Transparent Path Takes on Food Insecurity with Good Data and Transparency

“We’re committing to solving this. It’s important to us. It’s how we’re going to change the world.”

Getting food onto the tables of America’s families has always been a need. The global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 made it even more of a priority - in one of the world’s most deeply challenging times in history.

The crisis created food supply chain turmoil that led to food insecurity. The Department of Agriculture reports that as many as 23% of American households may have experienced food insecurity in 2020 - that’s double that of the year earlier.

“In 2020, we experienced just how many families are food insecure by the miles of cars at food banks,” says Transparent Path’s Chief Storyteller, Paulé Wood (pictured right). “As a Social Purpose Corporation (SPC) focused on data for the food system, we knew we could help.”

Meet the solution - Transparent Path, that provides secure and real-time visibility for managing food supply chains. Two years ago, while managing marketing services at Xerox, Eric Weaver’s customers repeatedly told him about “informational black holes” in their supply chain — how they lacked accurate, reliable data with which to make decisions. Weaver knew that continuously connected sensors could provide that data, which could then be secured within a blockchain to produce more trust and transparency within corporate systems.

Weaver has built Transparent Path with a team of experts from some of the most disruptive businesses today, including Microsoft and Amazon. The company’s hallmark products are ProofTag™ sensors which are placed on a customer’s shipment and stay with the load throughout its journey, monitoring location, temperature, humidity, light, tilt/shock and air pressure. The goal? People can truly know where products went and what happened to them during transit.

As important as visibility and transparency are to the company’s product and service, it is equally as important to how - and to whom - the Transparent Path chooses to communicate their mission.

Here are some of the strategic moves they make when it comes to communicating their mission.

TARGET THE RIGHT PERSONAS

Their biggest communication opportunity turned out to be their target personas - small and medium sized food producers who are not known for being early adopters; business owners who rely heavily on paper records versus technology.

“We’re a little too granola for a lot of the smaller food producers in the rural areas,” Weaver notes with humor and honesty. “Some of their employees were worried that our sensors were the beginning of big government tracking them, so we had to be upfront that we really, truly just wanted to track their food which is a common ask for the shipping business.”

BE A LEADER IN A DIFFERENT CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOD

There’s no doubt that Transparent Path is using data to solve food waste; they’re also using data to start a different conversation about food. “Food is a personal experience which is why we’re interested in visible and visceral stories about food and how our food gets where it needs to go,” Wood continues. “Consumers are now starting to ask more questions like that.”

ALWAYS REMEMBER - THIS IS ABOUT PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES

Yes, this is most certainly a conversation about food - but also a conversation about people. “I’m really interested in people and their decisions when it comes to food,” says Wood. “Decisions like, ‘why are Iowans choosing to eat gluten-free?’ How are people using social media to share anecdotal things regarding their food choices and habits?”

Transparent Path’s communication and content strategy is about education and finding connection points and community building opportunities. It’s a critical opportunity for both with smaller food producers and the larger movement committed to solving food waste and abiding by “greener” standards.

BE JUST AS TRANSPARENT IN PRACTICAL, CUSTOMER-FACING LANGUAGE - AS IN BUSINESS THEORY

Transparent Path’s communication is rooted in a hallmark value - transparency in language, which is why you read clear, concise, and direct communication on their company’s website. It’s both strategic and altruistic. “We wanted to make sure that we show ourselves and then the world that we believe in giving back; that our current levels of food waste and insecurity need to be fixed, now” says Weaver. “We’re committing to solving this. It’s important to us. It’s how we’re going to change the world.