Food is a global issue. Once upon a not very long time ago, food was largely regional. If the weather was favorable in your area, you and others grew plenty of food for your family and for the surrounding area. If it rained too little or too much, you were probably looking at a pretty rough winter. The next region over though was largely unaffected. Or if you wanted strawberries in March, you were probably just going to have to wait a couple of months until they were in season again. Now, you can get pretty much any food you want any time you want it. Basically, strawberries are in season somewhere and the food supply chain is robust enough to get them from there to your corner grocery store. Corn grown in Iowa goes all over the world, same with rice in China. Your last Big Mac might have come from a cow raised in Brazil. In a lot of ways, this is a great thing. Despite there being many more people on the planet than there were when food was local, more of them are fed.
However, it also comes with a couple of downsides, the biggest of which being that the food supply chain is vulnerable. Now, if the weather or something else disrupts the crops in one area, it doesn’t just affect that area, the whole world can quickly find itself short on corn, meaning many go hungry and the prices for everyone else get higher.
For a year now, COVID and the response to it has put unprecedented strain on our food supply, leading to issues from the local small town to far off villages. The response to COVID led to the shutdown of course of pretty much every restaurant in the country, except for takeout, led to the total disruption of the supply chain. Since people weren’t going out to eat as much, they turned to the grocery stores, which put so much strain on them that even Costco and Sam’s Club had limits on how much of certain items could be purchased, if they were there at all. It’s not that there wasn’t food, it’s that there are multiple food supply chains and it proved impossible to redirect the resources from the restaurant supply chain to the grocery stores. As a result, literally tons of food were wasted. Fortunately the system adjusted in a couple months and most people were only inconvenienced (that’s to say nothing of the unemployed who were relying on food pantries, but that’s a separate issue). Yet, the situation did a lot to show that something as important as our food supply chain is a lot more fragile than most would have thought.
Climate issues raised fears of further disruption just months later when a massive storm ripped through the plain states, destroying millions of wheat crops. Again, we seem to have gotten lucky with how the system has managed to respond and other than a price increase due to lower supply things seem to have remained stable. However, should we be faced with these things happening at the same time, we could be in real trouble. Imagine a pandemic as bad as we feared COVID would be, at the same time as a hurricane that decimates a couple important ports while a drought destroys crops out west. Does that sound far-fetched? Then you haven’t paid much attention last year. Any one of those types of events is happening somewhere in the world at any given point. All it would take is a flap of the butterfly’s wings to get them to line up a little differently.
How to weather such a series of unfortunate events? Right now, we can’t really say. Which is exactly why we need to come together and use our data and other resources to better understand the world we are living in. Only then can we hope to be prepared to handle major disruptions to the things we take for granted. It’s a simple choice, use our data to save and build a better world, or don’t use it, and hope we get lucky again.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
TARTLE may be a young company but it already stretches around the world with users in many countries. One of the many countries you can find us in is the Philippines. So it’s time we gave a little shout out to the amazing people of that small nation and their culture.
If you aren’t familiar with this little country, it’s a collection of islands in the Pacific, far off the eastern coast of Asia. It was ravaged by WWII and is covered in jungle with a volcano or two thrown in just to make things exciting.
The culture there is an interesting one. On one hand, there are tent and shanty cities built right next to railroad tracks. On the other, everyone there has a smartphone and is constantly sending texts or scrolling Facebook. It’s a deeply religious and developing culture with one foot in the past and the other in the future. As such, it’s kept many of its older qualities like a strong and cheerful work ethic and generosity while showing a significant aptitude for learning new technologies to keep them connected across the islands and with friends and family who move to the USA.
