Traceability at Skånemejerier, Consumer Attitudes & Opportunities for Commercialization

Sammanfattning: Skånemejerier is a dairy cooperative in the region of Skåne in southern Sweden. It collects milk from roughly 500 farmers around the region on a daily basis. Skånemejerier has developed an IT system that allows end consumers to ‘trace’ their milk to a number of farms that each have contributed to the milk in a specific milk carton. There is a code on the top of Skånemejerier milk cartons which is used by the consumers to trace the product through the website or an iPhone application. This technology is currently patent pending and is a patent of a method. Its range of application includes any liquid food producer that aggregates incoming batches of a single liquid ingredient from different sources (e.g. farms) during the production process. Skånemejerier wants to generate more value from their traceability offering, and ultimately investigate the potential for it to be commercialized externally. As for now, traceability at Skånemejerier appears to be somewhat of a minor side project with no single person in charge of it. Skånemejerier has up to this point spent roughly 15,000 Euro on the development of the technology. There are three distinctive purposes of this report: 1. evaluate Skånemejerier’s current traceability offering, 2. identify key missing pieces to commercialize this novel technique, and 3. create ideas on how to earn profits from Skånemejerier’s liquid food tracing method To arrive at the conclusions of this report, several methods of addressing the distinctive purposes were used. Literature on the value to consumers of tracing food products is currently very scarce, although some insights are provided on how traceability and knowledge of origin affects consumer behavior and how this can be utilized by the marketer. While the value proposition of liquid food traceability remains unknown, there are a multitude of opportunities for Skånemejerier to improve its traceability offering and test traceability’s value proposition internally before trying to commercialize it externally. We strongly believe that traceability could open up new revenue streams and this report presents several potential ways to capture those revenue streams. There are wide variety of incremental improvement opportunities as well as opportunities to make radical improvements available to Skånemejerier. Currently, traceability at Skånemejerier is underdeveloped, poorly executed and not communicated clearly to customers. The full value of traceability will not be fully explored if business continues as usual at Skånemejerier. Traceability at Skånemejerier needs a strong advocate in the management team with a budget to explore its full potential.