Beef transparency; play ball?

Prime Future 222: the newsletter for innovators in livestock, meat, and dairy

This tweet is funny in a familiar sort of way because it is the perfect parallel and summary for transparency in livestock supply chains, particularly in oh-so-fragmented North America beef:

I'm not talking about disease traceability; I'm talking about the seamless two-way transfer of relevant animal and carcass data up and down a given supply chain for the purpose of value creation and value capture along the way.

Many see this vision for the future of the beef industry in contrast to the fragmented and largely transactional industry structure and culture that exists today. There are pockets of it happening today, with more emerging, but it's nowhere near common.

My hypothesis continues to be that beef supply chain transparency will be successful where it's pursued as a secondary outcome, not a primary objective. After marketplaces, this type of product is a common one that is oh-so-tempting for entrepreneurs who misunderstand & underestimate the complex dynamics at play.

As a result of this vast oversimplification, many software companies & products have been started and shuttered because they saw data aggregation through the beef supply chain as an engineering problem and tackled it accordingly.

There are real reasons that the vision of beef supply chain transparency is not the default state of the industry.

None of the reasons are because good enough software hasn't been developed.

Just like the adoption of virtual reality glasses, this is not an engineering problem.

Here's one way to think about it: