Welcome Everyone to the Smart Product Innovation Across Your Supply Chain Webinar. Good day, good morning, good evening, wherever you're joining us from. Thanks for participating. My name's Tye Blazey, and I'm a Director of Business Development with SGS Digicomply, and I'm joined today with Bob Hudson as well. Bob, hello.
Hi, I'm Bob Hudson. My role at TraceGains is I'm the Strategic Account Program Director. I'm among the original team that founded TraceGains back in 2008. We continue on our journey 14 years later to revolutionize data exchange in the food and beverage supply chain. We look forward to our webinar today, and hope it's good information for you. Tye?
Yeah, indeed. Let's introduce a bit our our companies as well and what we're focused on and what are the the connection points here. As I said, I'm with SGS Digicomply, and Digicomply is an online system for monitoring and analyzing information coming from legislation, scientific publications, and news sources. Within Digicomply, we've built up a set of four million documents covering 160 countries globally. Bob, do you wanna say a few words on TraceGains? and then we can share a little bit about why we're here together today.
Sure. For those of you not aware or familiar with TraceGains is a software company that manages your product information in a unique way. We're revolutionizing supply chain agility through an innovative network ingredient marketplace that's been built over the course of about the last eight or nine years or so. In this marketplace, businesses seamlessly connect with their partners and information about suppliers and ingredients flow instantly using intelligence and automation. Today, that marketplace continues to grow exponentially with tens of thousands of suppliers and locations, about a half a million items and services, as well as millions of digital assets, which are really the key to it all.
Our software applications leverage this marketplace to help companies accelerate new product development as well as automate supplier and material quality and compliance on a regular basis. A little bit about why we partnered with Digicomply is we wanted to tap our TraceGains Intelligence Suite, which we will talk about later, into vast amounts of data, including an international regulatory catalog and expert analysis from SGS's global team. We just didn't see another tool that comes close in helping companies to understand emerging risk. That's why we're here. Tye?
Yep. No, and I mean, that's. Thank you for that. Also from our side, what I can say is, you know, stay tuned. We announced the partnership in January, and our technical teams have been working hard to integrate this information and data to deliver some exciting new products. Stay tuned. There's definitely more to come throughout the remainder of 2022. Let's get in, though, to, you know, what we're gonna really focus on today, which is what we're calling smart product innovation and how it impacts various aspects of the supply chain. Here's what we have in store in terms of the agenda. We're gonna start off focusing on really the strong forces at play in the industry, which most of us are aware of.
I mean, they're impacting us in many different dimensions from a supply chain perspective and also what we're seeing from a consumer perspective. We're gonna look at why new product development is so hard and what are some of the challenges there. For the second half of today's conversation, it's about really this shift that's happening from what we call digitization to digitalization and what does that mean. Finally, product performance intelligence. This means, to us, how various functions within companies can make better, faster decisions with this having access to a greater level of information and data in real time. We see a shift happening in terms of how companies do product innovation, and a lot of it happens by, you know, getting access to as much real-time information when they need it.
We put together a couple examples to go through today that we'll touch on that. Okay, let's begin 1st off with, you know, what we're seeing from the consumer side. You know, as these images or articles call out, there are some certainly major aspects to consider. On the one side, we see certainly this, the growing sales of dairy and meat alternatives. What this means is that more and more companies with strong brands, perhaps in more of these, let's say, traditional areas, are certainly going to be having to come up and evolve and devise new products that will utilize the strength of their brands that are gonna be made up of ingredients really completely foreign to them.
That's a major shift from really how people are eating, and you're seeing here with just the growth in the retail sales across many different geographies that this is certainly a reality. I think another major consumer aspect is certainly around the, let's say, the after effects or even the ongoing effects of still the pandemic in a, in a couple ways.
One is that we see right now in this day really this shift from goods to services by consumers. There's a big uptake in services around entertainment, fun that people wanna have now that they've been, you know, coming out of more restrictive environment, and that just changes how people eat food, when they snack, when they consume products in more of a, you know, entertainment type environment. Ce rtainly that food service shift is happening. I'd say another one that's also connected to pandemic is this article speaks to here, is that there's people want to eat healthy. They wanna make choices that are, that they feel are improving their health, and they may do it also to combat things that maybe previously seemed a bit unrelated, like stress.
