Webtools Agritech Blog | Christchurch, New Zealand

Backstory is a project aimed at creating more Value for everyone in the value chain. Suppliers, consumers and brands. For this to happen we are innovating how the consumer is connected, in a meaningful way to their natural products (food or fibre). By creating what we consider to be meaningful connection, everyone wins. The brands bottom line, the environments bottom line, the supplier and the consumer.

January 11, 2023

Melissa Baer

Conscious Consumerism is HARD - What this means for Conscious Brands

Conscious Consumerism is HARD, and this makes it hard for conscious brands trying to reach this audience. It is hard for consumers to know what's "the right thing". This is especially true in long supply chains. This makes it double hard for conscious brands to achieve cut through, differentiation and retention when channels are so fragmented and consumers are so confused.

February 16, 2022

Melissa Baer

Think piece: Disrupting our very own industries

Should we be Tech companies that ship meat, apples, milk? ‍I run workshops sometimes for primary industry processors and aggregators. More often than not someone always says “So should we just be tech companies that produce and ship high quality meat, milk, apples” Or whatever specific primary industry product/food that we’re discussing at the time.

December 6, 2021

Melissa Baer

Commodification of unique claims it’s a vicious cycle… how do we stay ahead?

The EU has introduced the Farm to Fork Strategy which will take effect in the coming year. It will require that food both produced and imported have an environmental footprint analysis. Environmental claims were considered quite “niche” not even 18 months ago (a pre covid time if you can remember back that far). We now have pretty good certainty that something that was “premium” before has now become commodity, due to it being a requirement for the mass market in the EU. So, we as primary processors and producers need to be thinking about the next premium product.

December 1, 2021

Melissa Baer

22 Immutable laws of marketing applied to agriculture and natural production systems

This book which came out in 1993, by author Al Ries. I’ve always maintained that if we applied some of these core fundamental principles to the primary sector and the export markets we serve. We might begin to shift from volume producers to value producers. Have a read about the application and some examples of each principle applied to the sector. I still quietly think that if the Agri-food sector adopted the same ethos of “product ownership” as the tech sector, we’d have some wicked world leading products coming out of our backyard. I don’t think we’ve even touched the surface of what we could be producing to solve real problems or challenges or concerns for people.

July 22, 2021

Melissa Baer

Which NZ company will be the first to get 1000/KG of meat, dairy, fish, or plants?

The truth is the writing is on the wall. This is not some crazy Jetsons future that we are trying to predict. We are living in what was predicted several years ago. We won’t be able to effectively compete in common staple foods category for much longer.

Melissa Baer

Faster Horses or Cars?

Often, we don’t even know what our challenges or concerns are until they have magically disappeared. Nobody thought taxi’s were a nuisance until there was a better option. This is where tech can come in. To spot the white space before we even know what's a problem.

Melissa Baer

Transparency Tech Collective

It’s not traditional Agritech, it’s not blockchain, it’s not IOT, it’s probably all of those oriented to a problem, which is how do we reproduce the sustainable outcomes that occur in short supply chains where transparency is high, over longer supply chains?

May 27, 2021

Melissa Baer

Productivity of New Zealand

There has long been discussion that New Zealand suffers from low productivity numbers relative to the rest of the developed world. In crude language, New Zealand is stuck in the industrial revolution, while the rest of the world has moved onto the information age.

May 26, 2021

Melissa Baer

ERP Decision Time?

It is inevitable at one point or another for a company to realize that spreadsheets are not scalable. As a result, someone will be tasked with going through a procurement process to bring in the system of all systems to digitize and move the company forward.

May 19, 2021

Melissa Baer

Productisation as a Core Capability for Agri Food Processors of the Future

How do we continue to grow economic outcomes, reduce environmental impacts, and improve social outcomes in the Agri-food sector?

March 11, 2021

Melissa Baer

Maturing the Sustainability Conversation - Sustainability in an Exponential World

Its no secret I was raised in early adopter “Hippie” culture. I often joke that it was back in a time that we hippies still needed to make money. That is only to point out that we’ve been “social enterprising” before it was a term. We didn’t have the luxury of taking corporate or government money and doing good with it. We had to build the good into our business models from day dot.

February 22, 2021

Melissa Baer

Hemp Industry Research Report - Digitisation Unlocks Opportunities for Emerging Hemp Industry

The hemp industry is long regarded as "the industry that never took off". Across the country there are big plans being hatched for hemp crops and their products: from food and fibre, to medicine and building products and beyond.

Featured

Think piece: Disrupting our very own industries

2/16/2022

Commodification of unique claims it’s a vicious cycle… how do we stay ahead?

12/6/2021

22 Immutable laws of marketing applied to agriculture and natural production systems

12/1/2021

Which NZ company will be the first to get 1000/KG of meat, dairy, fish, or plants?

7/22/2021

Productisation as a Core Capability for Agri Food Processors of the Future

5/19/2021

Maturing the Sustainability Conversation - Sustainability in an Exponential World

3/11/2021

Hemp Industry Research Report - Digitisation Unlocks Opportunities for Emerging Hemp Industry

2/22/2021

Blog

Backstory Project

Conscious Consumerism is HARD - What this means for Conscious Brands

Think piece: Disrupting our very own industries

Commodification of unique claims it’s a vicious cycle… how do we stay ahead?

22 Immutable laws of marketing applied to agriculture and natural production systems

Which NZ company will be the first to get 1000/KG of meat, dairy, fish, or plants?

Faster Horses or Cars?

Transparency Tech Collective

Productivity of New Zealand

ERP Decision Time?

Productisation as a Core Capability for Agri Food Processors of the Future

Maturing the Sustainability Conversation - Sustainability in an Exponential World

Hemp Industry Research Report - Digitisation Unlocks Opportunities for Emerging Hemp Industry