The Company

The destruction of our ecosystem is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid, and the industrial food production has far-reaching consequences on our environment. Jürg Knoll and Harri Butsch, Managing Directors of followfood GmbH, thought “This cannot continue,” and in 2007, they created the sustainable food brand followfish, which quickly became the most successful frozen fish brand in Germany. This success was due to a good reason. Like humans, every product leaves an ecological footprint in our climate balance, extending throughout the entire supply chain, from catching the fish to the final shopping experience. And this is precisely where the followfood concept comes into play. Using a tracking code, the eco-friendly origin of the fish products can be traced entirely.

Followfood has pioneered the development of this unique tracking code. It provides information about the food’s origin, cultivation, catch, and processing, giving consumers complete transparency about the impact of their purchase on nature.

Sustainable and transparent – followfood taps into the pulse of our time and now supplies about 90 frozen, canned, and fresh products to German organic and food retailers. But the sustainable products of followfood are also available in Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

Challenge

followfood is a company for ecological and social products and also a movement for sustainability and transparency throughout the entire supply chain.

This target places special demands on product master data management since resource conservation means reducing costs and efforts, and transparency towards consumers is hardly possible without detailed and verified product information. Furthermore, the trade demands electronic exchange of product master data via GDSN® (Global Data Synchronization Network). To provide this information to the retailers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, which are different target markets with partially different attribute sets, followfood used multiple data pools. For example, when introducing new products or supplementing master data, all information had to be updated in several systems, a tedious and time-consuming solution for which a modern and reliable alternative was to be found.

The Objective

For followfood, master data maintenance and process optimization were of utmost importance. All product information should be maintained in a central source, a data pool, to serve the organic retail trade in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in the future.

The solution should enable efficient work, and with cost and effort reduction — and of course, conservation of resources is another essential aspect. followfood also relies on GS1 DQX since this manual visual inspection promises significant competitive advantages as retailers increasingly demand this seal.

The Solution

The 1WorldSync – a 1WorldSync Company data pool was already familiar to followfood for the topic of “central product data exchange via GDSN®.” Our 1WorldSync publishing solution enables synchronous and electronic data exchange via GDSN®, thereby providing followfood with direct access to other growth markets. The followfood team now simply creates a copy of the attribute set. To supply additional target markets such as Austria and Switzerland with a differing attribute set, the team adds or changes the information, and this product information can then be exchanged validly and GDSN®-compliantly.

Additionally, followfood relies on the special proximity to GS1, which allows them to react quickly to any changes.