Here there's an example of how the need to eat or desire to eat clean type ingredients is something that consumers see as a way to help combat stress. I think also the, let's say, the functional aspects of food, the use of special ingredients are all gonna be continually important from a consumer perspective. I think everyone's aware of the massive supply chain disruptions over the past few years, really disrupting access to domestic and foreign ingredient sources, the war in Ukraine impacting global grain and just a real mess of the entire supply chain and getting access to materials. Companies are scrambling now for other sources of materials, new places to get them from.
Also, there's the need to, with shortages in one material, trying to find an alternative material that may result in the need for reformulation and really depending upon R&D just to keep products on the shelves. Yeah. What does that all mean? It means that food companies, suppliers, companies as well that are providing services like us to these food companies are all gonna be in the middle there with these two forces certainly pushing down. The evolution and the trends that are happening in the consumer perspective that we touched on, and then as well having to deal with the supply chain aspects.
This will all then feed into how new products are developed and certainly bring as well some new challenges that we really haven't had to deal with in a long time. Bob, why don't you walk us through a bit what this means from a new product development standpoint?
Sure. You know, even recent events aside, CPG companies, especially food and beverage companies really aren't doing a great job at the game of innovation to start with. This McKinsey study that is mentioned on this slide here is really from a couple of years ago. It really revealed that 75% of new products fail within the 1st four years.
It's not just big name brands, even smaller, more agile brands from small, more innovative or faster react food companies, startups, brand owners and things like that are still failing at that same rate. Really complicating that is, companies fail slowly because product development is slow, and R&D teams take too long for new products to reach the market. This isn't solely a new product launch issue. These teams spend half their time, like in the example that I just mentioned, reformulating existing products when some external or internal event occurs, and this also takes too long as well. What's slowing down product development in general? Really decentralized product information is a common problem.
More than ever, companies need visibility into the complete history of ingredients, into the history of items and the materials that are going into these products. Consumers demand it, and FSMA regulations and other global regulations, whether it be Canada, EU or wherever, are requiring this information as well. Many companies still maintain islands of product information spanning divisions and departments w hen it comes to suppliers and co-manufacturers, there's even more essential information missing. It's just tougher to get that. The greatest challenge of all is that when a company's trying to build a new formulation or reformulate a product, as much as 75% of the information that you really need to do that is outside the four walls of the organization. We need to get that data in.
Collaboration is vital for driving innovation, and the most successful companies have strong ties with their customers, with their partners, with their suppliers, and other stakeholders. But before they can do that, they need to eliminate silos within their own four walls. While led by R&D and innovation teams, product development is really a cross-functional effort that requires engagement in many departments like quality, regulatory, procurement, marketing, and more. They all play a significant role in getting a new product to market. When you can't see what other members of your team is doing or waiting for other departments to respond, progress is slow and product outcomes suffer.
In a world where speed of innovation is the essence of survival, like this Forbes quote states, the answer to accelerating NPD when it comes to this 75% of information from outside your walls, is to move from digitization to digitalization. Digitization is not new. Vendors have created document packages, typically a collection of PDF files, and they bundle them up, and they email them out to their partners, and it helps to make sure that everybody has documentation on compliance and regulations and standards. What digitization doesn't do is what digitalization does, which is deliver the actual electronic information so that you have actionable knowledge at the product level. You can work collaboratively with everyone having access to the same data, not just the hosted documents.
You can minimize data re-entry, make smart decisions about product risk and product development, and do that fast. Digitalization in TraceGains' networked integration marketplace allows buyers, sellers, manufacturers, co-manufacturers to really collaborate quickly with a shared business ecosystem. The marketplace fosters immediate exchange of relationships, vital ingredient information, ingredient profiles, supplier profiles, global alerts. It's really a customized view of everything needed from a brand owner's perspective.
