Ambrosia

The food system faces many challenges, particularly in the food supply chain system and challenges to diversifying the over-reliance on large-scale monoculture farming - a few agricultural giants focus on an increasingly selective number of crops for breeding. Food innovators who seek to broaden our crop ecosystem struggle to discover and source a reliable stream of specialty ingredients. Our product democratizes this process for innovators by providing access to an online food supplier marketplace that source, tracks, and verifies the quality of specialty ingredients from small to midsize farmers around the world. Procurement teams can easily search for new ingredients and track the distribution from seed to store. Our enterprise platform replaces the traditional pen and paper methods while facilitating critical sourcing workflows that support multi-stakeholder collaboration.

We are tackling two key issues that have ramifications across the agricultural industry: the risks of monoculture farming, and supply chain traceability. Currently 75% of the world's food comes from only 4 major crops, which is a huge food risk in concentration. Without the infrastructure in place to encourage and facilitate crop diversification, particularly the small-scale producers who take on the risk of specialty farming, the world is overly reliant on crops that are at risk to outside forces such as climate change and disease. We see long term trends in consumer behaviors encouraging diversification evidenced by the demand for natural foods such as superfoods and ancient grains; specialty food represent 16% of retailing and is growing rapidly. Additionally, one-third of the food produced globally is wasted or lost in the food supply chain process (2019 World Economic Forum's Traceability in Food). Improving traceability has the potential to have 1-4% impact in reduce food loss. By focusing on improving transparency in the supply chain process and focusing on diversification of dietary consumption habits, we can improve food loss, agricultural sustainability, and help the economic plight faced by many small-scale farmers around the round. 

Our platform operates as a searchable supplier database that is constantly updated by many stakeholders, such as procurement teams, suppliers, and producers, to ensure the ingredient information is real-time and up to date. Food procurement can input their supplier sources to track the movement ingredients at different touchpoints in the supply chain. Suppliers and producers also benefit by uploading available ingredient supplies and sharing tracking information with their buyers. Using machine learning, our platform can stitch together a streamline picture of every ingredient and their stops along the supply chain journey, tracking changes and participants to create a holistic view of the ingredient's journey from farmer to the food manufacturing site. 

Food innovators such as consumer goods buyers and procurement teams save time and money by quickly sourcing the ingredients they need. They can compare pricing, distance, and availability among other key variables important to food purchasing decisions. Additionally, producers who provide product benefit by seeing more exposure of their product to more interested parties, and can negotiate better fees with less hidden middle men taking a cut of the costs. Particularly for disenfranchised small scale farmers, these boost to their incomes can dramatically alter their livelihoods and ability to scale agricultural operations.

By 2050, the world population is estimated to increase to 10 billion people who need access to food resources that currently do not exist. Over-reliance on large scale farming of a few crops and the current food supply chain puts the future of our world's food security at risk. These current agricultural infrastructures are not scalable for the demands of the future and can be transformed through a technological lens that benefits our agricultural workforce. Our enterprise platform is not only a marketplace but also are tools that give agricultural providers an advantage in reducing food waste and improving incomes.

Current solutions to sourcing are heavily focused on long-term established buyer-supplier relationships. This shuts out any potential innovators who do not have access to those relationships. Furthermore, the supply chain process is still very much pen-and-paper tracking or basic excel spreadsheets that do not enable complex search and tracking capabilities that a platform that is complete with maps, supporting workflows, and machine learning insights. We believe that innovation is not tied to any one advantage but a series of multiple, small innovations both in technology, user experience, and business models that make our solution truly innovative.

We focus on utilizing a mix of private blockchain technology for immutability in tracking goods, and machine learning for mapping previously invisible relationships together in a clear picture for our users. At the producer level, improvements to 5G will enable real-time tracking and the dissemination of internet and mobile phone usage enable even small-scale producers to participate. 

Links

Deloitte: Beefing Up Blockchain, How Blockchain can Transform the Irish Beef Supply Chain

Digital Technologies in Agriculture and Rural Areas

By providing a transparent marketplace with tools to support sourcing workflows, we believe that we can save time and costs for the buyer and producer, all while improving reliability on a trackable supply chain system. Time and cost-savings are passed onto the producers who can focus their efforts on investing their agricultural operation. Buyers know they can rely on the quality of the product, reducing the risks food fraud, which costs the industry between 30 and 40 billion dollars per year. The increased reliability on a supply chain can reduce the food loss by up to four percent, or hundreds of millions of tons of food per year. 

We are currently in pilot mode but hope to expand to at least a dozen food production customers in the next year, each whom serve millions of consumers across the United States. In five years we hope to be serving the entire United States.

Within the next year we hope to be the reliable management and first-ever search system for new food ingredients trusted by producers and food production innovators across the United States. Within five years we hope to become the world's marketplace for food sourcing and the trusted source for transparent food supply chain traceability. 

Currently food supply moves through many legal barriers at different ports and countries. Furthermore, food buyers and food producers are often beholden to different legal and cultural entities that restrict the import and export of goods. This is a challenge to properly source, predict, and track food through the supply chain. 

We look to initially engage with suppliers with field knowledge and intimate understanding of the nuances moving goods internationally. By developing features that support those key workflows we hope to find solution and patterns addressable to a broader customer base. 

We are a team of Harvard and MIT-educated founders with a passion for designing thoughtful user experiences. Having met in graduate school at the Art Center College of Design, the founders have a design toolkit that outlines clear processes for innovation and intuitive experiences that benefit a food industry that has traditionally had poor user experiences. Tom's background in finance and design allows him to view the agricultural markets at both a global and granular scale, while Jeff's experience designing supply chain solutions for the slow-moving construction industry has provided insights applicable to the food industry. 

We have not partnered with any organizations at this time.

Food production customers pay a per-user license to join the platform, while producers are encouraged to join the platform for free. Our platform also takes a percentage of contract revenue when buyer and supplier orders are facilitated. Over time we also aim to add premium features that would bring in additional revenue streams.  

Designers Fund — we look for support from funds that value exceptionally designed user experiences.

Good Food Institute — hope to partner with the non-profit that is laser-focused on using markets and food technology to transform our food system