The Product Trust

Making Sense of the Nonsensical

consumers want to know…

Global supply chains are messy beings. There are so many different players, so many influencers and stakeholders. Take the supply chain above. This is the sort of picture I unpicked when I set up The Forest Trust in 1999 to look at wooden garden furniture.

The forests that supplied the Vietnamese garden furniture industry with logs were scattered across the whole of SE Asia, and between the forests and the factories there were middle-men and traders moving the logs. Between the factories in Vietnam and retailers in Europe, there were middle-men too. The industry was awash with illegal wood coming in from Cambodia. Global Witness, the UK based NGO, got wind of it and launched a campaign in 1998 that took off across Europe as other NGOs and the press gave retailers a good kicking for the industries’ links to deforestation, human rights’ abuses and illegal wood. There were banks lending to all the players in the game, governments in every country with their own concerns, some of them personal as corruption was evident. You had the UN sitting above all of it being totally ineffectual with various conventions. I’ve not even put all the communities and indigenous peoples, the workers, the workers’ Unions…there are many other stakeholders not represented in that drawing. Even without everyone, it’s still a terrible mess and consumers in far away Europe had zero chance of understanding where the wood in their furniture came from.

It’s the same for pretty much every product you might buy. When I buy a “thing” in a store in say, Europe, it’s impossible, at the Point-of-Sale, to know where all the ingredients or components inside it came from and how they got to me, even if they all originated in the same country. Totally, utterly, impossible.

“Made in XXXXX” gives only the tiniest of hints as to a product’s story.

In which city? In which factory? What are the labour conditions there? What’s happening with the waste? Are there children working there?

Where do they get their ingredients, their raw materials? How do they arrive there? Via traders, middle-men? What happens at the place where the ingredients come from? Are there bad environmental or social practices out there? Is there corruption, slavery, war? What about the carbon footprint?

Is there deforestation? Pollution? Exploitation? Was the land where the raw materials grow taken from communities? Are the folk who work out there earning a living wage?If there are small farmers involved, do they get paid fairly? Are they exposed to dangerous chemicals? Are there children working there as well?

Today, for all our certification schemes - FSC, MSC, RSPO, Fair Trade, B Corp, Rainforest Alliance, etc etc, you name it - we simply cannot know the answer to most of these questions. The schemes try to cover some of these issues but even when their standards are good, their implementation is challenged (see Beyond Certification) and so again and again there are exposés where investigative journalists find issues. During my 20 years with The Forest Trust, we saw issue after issue that never reached the light of day; consumers bought in total ignorance of their true footprint.

It’s not always the case that businesses want to cover this stuff up, not ALL the time. Some do, but even the well-meaning and serious ones can’t know either and getting back to the absolute starting point of their supply chains is nigh on impossible as traders and middle-men hide origins and trading partners to ensure they’re not cut from the supply chain.

What to do?

Introducing The Product Trust

The idea for The Product Trust came from discussions with a good friend. He has a long history working in the global bakery industry and is deeply committed to sustainability. He wanted to know the story behind ALL the ingredients in the products he was selling. Not just where they came from, but what was happening there - all the social and environmental issues, governance, carbon footprint, everything. Was he contributing positively with the purchases he was making in his supply chains or was he part of the problem? Try as he might, he just couldn’t get there. He couldn’t find very much information at all as his suppliers baulked at giving him the information he wanted. He felt sure that his customers and his customers’ customers - consumers of the end product - increasingly want to know this information.

With my two decades of experience looking at supply chain sustainability, I have decided to create The Product Trust (TPT) to address this growing concern. Right now, TPT is just a blog, but I have aspirations to go further and crate an app — or partner with an existing service — that can go deeply and distant to the far reaches of global supply chains, asking the right and tough questions and report back to consumers what I learn. The opportunity is to create a flow of trusted information to let consumers know the full story behind the products they’re buying, right down to the absolute nitty gritty details. And if those details aren’t available, I’ll report that too because supply chain opacity is an issue in itself.

And key to this is that I will not take any money from ANY business to write a paid piece about their product. I’ll not be recruited as a consultant to help any organisation sort out their supply chain. That’s the job for organisations like TFT, now called Earthworm Foundation. No, I will remain 100% free from any business influence which could create a conflict of interest. I just want to report what I see and my opinion on whether I think it’s good enough or not.

The Product Trust will thus develop organically. I’ll write about ingredients (e.g. Palm Oil, Cocoa) and my personal perspective on the issues behind them. I’ll report on my discussions with businesses offering products to market. In time, if there’s interest, I may develop an app though others are doing similar work to bring such information to consumers. Let’s see.

I believe that with my extensive knowledge of how businesses and supply chains function, I can go beyond headline information like “Palm Oil is bad” and dig more deeply to give consumers nuanced, thoughtful information.

I value all feedback as as I get going. I’ll welcome all input into how TPT is going and suggestions as to where you, the consumer, would like more information.