Imagine being able to work with a vendor on a new or revised ingredient specification with a full audit trail and sign-off capabilities, or to check if you could sell the same formulation in multiple geographies and maintain your claims too, as we go through the various rules and regulations of different regulatory authorities around the world. Really, again, to be automatically alerted to supply chain disruptions or the exact products you are sourcing, not just the category or geography, and then be able to source alternatives based upon your unique requirements. Tye, at this point, let's take a look at a use case for all of these things.
Yes. A couple of things. We're gonna shift gears a little bit. We wanted to use some examples to kind of go through some of the thinking and what Bob just described on this, how to get these, this information down to the product, and even really, I mean, to the individual ingredient level. Just a couple of things, though, as we do a check-in. 1st off, you do have the ability to ask questions. There's a Q&A box, and we are gonna leave the last part of today's webinar to answer any of those. If you have questions on anything you're seeing here, anything that's been discussed so far, please do ask those. We've also put together a few polls that are gonna be coming up shortly, based on what we're seeing.
We wanna make this interactive as well, and when you see those questions that appear, you can actually then click on the specific answer, and then we'll talk through some of those as well. Okay, to begin with here, you know, and what are we looking at? I'm sure this is an area where, you know, many of you are involved in a product development perspective could see something like this comes out from management. Maybe what's happened is that they've, like, designed or come up with an initial concept for a product, and they've put these type of parameters on it. The idea is that they're looking to create some type of superfood powder. They want specifically to be able to include sustainability claims, non-GMO.
They wanna be able to label it with, you know, clean ingredients. They already have as well some of the markets that they're interested in, for the particular product. They know that they wanna include at least a minimum of 15 grams of dietary fiber and as well, to maintain that flexibility in the challenging environment from a supplier perspective, they wanna also be able to have the ingredients be able to be provided from at least 3 alternative suppliers.
You know, this is kind of what they come up with, and now you are asked to go and really come back with a proposal of what would this product look like for your company. You know, let's say then that, you know, based on that, you design an initial view on the initial ingredient list and a prospective formulation, and it looks something like this. You know the formulation works, the ingredient nutritional goals are met, but now, you know, each one of those ingredients needs to be further assessed. You know, all of the various groups within the functions that are impacted in this, let's say, this product design, can now go and really go down and look at more detail of what that means for the various ingredients.
Let's just take one of those here, beta-alanine, and see what that then looks like as you look across specifically, the different, what we call information categories or from a risk, but also from an opportunity perspective. You really can take a specific ingredient and do a further assessment of it to determine if it's suitable for what your product strategy is. In this case, what you're seeing here is you take the specific ingredient, you could go into system such as Digicomply, this has already been loaded in there. What are you looking at here? Well, now what you're looking at is across regulations, scientific, publications, incidences, and social news, you have a view on, let's say, the discussion or the dimensions of this particular ingredient.
Another key aspect here is, you know, you're not looking at this ingredient in isolation either. I think this is something that TraceGains, I know spends a lot of time on, as do we within SGS Digicomply, is really this network of terms or this hierarchy, meaning that, you know, individual ingredients are part of a broader product category or product group, or as well, they may have subingredients. By creating this hierarchy of terms, what it does is it allows for insights and information to be drawn out, even if that particular product is not mentioned. If a comparable product in the same product category is discussed from a social news perspective or there's incidents, well, it's very likely then that there could be, let's say, knock-on effects also within that particular ingredient as well.
That hierarchy ensures that you're not just looking at something in isolation, but you're looking at it across also the dimensions of the hierarchy within it resides. You know, here you have the overall view looking across these, as I said, the different areas you can see here, with the analytics, how this is trending. You can drill down into these specific areas. You know, for example, if you then were to go into the scientific, you could look at various scientific publications that have come out on this ingredient, because this is certainly an important area from a risk perspective, but also from an opportunity perspective.
Maybe there's a new study that comes out talking about the health benefits of this particular ingredient, or on the other end, if there's something that comes out more concerning, you know, this type of information can come up and be exposed at the scientific level. Just as well from an incidence perspective, and Bob will talk about this as well in the next case, but, you know, certainly here too, where you're sourcing from, who you're sourcing from, what are you seeing from other events that are happening globally, is certainly going to be an integral part of the decision-making process as well.
