Explain yourself in depth

If you’re in the business of selling products, you should also be sharing the data you’ve collected about those products.

With every year that passes, my diet grows more and more particular. Certain foods I once ate with abandon now disagree with me, and the doctor tells me to avoid one thing or to load myself up with something else. This isn’t uncommon: most kids can eat almost anything they like, while those of us in middle age have to be a lot more careful.

These days, as I cruise down each aisle in the supermarket, it feels more like a trip to a brightly lit library:  each time I find something I think I want, I’m then hunched over a can or a package, scrutinising the fine print of the nutritional contents listed on the label, holding it up to the light, stretching out the cellophane, and so forth, until it becomes readable and comprehensible. Then I have to make a decision: does this go into the shopping trolley? How much of it can I eat on a given day? Should I be eating it at all?

With packaged foods all of this analysis is straightforward. But what about a tray of mince? How much do I really know about it? The supermarket tells me the date before which it should be used, and – if I’m very lucky – how much fat it contains. That’s about it. But there’s a lot more I might want to know. Where did this mince come from before it went into the mincing machine? Which farmer produced it, with what animal? Was that animal healthy? Was it fed lots of antibiotics in the feedlot? Am I getting those, too, in my spaghetti bolognese?

These are the kinds of questions that can’t easily be answered right now. Yet all of this information is tracked. It is all stored in databases, somewhere. The farmer keeps excellent records on his stock – the better to sell them at a higher price. The same goes for the feedlot, the abattoir and the distributor. There’s a chain connecting the animal to the consumer, but it’s broken. The links have not been forged together into a continuous whole.

If they were – if I had ‘traceability’ from the package in the meat cooler back to the animal – I might learn all sorts of interesting and important things about the food I’m about to eat. I’d have information that I could use to help me be healthy. Things that could make a purchasing decision much more straightforward.

Anyone in the business of selling products to anyone else – to another company or directly to the consumer – must begin to think about sharing the data they’ve collected around these products.

The purchaser of a product (or the potential purchaser) needs as much data as possible to make a good buying decision. It doesn’t have to be fancy – it’s not as though you need to build a website to provide beautiful visualisations of what may be very ordinary data – but it does need to be provided, hand-in-hand with a mechanism (formally known as an API) that allows others to build tools that can harness that data.

Once you’ve done the sharing, others will come in to forge the links in the chain that connects your products to the markets they serve. Sharing data makes your products more useful and more valuable.  So share, and reap the rewards.

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