Is the Food Supply Chain Really Breaking?

For example, keeping fresh food refrigerated during transport isn’t cheap. Even if refrigerated trucks were inexpensive, the shortage of long-haul truckers drives up transportation costs, while also increasing the risk that products spend so much time in storage or transit that they lose their freshness.

Customers don’t care about their supplier problems; they just want the products to arrive on time to satisfy their customers. Late or incomplete deliveries are a big problem, with the U.S. food industry losing $15 to $20 billion in sales annually due to out-of-stock or unsellable products.

For this reason, retailers require food producers to hit their “must arrive by” dates or incur a fee. Less-than-truckload shipping can help smaller producers hit these delivery deadlines, but the fact that their products are loaded and unloaded more frequently, and that they’re transported along with non-food items, leads to more breakage and contamination. This creates a vicious cycle.

These are only a few of the transportation challenges smaller food businesses face. Larger and international businesses have challenges of their own, such as port congestion, that can delay deliveries.

Strengthening the Fragile Food Supply Chain

What do all of these issues—complexity, shipping and storage problems, and increasing costs—have in common? They can all be solved with more transparency among partners in the food supply chain.

We have the data that can help us streamline the entire food supply chain. Now, we need to implement the data-sharing, communication, and forecasting technologies that other industries have been using for years.

The food supply isn’t at the breaking point yet. Let’s put the tech in place to ensure it won’t get there.

Traasdahl is the founder and CEO of Crisp.