Going back to the discussion previously or on the consumer trends, and that you can't look at this just from a compliance perspective either, and that same ingredient as well, you know, if it's being discussed in NGO, from NGO community because it's particularly damaging its production to in the environment, and that's certainly gonna be important because that could shape then regulations and consumer decisions. Also, you know, there may be, as this article here that when we pulled up called, you know, it was talking about something that's being discussed, that vegan diets really need to include this, these important ingredients. This here could be a very suitable candidate for one, for this particular product. In the end, what you have is this product.
It's really, we see it as this shift, and it sits, it resides at the center. You can look at it across these different dimensions. Also very important is that no matter which department or function you're in, you can access this type of information when you need to. I think that's a key part of what we see in terms of being able to do this product innovation in a quicker way and intelligent way is. You don't wait until it's too late or it's gonna take a lot of time to reformulate or redesign something, but instead, the various stakeholders can tap into information and make decisions because as we all know, these product development decisions, I don't even know how many thousands of small decisions that go into it.
The faster you're able to do that, the better insights you have, the better then that product will be when it's brought to the market. We have now a poll question here that we wanna put out to you, to the audience. You guys now have a chance to respond. I guess the question here is really looking at when you think about the product innovation in these various departments that are involved in the product development standpoint, which department today would you say has the least amount of access to this type of live information at the individual ingredient level? I guess then based on that would be though the department that would gain the most.
I'm gonna pause here, take a minute to select which one you believe to be the case, and then we'll take a look here at the results. All right, I'll give it a few more seconds. Okay, let's see. Looks like here we have marketing and sales as the highest at the top. Then at second, it looks like on procurement and sourcing. What are you seeing at the top there, Bob, as well? Also maybe what are some of your thoughts on what you're seeing here too? You're on mute.
Sorry about that.
It's gonna happen at least once.
What I find is interesting is that R&D is actually the lowest of departments that have the least access to this live information, which makes sense. Although you know it really takes all groups to put these things together and having that information available to be able to move fast in terms of new product development more than anything else. Regulatory needs that information because nothing's going out the door. No formulation is going anywhere without regulatory looking at that. When it comes to QA and manufacturing, depending on how you build the product, whether you're using components or doing it internally is gonna impact that as well.
Yeah. I think too, it's probably saying, okay, the marketing and sales teams, you know, they need to consider some of these other. They need to have a view on what this means if they're looking at it from a compliance perspective as well, so not just making too many decisions without considering some of the impacts. I think that's also interesting. It's, I think, in the direction where, you know, giving them the ability to look up, for example, if there are particular limits on an ingredient that they want to include, they can already begin to factor that into the decision-making process earlier, just as an example. No, very interesting results.
I think, yeah, seeing that from a marketing sales, but also procurement sourcing, what that means, I think that shows as well the need to consider also the supplier community and, you know, making sure then that both sides on the procurement but also on the supplier have access to this real-time information. Go ahead.
Okay. Let's highlight a little bit the three primary product development models that take place in the food and beverage industry today. Almost starting on the right-hand end of things is an organization that has what we call full control. They own the entire process. They create the brand, they create the idea. They do the marketing studies. They formulate. They get the ingredients. They source the materials and the ingredients. They take it through the regulatory process. They take it through manufacturing and quality, scale up and get the product out the door. Everything's internal.
Aside from the need of the information directly from the suppliers, it's at least handled inside. The other extreme is brand owner, and I'm sure that there are plenty of companies out there that are very aware of situations in recent years, everything from KIND Bars to a lot of things in the protein bar industry and whatnot are done through the company owning only the brand and then outsourcing everything in regards to getting finding ingredients, and really just taking a finished good specification and sending it out to a co-manufacturer and basically having them run the show. The one in the middle is a little bit more and a little bit more of a hybrid.
It's really where, obviously the company owns the brand. They define the framework for the product and the unique selling characteristics, but they largely let co-manufacturers source ingredients, but not in all cases. Quite often, depending upon what the product is, the brand owner will stay closely connected and specify things like flavors and textures and other strategic ingredients, maybe source those internally and then distribute those out to co-manufacturers and not do the co-manufacturing. To make it even more complicated, a lot of companies, the customers of TraceGains today are doing different things in different parts of the world, depending upon how well they manage their relationships.
