We helped an agricultural startup in Southern Africa to build trust with their consumers by designing and building QR-code linked product pages to showcase their seed’s origins, quality control, impact, and sustainability.
Consumers are demanding more visibility into the products they buy. In few places is this more salient than the vast seed industry in Southern Africa. This industry is critical to the region’s economy and food security, and it is both highly contested, with many well established brands, and highly distrusted, with huge volumes of counterfeit seed.
Quality control within the industry is extremely difficult, with opaque processing and supply chains - along with policies undermined by corruption and political patronage - making it hard for the everyday consumer (typically a smallholder farmer) to assess if what they are buying is really the genuine, high quality product they need to support their livelihoods.
The challenge
This context presented an opportunity for a forward thinking seed company in the region to build consumer loyalty and trust. Good Nature Agro, based in Zambia and operating throughout the region, sought to create supply chain transparency by displaying authenticatable, quality control proof points for their products. In addition to providing product traceability, GNA sought to provide their consumers with easily accessible resources to learn more about where their seed comes from and what impact their purchase has.
We worked directly with GNA to iteratively design and develop a comprehensive farm-to-consumer traceability solution, with unique product pages for each bag of seed they produced accessible via QR codes and RFID tags on the packaging.
These product pages provide the consumer with insight into every bag of seed’s journey from farm to consumer, with each activity and quality control check recorded though an authenticatable or certifiable step.
The solution
Visual display of traceability and quality control data points
Product pages are designed to visualise the product journey from a specific farm to the end consumer, highlighting logistical, processing and quality control steps along the way.
Visibility into social and environmental impact
Each product page provides certifiable social and environmental impact metrics to the consumer to help them make more informed purchasing choices.
Core features
Individualised QR produced pages for each bag
Our solution uses unique QR codes for every bag, leveraging URL parameters to generate individualised product pages and ensure that the product information provided to users is specific to a given bag.
Visual display of traceability and quality control data points
Product pages are designed to visualise the product journey from a specific farm to the end consumer, highlighting logistical, processing and quality control steps along the way.
Visibility into social and environmental impact
Each product page provides certifiable social and environmental impact metrics to the consumer to help them make more informed purchasing choices.
Our approach
This solution was built on top of a traceability module developed by Hello Robin for Good Nature Agro. It also leveraged data from inventory, field and logistical management solutions. We designed the required APIs to pull relevant data from this integrated ecosystem.
We considered two approaches for the product page (front end). The first was to use react.js (a traditional approach for web development using Javascript). The second was to use the lowcode tool Bubble.io. We chose to use Bubble as it would cut front end development time and cost down by a full 75%, with no difference in performance. The use of this more flexible tool enabled us to rapidly change and iterate on the product as we analysed consumer feedback.
Individualised QR produced pages for each bag
Our solution uses unique QR codes for every bag, leveraging URL parameters to generate individualised product pages and ensure that the product information provided to users is specific to a given bag.
