Want to know where and how your avocado was grown? Brisbane tech company Fresh Supply Co is creating digital food identities on a global network it’s calling ‘the internet of food’. Stuart Ridley writes.
Word-of-mouth can be a blessing and a curse for anyone in the food business. Sure, it’s fantastic to see customers enthusiastically promote your products in their social networks (eye-to-eye in the case of photos on Instagram), negative views can spread peer-to-peer like wildfire.
And every claim you make about doing ‘the right thing’ is open to judgment in the messy court of public opinion.
So, what can you do about it? Give your consumers – and their social connections – something positive to talk about, suggest David Inderias, CEO of digital food identity business Fresh Supply Co (FSC), which launched in November 2017.
“Frankly, most of the digital experience of food sucks,” he says. “As consumers we want connectedness between our physical and digital experiences but when it comes to food there’s often no payback with things like QR codes on a piece of fruit.”
Too often food companies simply point to a website from a tiny call-to-action on the food label and then expect customers to dig for answers, warns Inderias.
Worse, the label only displays the brand name. Or there isn’t a label.
Digital food identity
Just because a product isn’t sold in a box with bold type calls-to-action doesn’t mean the label can’t trigger a customer-centric digital experience, he explains.
Fresh Supply Co helps food producers across Australia and Asia make the most of even the smallest labels to trigger a meaningful mobile content experience. Actually, that’s the easy part.
“You’ve got a consumer already interested in a specific product: they’ve actually picked it up,” he says. “Now they’ve engaged they want their curiosity satisfied. It’s like, if I walk into a car dealership and say ‘Tell me about the Mustang’, I don’t want to hear ‘Go to our website’.”
Yes of course people want to ‘see under the hood’, he adds. Consumers often expect digital content that helps them discover interesting ways to enjoy a product. And they certainly relish recipe ideas from food brands, though recipes are just the baseline now, suggests Indieras.