“Don’t invent your own metric. Use the number that’s already there.”
“Please call when you see smoke, not when the fire is already burning.”
Dr. Matthias NachtmannChairman, Friends of Digital Farming
Diana WichtSupply Chain Lead, McDonald’s Deutschland LLC
My guest is Dr. Matthias Nachtmann, chairman of Friends of Digital Farming and co-editor of the Handbook Digital Farming. For 25 years he has worked where farming, digital technology and sustainability meet. We discuss why the data a food buyer wants is usually already sitting on a farm and why it so rarely arrives, why a farmer can end up filling out seventeen different forms for the same thing, what a fry plant should know about soil moisture, and how far around a mill a buyer should be watching the crops.
My guest is Diana Wicht, supply chain lead for McDonald’s Germany: purchasing, logistics, food safety, quality and sustainability, behind 1,400 restaurants and more than 1.5 million guests a day. We discuss why she never treats volatility as one thing, why closed ports are not on her list, what it means that a potato variety can only be judged once a year, and how contract farmers now grow the wheat for the buns between potato crops.
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Six things he says that are hard to hear anywhere else.
Six things she says that are hard to hear anywhere else.
The first mile is the part nobody talks about in public.
Every conversation about food supply chains starts three steps too late, at the factory or on the shelf. The first mile is earlier: the field, the mill, the buyer in August asking whether this harvest will do what the contract says it will. That is where quality, risk and cost are actually decided.
The people doing that work carry a picture of their supply chain that exists nowhere in writing. They know which warnings turned out to be noise, which supplier calls at the right moment, and what they would want to know one season earlier. I want to hear it while it is still fresh, and I want it on the record, because the next person facing the same season has nowhere to look it up.
Catharina van Delden, Finches
The drought that started Finches.
In Uruguay I look after 500 pecan trees and a rain gauge. In a dry year you can see the loss coming months ahead, and what you do in those months decides how much of the crop makes it. Almost none of that early knowledge reaches the people who buy the harvest. Closing that gap between knowing and acting is what my company works on, and it is what I ask every guest about.
Catharina van Delden is co-founder and CEO of Finches. Before that she built innosabi out of TU Munich into the European market leader in its category.
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