"Consentio's mission is to enhance communication and transparency among producers, wholesalers, and supermarkets to optimize every business transaction and minimize product waste," says Benoit Vandevivere, co-founder of the online platform. "By effectively transferring the transactions between existing business relations to a digital tool, Consentio enables the industry's players to work and connect on another level."
Benoit and Vincent Rosso founded Consentio in 2018. They both are digital entrepreneurship specialists and are passionate about helping and resolving industry challenges. "You might not know that one-third of the worldwide food production is lost. That amounts to 715 million tons of fruit and vegetables per year. There are several ways to tackle this issue, and one of them is by using technology," says Benoit.
"Consentio allows the supply chain to operate more transparently and efficiently by centralizing all exchanges between the various market players: retail, food services, wholesale, import and export, and growers."
Benoit explains how their overall solution is built on three pillars:
-An online platform including the most modern marketing features, where buyers can view tailor-made product offerings. All products, prices, pictures, and descriptions are gathered in an online store. He adds: "Within our current customer base, the Consentio business tool is generating 35% more sales and better margins as well. The orders can be automatically uploaded into an ERP system and simultaneously checked for correct pricing: SAP, RPO, Microsoft Navision…you name it."
-An ordering tool called Magic Orders where orders in any format are scanned, processed, and intelligently analyzed in real-time, providing extra insights (products, prices…) and automatically sent into the respective ERP systems. No matter which order format suppliers are used to receive, Consentio can digitalize it, as well as more than 50 existing retailers' formats. "This is an immediate time-saver for companies that no longer manually enter orders into the ERP system. Not to mention that this is not a task that the new generation of employees in the fresh industry wants to perform. It moreover avoids errors, and it actually reduces the number of credit notes made up to 90%. Ultimately, it enables companies to use their resources for growing their business! And last but not least, thanks to faster communications and fewer errors, it helps reduce food waste by, we believe, 25%."
-A traceability instrument, capturing crucial data for companies' climate goals and CO2 footprint. "Environmental, social, and governance aspects are becoming increasingly important for companies. In a short while, these ESG criteria will be mandatory. Companies have to be able to show what their impact is on society and the climate," Benoit says.