If it's a US-based company, quite often they're really in full control when it comes to manufacturing at the local level. However, when it comes to sourcing materials in Asia or Australia, New Zealand, it may be an entirely different situation. We really have these three different types of opportunities, and every one of them brings a challenge when it comes to communication and availability of information. At this point, it's time for another poll. Our question now is, which of these three product development models are you seeing the greatest increase in new products over the last 12 months?
You know, food brands wanting to control, food brands adopting this networked product development hybrid, as I meant, as I called it, type of approach, or food brands acting only as brands and essentially relying fully on the co-manufacturer to manage all of these. We'll give it another minute, and then we'll talk about the results. They're slowly coming in. We'll give it another couple more. Another 15 seconds or so. Well, still coming in. Okay, let's take a look at where we are now. Our results, control, 27.5%. Food brands acting only as brands, just about even. A mix of both for the most part, as I like to call it, more than half.
From my perspective as a supplier of technology to the food and beverage industry and dealing with all different sizes of whether it be major companies all the way through to startups, we have a very broad range amongst our 500 customers around the world that use TraceGains. This is pretty much what I would have expected the result to be. It seems that you know the agile new brand owners are out there for a lot of the. I would say a lot, especially a lot in the snack products and some of the nutrition products.
You know, food brands acting as controlling the entire situation, that really varies all over the place as well in terms of from large to small companies. Truly, food brands adopting network product development strategy is what I personally see the most when attending events like Future Food-Tech or a lot of the other new product development events when you're getting into the new like plant-based proteins and things along those lines, they wanna outsource the manufacturing capacity, but they want to be able to you know, manage the secret sauce that makes that particular product work. There's no surprise that I see here. Ty, you have any comment?
I think it's interesting that Yeah, Bob Hudson, what you just mentioned is spot on in that you have, going back to the consumer, going back to the uptake of new products and new areas for a lot of these companies, I think things like the flavor and the texture, that sort of thing, are just so imperative that, you know, they're going to want to have, you know, some very much in control over that. Just like, you know, for some of the more special ingredients that they think are quite unique or differentiators in the market, they're gonna wanna have control on that. It's interesting to see.
I think, yeah, I think it also just, no matter what, it comes back to, you know, 75% essentially here, three-fourths are looking to work more closely with their suppliers in a, in more of a partnership type model. I think that's one of the key takeaways from my side and probably then leads well into a bit more on, you know, what does that mean? Yeah, well, let's take a look more from some of the TraceGains systems in, you know, what this looks like. Going back to our superfoods now example, from a formulation drilling down, let's talk through that and see what kinda continue on our example from before.
Okay. Let's do that. Just one other point now I'd like to make about these results is that when we're getting away from internal control to external control, as I mentioned earlier, there are those internal barriers, but then those external communication barriers that obviously become a lot more complicated, especially in the middle one where you know, 50% of the product development today is following that particular model. Let's get into a little bit into some screenshots here directly out of a TraceGains formula management application.
What we really wanna illustrate here is how, you know, digitalization and this external information that we need to make decisions, to build formulations and get a product to market all work out. This is a screenshot, just to keep things simple in a webinar, of our superfood powder and the various items that are here. What we can do with digitalization of information is link each item, each ingredient directly back to individual claims from various research sources or databases, from SGS Digicomply or elsewhere, in the world when it comes to perhaps scientific citations. To be able to have a view of what is impacted, what isn't, in our superfood powder, in our formula management system, used by TraceGains.
If we wanna take a hard look and do an intelligent search on one of the ingredients such as mango, we can search for alerts, we can search for studies, health topics, we can search for potential suppliers across the vast array of data sources and libraries within that are interconnected within the TraceGains platform. Their SGS Digicomply, their connections to suppliers in the TraceGains marketplace, but we can simply do searches and find specific information about something like mango.
