Tracing Impact Through Supply Chain Transparency - Katharina Davids of seedtrace GmbH

With consumers becoming more conscious and aware of the sustainability and overall impact of the products they buy, one major area under inspection is the supply chain process. And so, armed with the goal of sustainable consumption, Seedtrace CEO and co-founder Katharina Davids shares how their software empowers both businesses and consumers through product transparency.

On the one hand, Seedtrace enables companies to manage supply chain data, prove it, and then communicate it. On the other hand, Seedtrace also allows consumers to trace products back to their roots and ensure that environmental, ethical, or sustainable standards are met. Their software is actually blockchain-based, which Katharina herself deliberately doesn’t mention immediately nor is it mentioned on their website, because though blockchain does help them verify claims, it doesn’t help them prove where data is coming from. So, their focus is really more on providing transparency for sustainable consumption and production.

One case study Katharina gives is a cacao fruit pulp producer, Koa, and how they use Seedtrace to prove that their farmers are being paid fair wages. Apart from this, she also talks about the struggles she and her co-founder faced being two female founders, the challenges when it came to finding investors, especially female-led VCs, and the lessons they learned from these experiences. Listen to this episode to find out more.

Katharina’s key lessons and quotes from this episode were:

• “50% of consumers often don't know which is the better choice, because there's so much confusion and information lack and greenwashing that is happening around us as well.” (14:46)
• “Do we rather go that route to grow faster and maybe don't really stay true to ourselves? Or do we go the route where we might grow a bit slower and lose some clients on the way, or potential clients, but really do what we believe in?” (30:51)
• “We have the goal for ourselves that transparency in supply chains is the norm rather than the exception.” (38:54)

In this episode, we also talked about:

• Katharina’s background and what led her to creating Seedtrace (2:53)
• Current supply chain processes and regulations (9:24)
• The three main offerings of Seedtrace (17:46)
• Seedtrace’s two main stakeholders (26:58)
• The biggest challenge for Katharina in building Seedtrace (33:40)