Notes from the field and from the team.
Raw materials and the regions they grow in, how we work, the technology behind Finches, and the people building it.
Water always moves from wet to dry: crunchy snacks and nut sourcing
Mondelez built its Dairy Milk Biscoff bar to keep water away from the biscuit. The almonds in a snack took on their water earlier, on the orchard floor in August, and a moisture certificate can’t tell you where that water has been.
The same rain doesn’t grow the same crop anymore. So we raised €2M.
Finches has raised €2 million in pre-seed funding, led by HTGF with Vanagon Ventures as co-lead, alongside Bayern Kapital, UnternehmerTUM and our angels. Here's what the money is for, and why this summer made the case for it.
A trend can be over in ten months. A field answers in five years.
Viral demand moves in weeks. A whey concentration line takes two to four years, a tea field five, a pistachio tree ten. What a sourcing team can see before the price tells them.
You can’t put flowers back on a tree
Peru’s mango harvest starts in the first week of October, and how much comes off the trees was settled in July by night temperatures over the Pacific. What the flowering counts actually say, why the two men reporting them do not agree, and what happened the last time this ocean ran warm.
Call us when you see smoke: the rule that keeps McDonald's Germany supplied
In the first episode of our new webcast The First Mile by Finches, Diana Wicht, Supply Chain Lead at McDonald's Deutschland LLC, on why volatility only works in the plural, and why she asks her suppliers to call when they see smoke.
The wells under the concrete: what Huelva's strawberry water actually depends on
Huelva's illegal Doñana wells are being sealed and the abstraction limits have just been lifted. The water that was supposed to replace them is 63 percent unbuilt.
I Talked to 40 Food Companies in 1 Day. They're All Flying Blind.
I talked to 40 food companies at Anuga Select Brazil. They're all flying blind on raw material sourcing. Here's what's broken in agricultural supply chains and how field intelligence can fix it.