One of those people who made the journey across the deep blue sea is married to one of the people who work for us here at TARTLE. Alex (our co-founder for those just tuning in) went over there for dinner and was talking with everyone when he realized the wife was missing. Well, it turns out she was in the kitchen working on dinner, even after working all day. When it was time to eat, a veritable feast was laid out with mountains upon mountains of food. And yes, this is normal for them. It’s one of the admirable things about Filipino culture, the work never stops. Men and women are both constantly in motion, accomplishing something that needs to be done, yet few ever complain about it. That’s because they do it all out of a sense of service, a desire to care for others that leads them to really put themselves into their work.
It’s exactly these kinds of people that TARTLE is striving to bring into the fold. Anyone who puts that kind of spirit and effort into just normal, daily life deserves to be rewarded for it. That’s true of their data use as well. When they are spending time on their phones, checking out the news, shopping or keeping up with people via Facebook, they are just generating profit for that company. The people of the Philippines deserve a little something back for that. After all, when you’re working on getting out of the tent by the railroad tracks and into something a little nicer, every little bit counts. By working through us, they have the chance to take that data they are generating and turn into a good subsidy for their lives and use it however they want. Though if Alex’s recent dinner is any indication, it just might go into helping make another mountain of food, which is no bad thing either.
TARTLE welcomes everyone, wherever you are from to sign up with us. We want to help you, whether you are driving a cab in Moscow, roaming the desert in Libya, working in a cubicle in Des Moines, Iowa, or running a fishing boat in the Philippines to take control of your data. Whether you just want to be able to generate some extra income by selling your data or share your data to specifically help causes you care about, TARTLE is there to make it all possible.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
Plenty of industries have benefited from utilizing data. New processes have been discovered, new products developed, and tons of customer feedback has been collected helping to make businesses more efficient, more profitable, and better able to serve their clients at the same time. It’s nothing short of astonishing what some people have managed to do by tracking seemingly innocuous statistics and turning that into valuable information.
The poster child for this has been the food delivery industry. Once a niche market confined to the big cities, or those servicing people with special needs, food delivery has exploded in the last year. Of course, much of that sudden expansion has been in response to COVID, yet the industry had already been growing and gaining traction before anyone paid attention to the term coronavirus.
The use of big data to improve service in the food delivery world certainly hasn’t been limited to the United States either. That’s one of the great things about the digital revolution, it has made possible the democratization of data and technology in ways that couldn’t have been possible before. That is why we can look at advances made by Food Panda, a food delivery company as far away as Malaysia and the efficiencies they’ve found. They’ve started analyzing, in detail, location and traffic information in real time to allow their drivers to perform better. Not only does this lead to less stress on the part of the drivers trying to make an impossible deadline, but it also makes it possible to give better delivery estimates to their customers. Instead of a generic ‘within the hour’ estimate, they can say with confidence that the delivery will be there in thirty to forty minutes. Their drivers get to their destinations faster, the customers are happier and more of them can be serviced. In fact, each driver is now making as many as three deliveries an hour.
Big data and the digital revolution are driving innovations in other ways as well. Ever heard of a cloud kitchen? This is a recent development in which food is prepared in a kitchen that only serves delivery companies. There will be four or five of these companies that all use one kitchen, delivering fresh food to their customers. There is a good chance this could be the restaurant of the future, at least in crowded areas where space is at a premium.
Sometimes, big data can even help the other way as well. You can actually track UPS drivers through their app and see where they are. If you happen to be in a hard-to-find gated community, you can see where he’s driving around and go meet him at the entrance, saving you both time and hassle. You get what you need faster and he gets to move on to the next delivery. This is especially useful if they are bringing a Blue Apron delivery that you need for dinner that night.
Speaking of UPS, one of the recent data-driven tweaks they made to their process might seem a little counterintuitive. After a thorough analysis of the data, they decided their drivers should only make right hand turns. Why? It turns out that is the most efficient process. The drivers then almost never have to wait on a red light or wait for traffic to clear before making a left turn. Yes, it might take two more turns to get where they are going, but there is less chance they ever have to stop.
