Leveraging Data for the Complex Dairy Supply Chain
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
The size and the complexity of the food system is very difficult for most of us to comprehend. For perishable products like dairy, there are many steps in which data and technology can help. Scott Sexton co-founded dairy.com over 20 years ago.
Sexton… “You're dealing with a perishable liquid multicomponent heavily regulated product that has to be assembled, tracked, quality has to be managed. And then, you think about it, it's like the oil and gas supply chain. There's a lot of refineries. So if you're a Greek yogurt company, you want the protein, but you don't want the fat. So that the fat comes out of the processing facility. It needs to go over to somebody that makes ice cream or cream cheese or butter or sour cream. So there's this, this kind of ticking time clock on all of these commodity moves with specialized transportation. There is no pipeline for, you know, milk, right? Like oil and gas.”
The company started out as more of a marketplace for buyers and sellers, but found their true value was in help clients manage these complex supply chains.
Sexton… “It's the system of record shared on the internet for people to manage the life cycle of milk. And so in some regards, we didn't know how perfectly suited the dairy vertical was for kind of a new way of doing business.”
Sexton said we are still in the very early innings of this new way of doing business digitally.
