Since we unlocked access to our global Networked Ingredients Marketplace last year with the launch of TraceGains Gather®, the response has been overwhelming. Gather boasts hundreds of thousands of users from more than 20,000 consumer goods brands.

This growing interest reinforces our belief in the power of the network effect, which Gather has lived up to, with more users benefiting from a quicker, more efficient way to exchange information through an egalitarian ecosystem that can evolve faster than legacy systems. 

TraceGains Gather® sits a step above traditional supply chain management platforms, empowering food and beverage brands to capitalize on speed and agility to remain competitive amid shifting market conditions. In addition, TraceGains Gather® brushes aside the barriers typical enterprise software systems put in the way.

“TraceGains Gather® is an open marketplace for information exchange, and it’s doing for the consumer goods supply chain what user-centric solutions like LinkedIn, Slack, and Zoom have done for their respective industries. It empowers users to tap into a vast and growing network of people and information to collaborate without friction,” Principal Product Manager John Thorpe said. “Offering free access for foundational capabilities eliminates the enterprise software purchase decision, and users can be productive as soon as they sign up.”

Gather® Maps

Now, we’ve rolled out Maps, a robust new functionality in Gather® that allows users to source and qualify suppliers on the marketplace more efficiently in a new map view that can toggle effortlessly between satellite and street view. With Maps, users can plot efficient travel plans for an audit or any other supplier visit, quickly track down local co-mans, ingredients, and suppliers, and tailor map results to specific product categories.

“With Gather® Maps, we’re putting even more visibility and power into the hands of buyers to make decisions when sourcing ingredients,” Product Manager Emma Karp said. “Seeing where an item or a supplier is geographically can save time, money, and effort when it comes to getting an item from point A to point B. You can also reduce lead time by finding materials closer to your manufacturing facility, save money on transportation costs, and can keep your production on schedule in case of a last-minute supply chain disruption. In addition to logistical efficiencies, understanding the geographic location of items and suppliers during a search could support sustainability and local sourcing initiatives.”

Additionally, Maps allows users to:

• Visualize your supplier and customer network to enable more efficient partner engagement.
• Use maps and TraceGains Network insights to create and share customized maps with your team members.
• Look for an alternative supplier while accounting for location and transportation needs and visualize alternative options with specified geographic parameters.

Supporting supply chain resiliency

Over the past few years, supply chain disruptions have been hard on consumers, manufacturers, and suppliers. Our data shows that ingredient shortages forced nearly 40% of brands to modify multiple product formulas. And rising ingredient and shipping costs pushed almost two-thirds of companies to raise their prices. Finally, roughly half of them pulled products off the market altogether. Consequently, according to Kearney, a global management consulting firm, inefficient supply chains could cost companies $800 billion in lost growth.

And that’s a big reason we designed Gather®: to forge a better path forward, built on speed and agility. More often, procurement, R&D, regulatory, quality assurance, and legal teams must work together better to keep up with a dynamic market. 

“R&D professionals use TraceGains Gather® to cut their time to market while ensuring the integrity of label claims—all without disrupting manufacturing,” Thorpe explained. “This instant access to detailed ingredient specifications allows brands to quickly design products or re-formulate existing ones despite persistent sourcing challenges. Gather®, simply put, is where the supply chain works.”

More than a search engine

Leveraging our Networked Ingredients Marketplace, TraceGains Gather® users can forge new partnerships, share information quickly, and easily source ingredients from new suppliers. Other features include:

• Networked Ingredients Marketplace – With access to the industry’s most powerful network of ingredients and suppliers across food, beverage, and dietary supplements, customers have instant access to millions of ingredient documents, including detailed specification data.
• Networked Intelligence – This cross-functional solution helps brands manage the increasingly complex web of formulations amid changing ingredient accessibility and status updates. Networked Intelligence offers manufacturers and suppliers a complete, integrated view of ingredient-level risks that can take days or weeks to track manually.
• Customer Manager – Through the Customer Manager tool, suppliers can communicate with customers about requests, post listings on the Marketplace, manage communications in one place, and more. Users can also maintain quality documents in the document library, the single source of truth that lets entire teams move faster with immediate access to technical specs.
• Collaborative Workspaces – With this tool, users can create, view, and manage shared workspaces with internal teams or external supply chain partners, including researching Marketplace items, creating “watch lists” for ingredients or suppliers, collaborating on projects, and more.

Find out everything Gather® can do for you today.