When we ask for a search on mango here in our intelligence platform, first thing we can do is take a look at general information, taxonomies, information, warnings and advisories and side effects, interactions, a lot of scientific information, as well as regulatory alert, Digicomply type information that's associated with that single mango ingredient. Then, you know, what alerts are out there that may have some impact on mangoes? As this search pulled up in the screenshot, there were several alerts with dates and sources that have come up. This is an import alert type.
There's all different types of alerts, whether it be FDA or CFIA or EU sources or, you know, other information such as an earthquake in Singapore or somewhere in the world where that may have impacted something. These alerts are right at our fingertips due to the ability to access them through this digitalized environment.
Then lastly here, we have the overall recipe of our superfood product that we've developed here with our amounts and our calculations and our ability to calculate total nutrition values based upon this particular formulation, plug new numbers in or plug new materials in and be able to calculate out, build a nutrition, at least a strawman nutrition facts panel of what this particular product's gonna look like. Some components, what is the allergen profile? How does the allergen profile impact where we could potentially market this product based upon local and general rules?
Obviously things like costs and process steps for manufacturing, the types of things that need to be rolled up into a finished good specification, especially if you're a brand owner and you wanna rely on co-manufacturers to take care of everything or to take care of at least the manufacturing process, while you as the brand owner manage the primary critical ingredients in the material. So, Ty, you wanna give us a little wrap-up?
Yeah. Thanks for that run-through there. So just to kind of summarize, and then we can use the last few minutes as well to take a couple questions. Summarizing on what we've gone over today,
what are some of the takeaways here?
Yes, I mean, new product development is hard. There's no doubt about it. There's the external forces that, again, can be challenges, but also opportunities. There's the need to or the challenge around certainly bringing products in a timely manner, because that's paramount. It's hard because of access to information, meaning that there's barriers even internally. There's also barriers as well in terms of especially in these areas of collaboration amongst partners, where you've got access to all this information residing outside of your four walls too.
How to bring that together in a timely manner. Digitalization, as we've termed that, can help speed up the process by accessing an increased wealth of data, integrating systems, and making it easier for different teams to access it. Meaning that even, you know, all of those cases today, from the formulation examples, you know, your search is live information. It's real-time. If information changes, you can be notified. All of that helps in terms of that, those making those decisions at the right time within the right functional group in which you reside. Yeah. Then also the sharing of information.
I see also a couple questions here on that as well that came in on terms of sharing because, yes, it's good that you have access to this information, but then what do you do with it? How do you quickly communicate it with others within your company or within your supplier network? I mean, all of this has a lot to do with the same concept of speed and moving quickly. At the end of the day, making better decisions because the more you're able to present this actionable knowledge, as we call it, to others that then can make decisions, and you're able to do that using, you know, specific charts, being able to the right level of alerts, all of these things can then allow others to make better decisions as well.
Certainly the sharing, the collaboration internally and externally is critical. Anything from your side to add to this, as we wrap up and move to questions, Bob?
I think you covered it pretty well. Again, our focus is on being able to provide solutions that provide the information that's necessary to make decisions in this world today. There are so many internal factors, just communication within organizations, but the external factors are just overwhelming today in terms of having to get the right information and understand the impact of that information based upon what the product is, who the consumer is, and international regulations and differences make it a very complicated process. All good from here.
Great. Okay. We have a few minutes left. We had scheduled 45 minutes. We're a little bit over, but the calendar's for an hour. Let's use it. Let's take a few minutes now. If anyone has any questions, you can fill those into the Q&A box. We have a couple here that have come in, but we'll give you a bit of time to ask any of those, and then we can take a couple questions and then conclude today's session. Yeah, let's move over to the questions and take those here. We'll give you guys a little bit of time if anyone has any more to add, and then we'll begin with those. Okay.
I'll ask one while the other ones are coming in. There was a question, Bob, about you mentioned suppliers, you know, within the supplier network of TraceGains. You know, how do you see, I think it's connected as well to that middle product development model, the networked approach. How do the suppliers take advantage of this information and what does that communication look like between suppliers and the product companies? I guess there's a bit of interest to know more about that in the network aspect, how the information sharing can be done.
