25 Feb How Erüst Agriculture Benefited from Implementing Trusty

Summary

This case study addresses the challenges our customer Erüst Agriculture faced and how using Trusty helped them overcome these challenges.

Erüst Agriculture is a large-scale provider of premium segment ultra-fresh produce in Turkey. After the emergence of new competitors in their market, the increase in the popularity of food transparency, and the effects of Covid-19 on consumer behavior, Erüst needed a quick-to-implement and low-cost solution to improve food transparency, increase consumer loyalty, and increase their market shares.

By implementing Trusty, they managed to satisfy their customers with improved food transparency, retain the loyalty of their existing consumers, and improve their overall sales by over %5 in two months.

Challenge

The ultra-fresh produce industry is highly competitive, especially in regions where a large number of producers exist, such as most Mediterranean countries. There is also not a lot of room for product differentiation due to the nature of the industry. This situation combined with the rapid change in consumer behavior after Covid-19 resulted in a race for innovation between top competitors to preserve their market shares.

Erüst Agriculture is a large-scale producer in Turkey, delivering cleaned and packaged high-quality fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Their product portfolio consists of premium products and appeals to more environment and health-conscious, educated, higher-income consumers. The increasing popularity of food transparency around the world and the widespread health concerns after Covid-19 led high-segment consumers, and consecutively Erüst’s customers, to demand improved food transparency. At the same time, new competition emerged in packaged high-quality ultra-fresh produce market as more producers started to introduce premium products.

For this reason, Erüst started looking for a quick and low-cost solution to outcompete the new competitors for retaining its strong position with major sales channels and improve its market share. With this goal, Erüst decided to search for an easy-to-implement and low-cost food transparency tool that could also be used for increasing consumer engagement and brand visibility.

Solution

Trusty by ForFarming is a platform that allows agricultural producers to easily show their production processes, analysis reports, certificates, and facility information to consumers by printing QR codes on the packages. It is a channel that emphasizes the quality of products by reaching consumers and promotes their sustainability, freshness, and safety.

The application started with Erüst Agriculture registering on the platform and uploading various information about their company including location, the technology they are using, their practices, legal documents, and certificates. Afterward, ForFarming designed unique QR code landing pages for Erüst Agriculture and customized the data entry fields to match Erüst’s supply chain. Erüst recorded all of their production processes on the customized data fields separately for each batch they produce and printed the respective QR codes of each batch to the packages of the products in those batches. Their customers and consumers were able to scan these QR codes to view how, where, and by whom each batch was produced.

Results

• The QR codes on their product packages were scanned more than 2000 times in the first two months of usage.
• Erüst Agriculture managed to retain their commercial agreements with the major retailers in their local market despite the emergence of new competitors in virtue of their improved transparency implementation.
• Erüst Agriculture increased total sales by over 5% in only two months.
• Erüst Agriculture gained more brand awareness from consumers and retailers, and they are now recognized as the leading premium brand with high-quality and sustainable products in their local market.