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LEADING THE CHARGE

We’ve also got new channels evolving that are putting pressures on existing channels. Australian household food purchases have been dominated through conventional retail for the past 50 or 60 years. That’s now under a lot of pressure. We’re eating out of home much more, probably a 25% increase in the last seven to eight years. That’s substantial. And there are other channels growing, like meal kits and home deliveries, which are soaking up the growth that used to make 800 or 900 supermarkets an easy thing to do. It’s not easy anymore. And a lot of that pressure is flowing further back up the chain. How does technology such as IoT affect the food supply chain? Although there is a continual need for better collaboration between technology providers in adding value along the supply chain. The connectivity of IoT allows anyone in the supply chain to communicate for the avocado grower to easily communicate the credibility of their provenance story. Now they can. Extend that into the export markets of Southeast Asia and China and it’s probably worth 10 times what it is locally. with anyone else. Ten years ago, it simply wasn’t possible

When you get consumed in areas such as innovation, you can miss the fact that you’ve left the door open somewhere and someone can replicate what you’re doing. Not underestimating the value of understanding your market is key. Quantifying the size of the prize for a new innovative venture is a highly attractive piece of information to bring to discussion about raising capital.

What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs on how to protect their products? There are so many things an entrepreneur needs to be on top of – business planning, innovating, providing a consistently quality service/product and maintaining a competitive advantage. It’s difficult to be good at all those things at once and I think that some of those things are best championed by an external view.

service delivery through ‘Freshlogic Analytics’. Businesses can get a tailored view of a fuller set of market information which includes access to Tableau software analysis engine to generate category specific insights and 24-7 system access giving them flexible and timely market insights. What are some of the major trends happening that will shape or change the food supply chain? Today, consumers are far more discerning on value, to the point where they simply won’t return if they’re disappointed. There’s also a desire to be more across the whole picture, for example, understanding where a food item comes from and how it’s produced. This opens an opportunity for accurate, meaningful and well told stories around provenance as a valuable marketing investment. The other thing that’s clear is consumers are in a hurry, they’re not planning ahead, and they’re paying for convenience. If you look back over the last 10 years, once various levels of convenience have found their way into the delivery of food they rarely get traded off. They stay, and they get paid for. Smaller portions are willingly paid for at substantial premiums because they’re easy and they suit the frequency of shopping that they’re doing, which is around four times a week for an average household.

How did Freshlogic come to be? We started with a focus on fresh food and how it’s distributed. This stemmed from experience working in food retail where I realised how difficult it is to get meaningful information in fresh food supply chains. Over a period of 12 years, we have built tools to inform us and allow us to map what’s happening in fresh food supply chains. People now come to us wanting to know where the value is added, where it can be captured, what the demand signals are, and the best distribution channels. How would producers and businesses use your service? One of the things we do is size markets and delve into the detail of a category. For example, the retail fruit and vegetable market in Australia is about $14 billion. Tomatoes are substantial $1.1 billion category of within that market. But nearly $450 million of that is smaller, snacking tomatoes. That’s a product that didn’t exist 15 years ago, has been managed well and has been effectively grown to a larger scale by capturing a substantial convenience premium. People who invested to understand the category, were guided on where to invest, and added and captured substantial value. That’s a good example of the sort of thing that we’re proud to be able to support. We’ve improved our

MARTIN KNEEBONE Managing Director, Freshlogic

Martin Kneebone brings a detailed understanding of fresh food markets as a result of experience in research, analytics and interpretation of all parts of the food supply chain. His company Freshlogic is a Melbourne based specialist provider of market insights to stakeholders involved in fresh food production and marketing across Australia and SE Asia. Freshlogic’s ability is enabled by a set of unique research and analysis capacities designed expressly to provide commercial insight into fresh food markets.

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