What 300 Competitors Built Together — and How They Did It Without Anyone Losing Control

Two pallets. Same grower, same variety, same pack date, same truck. One arrives in perfect condition. The other gets rejected at the dock.

The data to explain what happened exists. It was captured at harvest, logged through transit, recorded at receiving. It just never connects. By the time anyone can act on the problem, the product is rejected and the conversation has turned to chargebacks.

This is not a technology failure. The technology to share data securely, analyze it, and integrate it into supply chain decisions already exists and has for years. What has been missing is agreement — on what to share, in what format, under what commercial relationships, and governed by whom. And an industry willing to do that work together before deploying technology, rather than discovering the governance gap after the system is already built.

The fresh produce supply chain moves hundreds of billions of dollars of product annually across five continents. It involves hundreds of thousands of growers, shippers, logistics providers, distributors, and retailers, most of whom are in commercial relationships that create structural tension around data sharing. No single organization has the authority to mandate how data flows. No single technology platform has the trust of all participants. The coordination problem is real, and it has resisted every attempt to solve it through technology alone.

This is the problem the Supply Chain of the Future initiative was built to address — not by creating a platform, but by creating a governance structure that makes collaborative infrastructure possible.

A hotel basement in Washington, D.C.

The initiative began in 2024. Drew Zabrocki was stepping down from the board of the International Fresh Produce Association after a long tenure, including chairing the supply chain committee. Together with Ed Treacy, IFPA's VP of Supply Chain, and Steve Alaerts, they had spent years watching the industry identify the same supply chain problems, commission the same white papers, and produce recommendations that organizations filed and did not implement.

The question they brought to a standing-room-only gathering in a Washington, D.C. hotel basement: what if we stopped complaining and started building? What if the industry constructed the supply chain it actually needed — together, from the ground up, with the people who would use it?

Seventy or eighty people showed up. The room was charged. By December of that year, they had secured a small IFPA grant, a significant in-kind sponsorship from GS1US, and TOTEM's commitment to match with its own resources. They convened 120-plus practitioners, subject matter experts, and executives in Las Vegas for what became the first SCOTF Collabathon.

Thousands of sticky notes. Rotating working groups. A facilitation architecture borrowed from software engineering's Event Storming methodology and adapted for a multistakeholder industry context. The room did not just identify problems — it defined what needed to be built, by whom, and under what governance. The output was not another report. It was a mandate.

The origin of the three-organization structure

The governance question was settled early and deliberately. In the first year, three organizations signed a joint memorandum of understanding that has defined the initiative's structure ever since: the International Fresh Produce Association, the Collaboratory for Open Software and Systems in Ag and Food (COSSAF), and TOTEM.

The MOU's central commitment: everything built under the initiative would be released under open-source or Creative Commons licensing. No participant would need to surrender data sovereignty to join. The intellectual property being created — standards, frameworks, protocols, tooling — would belong to the industry, not to any of the three organizations that steward it.

The role separation is what produces the trust that makes participation possible for competitive organizations. IFPA convenes the industry and provides the governance legitimacy that comes from representing thousands of member organizations globally. COSSAF builds and stewards the open-source technical infrastructure with a mandate to keep it accessible and sovereign. TOTEM operates the implementation layer — facilitating the Collabathons, staffing the coordination function, and running the working groups that do the detailed technical work.

When a grower, a major retailer, and a logistics provider sit down together in a SCOTF working group, they know that no single participant in the room is going to capture the value created collectively. The infrastructure belongs to the industry. That assurance is not rhetorical. It is structural.

What the Retail Issues Forum changed

Before October 2025, retail leadership had not been meaningfully included in designing the supply chain solutions being built for them. Previous initiatives had been developed technology-forward rather than retailer-reality-forward — solutions that looked compelling in design sessions but did not fit the operational reality of stores, distribution centers, or retail systems infrastructure.

The October 2025 Retail Issues Forum created space for something different. Dozens of retail leaders — produce buyers, category managers, and operations leaders from independent specialty chains, regional grocers, and enterprise retailers across North America — gathered under Chatham House Rules. The ground rules were simple: speak plainly, without attribution. The conversation that resulted shaped everything that came after.

Four findings came out of that room. The supply chain stops at the store door, and nobody is watching. FIFO and freshness are being forced into a false binary. Quality is rewarded with words, not money. And data standardization is an organizational problem, not a technology one.

The most significant finding was also the most uncomfortable: supply chain professionals investing heavily in cold chain management and logistics optimization often did not know how much shelf-life loss was occurring inside their own stores. The supply chain was doing its job. The store was failing to complete the final step. And nobody had designed the system to catch that gap.

Three pilots. One shared architecture.

The March and April 2026 Collabathons validated the October retail findings with expert practitioners from 22 countries. The same tensions retailers named in October — data stops at every handoff, quality is acknowledged but not compensated, standards exist but adoption is the problem — surfaced independently across every continent and every time zone. The convergence was not manufactured. It was earned through the facilitation design that created the conditions for it.

Three pilot programs advanced to implementation. Each addresses a structural failure that the industry has identified and discussed for years but has not yet solved.

The three pilots share a common architecture — GS1 identifiers, GS1 Digital Link, and Smart Data Escrow. A grower or retailer who participates in one pilot is not starting from scratch when the next one opens. The infrastructure is interoperable by design. And it is built in the open, under standards that already exist, on commercial terms that reward quality performance.

What makes it replicable

The Supply Chain of the Future is a fresh produce initiative. The governance architecture is not.

The coordination problem it solves — how do you get competitive organizations to build shared infrastructure that none of them individually owns — exists in every sector that has pre-competitive challenges and no single organization with the authority to mandate a solution. Dairy. Building materials. Specialty pharmaceuticals. Apparel. The structural features that make this initiative work are not specific to produce.

The prerequisites are fewer than most association executives assume. You need a convening organization with genuine member trust. You need a clear problem that no single participant can solve alone. You need a governance commitment to open-source or neutral ownership. And you need a facilitation methodology that can shift participants from their commercial identities into a shared stakeholder identity — because that shift is what makes difficult conversations possible.

The most common mistake is bringing buyers and sellers into the same room without changing the dynamic. They arrive as counterparties. They need to leave as stakeholders. That does not happen through a terms-of-engagement slide at the beginning of a panel discussion. It happens through a facilitation architecture that is designed specifically to produce that shift — before, during, and after the session.

Build the governance first. The technology follows. Every time.