The Biggest Challenge to the Food Supply Chain: Not COVID-19, but Digital Transformation

The biggest challenge to the food supply chain is not COVID-19, but digital transformation

Food security, vital to human survival, becomes our focus at least on World Food Day (October 16). The outbreak and spread of COVID-19 brought unprecedented tests to our lives. Yet during this period, our food shelves have remained well-stocked - an example of the extraordinary effectiveness and durability of the global food supply chain. As the population grows to nearly 8 billion, global demand for food supply has nearly tripled since 1970. However, over the same period, the proportion of hungry people dropped from 36% to 11%, food exports grew sixfold over the past 30 years, and about 80% of the world''s population consumes food grown and produced in other countries. In fact, the value of the food supply chain is equivalent to 10% of today''s world GDP.

As winter approaches, the "COVID shock" we face directly is making a comeback, but can we conclude that this is the biggest challenge encountered by food supply and the food supply chain?

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In fact, this is not the case, because a bigger challenge is emerging for the global food supply chain: digital transformation. The "COVID shock" will eventually end, but digital transformation is irreversible - this applies not only to the food supply chain but will also be borne out in the future in every aspect of our lives.

The digital transformation of the food supply chain is not just about applying advanced digital technologies to improve efficiency. Through these technologies, new digital cooperation opportunities are created between producers and buyers, while making food suppliers part of this cooperation opportunity, reducing friction and cost in the process, and improving efficiency, value, and choice.

This is a holistic transformation that seamlessly connects producers, suppliers, buyers, and consumers. It is a search for new ways to create higher value from food while improving the planet we depend on and protecting our scarcest resources. Most importantly, the digital transformation of the food supply chain means raising producers'' income levels, giving consumers more information, while improving food quality, lowering food prices, and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Achieving the digital transformation of the food supply chain also requires advanced technologies at every link of the food supply chain to work together, in order to uniformly provide suppliers and buyers with food supply chain traceability, blockchain functional verification solutions, logistics, and payment.

According to relevant research, by 2030, new digital connectivity infrastructure for food producers may bring up to USD 500 billion in additional value to GDP. In fact, advanced connectivity could bring USD 2 trillion to 3 trillion in additional value to global GDP over the next decade. So a key part of this digital transformation is building digital infrastructure to achieve advanced connectivity throughout the food supply chain. The current food supply chain still relies heavily on manual labor, negatively affecting not only producers and consumers but also food suppliers, who are caught in between, unable to respond to changing customer requirements and tastes, thereby threatening their own long-term survival.

At SINOQUAL, we do not produce grain or sell food, yet we are also an indispensable link in the Halal/Kosher food supply chain. For more than ten years in the business, we have provided many well-known enterprises with a strong guarantee for going international - Halal food certification certificates/Kosher food certification certificates. Household names such as COFCO, Jiusan Group, and Yihai Kerry have all chosen SINOQUAL as their long-term partner. Though this winter is cold, SINOQUAL is willing to become a beam of warm sunshine, guarding by your side!

Viruses do not recognize borders; they spread indiscriminately. Even if they can be confined to one actual location, their impact will ripple beyond national borders. The same is true of carbon dioxide. Food insecurity in one region may be the result of drought on the other side of the world, and food insecurity is in turn one of the main causes of geopolitical risk. The digital transformation of the food supply chain may be the most reliable way to address such a "butterfly effect", integrating still-scattered components and creating new cooperation opportunities. Against this backdrop, it is time for us to strengthen the connection between the two weakest components of the food ecosystem - producers and consumers - so as to increase food supply, improve food quality and food producers'' income, while reducing waste, lowering consumer prices and carbon dioxide emissions.