Spring
is in full swing, and so are we. Our team has been hard at work,
focused on launching our new marketplace application and finalizing
global partnerships with agricultural producers, retail buyers, consumer
packaged goods brand buyers, and NGOs. Our vision is to successfully
implement 100 use cases with active producer groups this year,
representing hundreds of thousands of farmers.
Our team is making serious progress, and we want to keep you in the loop. We’re especially excited about these key updates:
We're actively onboarding producers.
In April we launched our automated onboarding protocol and back-end database system to achieve our goal of bringing on 100 producer groups by the end of 2019, and 1,000 groups by the end of 2020. The
first 15 producer groups in the onboarding process come from diverse
geographic regions including Colombia, Philippines, Togo, Brazil,
Panama, United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Lebanon, Turkey, Indonesia,
Lebanon, Egypt, and Palestine. We anticipate a strong onboarding wave
coming soon from India, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Rwanda, and other
countries.
Bringing traceability to agriculture.
We have formalized a memorandum of understanding with IBM’s Food Trust to become a leader in bringing blockchain traceability to the agricultural value chain. We are actively working on use cases to apply the Food Trust traceability technology to some of our existing programs. We will continue to keep you updated once we have permission to publicly share details.
Marketplace app getting ready to launch.
In April we brought on two more software developers, expanding our engineering department to get closer to our goal of launching the Producers Market web and desktop marketplace app. Stay tuned for announcements about our launch date.
Our network is growing.
Co-founder and CEO Keith Agoada recently completed a business development and finance trip to Asia during April 2019. He visited Singapore to meet with coconut partner Franklin Baker
and potential global banking partners and investors; Indonesia to meet
with large sustainable palm oil producers and investors; and China to
strategize partnerships and sourcing as well as to meet with our
strategic partner Whelfy and our new ecosystem investment and finance partner SDG Global Group.
Producers Market on the ground.
Producers Market recently exhibited at the Seeds & Chips Global Food Innovation Summit in Milan on May 6-9, where
Keith gave a presentation on supply chain innovation to a packed
audience, and had a one-on-one meeting with former President of Nigeria
Olusegun Obasanjo to discuss agricultural development strategies in
Nigeria and Africa. The team met with leading tech companies, NGOs,
producers, and buyers in high level partnership and collaboration
discussions.
Wendy Diamond, our Chief Inspiration Officer, was a featured speaker at the Silicon Valley AgTech Conference on May 13th. Keith and advisor Zachery Ty Bryan were keynote speakers at the Moving Forward conference in Manhattan May 30th.
Thank you for being part of this process. We would not be so close to realizing our vision without the support of our contributors, mentors, and investors. We welcome any feedback, comments, or questions you might have at this point in our journey.