Absolutely. First of all, the fundamental advantage that our integrated network marketplace has provided suppliers really since we created it back in about 2014, 2015, is that they first of all in providing information to their customers have this unique ability and actually it's a patented technology that we call PostOnce that allows a supplier to basically post information about their products and their
Even things like location information, like audits and other business or regulatory documents, be able to post them once, and then they can connect to their customers very comparable or more comparable to, like, LinkedIn or Facebook, where you go out and you send a friend request, and once the friend request is accepted, then information from that friend can automatically flow.
What's the first advantage that suppliers get is that they can kill multiple birds with one stone, I like to call it, where if I'm a major supplier like a Tate & Lyle or a Bunge, and I have, you know, 100, 200 customers out there on the network, I post those documents once, and the information that each one of those customers is requesting flows to them, utilizing this patented technology. That's a major saver on that component. The next component is that they're part of our marketplace. Unless it's a proprietary item like a custom flavor or some customized ingredient that's privatized, it's really free advertising for them.
They can market the product within our marketplace. This becomes the stage, whether you're in procurement or in new product development, to be able to go searching for an alternative supplier or a new supplier because we wanna put mango in my formulation. Who and where are the mango suppliers that are out there? As I mentioned today, from a supplier count, there's about 50,000 locations, about 20,000 companies that are already in the network. There are major advantages there. Then also within the applications that we provide, there's abilities to do things such as collaborate on specifications.
If I'm in R&D and I'm building a new ingredient spec, and I wanna see if it's realistic or not, I can post that across the network as a draft to several suppliers and go through a collaborative process in identifying, yes, this is something that's feasible for me as a supplier to provide. Really, again, it provides a tremendous amount of time and savings for suppliers in both those aspects.
Great. Thanks. Well, yeah. Let's take a look here. I think we can do one more. There's a question on data, which I can address. It's
Yes.
What are some of the data sources? Some of the examples they wanna know about the mango, where is that data coming from? Yeah, let me speak a bit to that. I mentioned at the beginning very briefly that SGS Digicomply, we have about 3,000 different sources in the system containing information from 160 countries. That whole data set, if you will, is 4 million documents. What are those sources? In that one example on the mango, you may have seen, FDA import alerts is one source. Obviously amongst those 3,000, there's a breadth of information. A lot of the information is coming from official government sources.
These are gonna be the legislation, what ends up being regulations, but also things like, you know, import alerts coming from the RASFF in the EU. A lot certainly within the official realm. Another important one is news. News means industry associations, industry news, but it also means news in the more traditional sense. If there's articles being written in a specific part of the world that's talking about a group of people that got ill because they ate some type of food. I mean, there's a lot of information more from this social news realm that's coming up.
Social media, but also news publications going down to the local level. From the scientific aspect, we have a large number of documents coming from sources like Web of Science, ScienceDirect, but also what some of the government agencies are publishing in their own studies. I'd say those are the main bodies, and they're really covering all different corners of the world. The last point is irrespective of language too, the information's coming in, but when we set out, when we really built this product, it was about taking this information regardless of the format of the data, we can bring it in in a consistent manner.
It's made available in English, and then from there, you can classify information and really locate specifically down to individual topics, ingredients, what impacts you. That's starting where it starts from and where it ends. I think with that, we can conclude here. I would like to thank everyone from my side. Very much appreciate you joining. Thanks for your interest in what TraceGains and SGS Digicomply, about our partnership, and how we view product innovation. We hope that this has been an interesting session looking at this. Bob, I'd also like to thank you for joining.
It was great to go over this information with you, and I look forward to future sessions as well, where we can talk about some of the other aspects of what's happened in the industry, and I think, you know, share more as well about our joint product plans, which I think is gonna be quite exciting in the future.
There's a lot of exciting initiatives to come. We're announcing, TraceGains specifically, rebranding our entire platform for getting this research type information. There's just a tremendous growth because there's tremendous need to get this information so that you can work faster and smarter. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thank the Digicomply folks for inviting us to spend the time.
Likewise. All right. Well, with that, I wish everyone a wonderful rest of your day or a pleasant evening wherever you reside. Thanks again and I look forward to a future session with all of you. Goodbye.
Okay. Bye-bye.
Bye now.