Getting back to restaurants, some have used their data analytics to help minimize food waste. Food waste is sadly a thing that happens at restaurants every day. So much gets thrown in the dumpster outback. Some businesses don’t even allow it to be taken home by employees at the end of the day, out of fears that it would encourage people to make ‘extra’ on purpose. Some governments prevent giving it away to the homeless, presumably out of a misguided health concern. In either case, it is in the restaurant’s interest to minimize how much food gets thrown out. Big data has helped them with that in a big way, saving them money and likely keeping food prices down as well.
No doubt data will continue to be a major driver in the food industry, helping to make it more profitable and efficient to better serve its customers. As these companies drill deeper into the data, they’ll find themselves going to you, to the source. TARTLE is driving that movement now, making connections between individuals and companies so that in sharing that source data, everyone’s life can be made just a bit better.
What’s your data worth?
It’s no surprise that we are TARTLE are big on data and using it to improve lives all over the world. By collecting and analyzing quality first party data processes can be refined and better decisions made.
One famous example of this is Domino’s Pizza. Years ago, the Michigan-based pizza giant was on the ropes. Once the leading name in pizza delivery, they were losing market share to others and getting bad reviews on their pizza and their delivery times. They went from the king of the mountain to sliding fast towards the valley.
What did they do? They realized they had to take a hard look at all of their processes and possibly make some very hard choices. To do this, they developed their pizza tracker program, tracking the whole process for each pizza from order to delivery. Looking at the data gained from that software, Dominos identified a number of inefficiencies, inefficiencies that they had to fix to get back on top. Altering their mentality to treat the pizza making process like a manufacturing process, the company completely revamped its business. The process was more efficient and they were able to deliver better, fresher pizzas faster than ever before. As a result, Domino’s is once again climbing the mountain and rebuilding its reputation.
That success story unfortunately isn’t every story. The other side of the coin is represented by an incident featuring America’s biggest big box store, Wal-Mart. Sam Walton’s company has been big on using data to optimize its profits for years. Because of this, they noticed that Vlassic pickles were selling remarkably well. What’s more, they figured that they would sell even better if they could get them down to a lower price point.
They contacted Vlassic to ask if it was possible and after the supplier crunched all their numbers based on their down data, they got close enough to make the bean counters at Wal-Mart happy and the order was placed. Everyone wins and we have another success story about the power of data analytics, right? Wrong. Instead of a raging success, this seemingly smart move was a disaster. Pickles indeed flew off the shelves, until they weren’t on the shelves anymore. What happened? The farmers that grow the cucumbers in the first place simply couldn’t keep up with the demand that was getting placed on them. With no pickles to put on the shelves the orders were cancelled or significantly reduced. That compounded problems for the farmers, especially those who would have bought new equipment and altered their own processes in order to meet the sudden increase in demand. Then all of a sudden that demand fell through the floor again, meaning that the farmers wouldn’t be able to recoup all those costs.
So what went wrong? Why did a reliance on data and the in depth analysis of it lead to success for one company and a major loss for another? It was a difference in approach. Domino’s didn’t just go over their procedures or have a couple teams demonstrate their process for the board. They went into many of their stores, working with the employees and analyzing how their pizzas were made. They also paid attention to their customers so they knew what it was they had to focus on improving. In short, they listened to everyone that mattered most in the process and worked with them to find the best possible solutions to everyone’s concerns.
Wal-Mart seemingly did the same thing. They knew what their customers wanted, knew they would be even happier with a lower price and worked with Vlassic to order more pickles at a lower price. But they forgot to talk to the real suppliers, the farmers that are pulling the product out of the ground in the first place. Granted, this need not always be a concern. A single store isn’t going to strain the system. However, given the number of stores Wal-Mart has and the volume of product they move, talking to the farmers is a necessary step.
What these two examples demonstrate is the necessity of remembering that even the most scientific data analysis has to be about people first and foremost. Keeping that in mind means you not only achieve financial success for yourself, you will improve the lives of others in the process. Forget that and you will do harm you never intended.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
