thank you for listening to AgVic Talk. For more episodes in this series, find us and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear your feedback. So please leave a comment or rating and share this series with your friends and family.

All information is accurate at the time of release. Contact Agriculture Victoria or your consultant before making any changes on farm. This podcast was developed by Agriculture Victoria, authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.