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From Berlin to Amsterdam: Supply Chain of the Future's Takes on Europe in February 2026
- Mar 16
- 7 min read
The conversations that matter most aren't happening on stage. They're happening in the hallways, at the ports, and around the tables where this community keeps showing up for each other.
There's a moment in every collaborative initiative when the energy shifts. You stop explaining what the community is building and start fielding questions about how to join.
A year ago, the Supply Chain of the Future team was making the case. This year, partners were walking up with implementation questions. How do we pilot this? Who's already running it? What does integration look like? The questions weren't directed at us — they were directed at each other. Companies comparing notes on what they'd tried. Retailers asking growers about data exchange. Solution providers listening instead of pitching.
In early February, the Supply Chain of the Future team traveled to Europe for concentrated engagements across three cities: Berlin, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. Our team met with industry leaders, growers, retail executives, standards organizations, and port authorities, and others working towards a common goal of improving agricultural supply chains. What we heard, across every stop, was a consistent message: the shift from talking about supply chain transformation to doing it is happening now, and the fresh produce industry is ready to move and lead.
Here's what happened.
Berlin:
Fruit Logistica and the IFPA Executive Leadership Summit
Our European tour began in Berlin during Fruit Logistica, one of the world's largest fresh produce trade events. On February 3, our team presented at the IFPA Executive Leadership Summit to a room of hundreds of senior executives from global fresh produce companies.
The session, titled Full Circle Integration: Building Resilient Supply Chains That Drive Business Value, was designed around a simple provocation: supply chain isn't a back-office function anymore — it sits at the center of regulatory compliance, sustainability commitments, market access, and commercial strategy. Drew Zabrocki opened by asking the room to raise their hands if supply chain decisions in their organizations affect more than just logistics. Nearly every hand stayed up.
Steve Alaerts of foodcareplus moderated a panel that included Drew, Martha King, Karl McDermott of DeltaTrak, and Elad Mardix of Clarifresh. Steve didn't go easy on the panelists — his opening question to Drew was blunt: "What are you actually doing right now that adds value for the businesses in this room?"
The panel covered real ground. Karl McDermott spoke about why an established industry leader like DeltaTrak sees this work as bigger than any single company. "This has to do with thinking generationally — thinking about the legacy we're creating," he told the room. Elad Mardix shared an honest account of Clarifresh's journey — joining SCOTF early, stepping away to build their business, and returning to find meaningful progress. His takeaway: the quality inspection and visibility tools Clarifresh builds become exponentially more valuable when shared standards and interoperable systems exist across the supply chain. Martha connected the work to the policy landscape, pointing to the EU's Digital Product Passport requirements, deforestation due diligence rules, and packaging regulations as reasons to act now rather than later.
The session's table exercise drew animated responses from participants across the room. Participants engaged in an interactive exercise sharing their thoughts about regional relevance, future-proofing priorities, and what it would take to get more deeply involved. The results were striking. Data standards and harmonization emerged as the single most requested enabler, with nearly a third of respondents asking for a common language across quality benchmarks, food safety accreditation, sustainability reporting, and logistics data. Technology adoption — particularly AI, shelf-life prediction, and digital platforms — was the top future-proofing priority, cited by 46% of participants.
The energy in Berlin wasn't about SCOTF's agenda. It was about an industry recognizing that collaborative infrastructure is something worth investing in — and that the people already doing it are the ones to learn from.
Antwerp:
The Port and the Problem of Perishable Logistics
Standing on the port grounds, watching container operations that handle millions of tons of fresh produce annually, the gap between digital ambitions and physical reality becomes visceral. Tineke Van de Voorde and the Port of Antwerp-Bruges team hosted a tour that reinforced something the SCOTF community has been building toward: at this scale, supply chain interoperability isn't a nice-to-have. It's infrastructure.
The visit underscored something the Berlin tables had surfaced independently: data standardization in logistics isn't an academic exercise — it's an operational necessity. Perishable goods moving through complex port systems face commercially-motivated shipping delays, inconsistent temperature monitoring, and fragmented data handoffs between carriers, terminals, and receivers. The discussions in Antwerp explored how port community systems and standards bodies like IPCSA could connect with SCOTF's work on harmonized data exchange, particularly around the first-mile and last-mile challenges that affect product quality and shelf life.
The conversations in Antwerp reinforced a through-line that carried into Amsterdam: the same data standards that help a berry clamshell tell its freshness story at retail also need to work at the port, in the container, and along the transport corridor.
The port community already understands what many in our industry are just learning: data standardization isn't a technology project. It's an operational necessity that enables everything else. The partnership conversations are early. But the alignment is real — and it's driven by the port teams and standards bodies who see the same problems from a different vantage point.
Noordwijk: The GS1 Global Forum
The week's final — and largest — stop was the GS1 Global Forum in Noordwijk, just outside of Amsterdam, where the SCOTF team participated in multiple sessions and a hands-on workshop that brought together GS1 member organizations, retailers, solution providers, and standards leaders from around the world.
The GS1 Global Forum is where the technical architecture conversations happen — and this year, those conversations carried a weight that felt different.
Sessions on verifiable credentials, resolver stacks, and agent-ready data weren't abstract protocol discussions. They were the building blocks of a supply chain where products compete for machine execution. Data doesn't just describe products anymore — it determines whether those products get seen, moved, and sold.
Here's what crystallized in Amsterdam: architecture is governance. The technical decisions being made right now about how data flows — who controls it, who can verify it, who gets to query it — are the governance decisions that will define this industry for the next decade. The work SCOTF's Technical Working Groups are doing, the pilots our partners are running, the standards the F49 committee is accelerating — these aren't separate workstreams. They're the industry deciding, collaboratively, how it wants to govern its own data future.
If the industry doesn't shape those decisions together, someone else will shape them for us.
The Panel: From Industry Needs to GS1 Solutions
Drew Zabrocki, Martha King, Liz Sertl of GS1 US, and Jaco Voorspuij of FixLog Consulting took the stage for a panel session titled Retail and Marketplaces: From Industry Needs to GS1 Solutions.
The panel was structured around three acts: why now, the proof that it's working, and where it goes next. Drew opened with the origin story of SCOTF — an initiative born not from a top-down mandate but from industry practitioners who came together because the problems demanded it. "We didn't start with standards — we started with problems," Drew told the room. "But every time we followed the thread, it led back to GS1."
Liz Sertl brought the perspective of GS1 US and the engagement momentum she has witnessed: producers, retailers, logistics providers, and solution providers stepping up not just to inform standards but to put them into practice. She was candid about the adoption gap — GS1 standards are strong at the shipping dock and the store, but thinner through the warehouses and back to the farm. "When adoption is the challenge, the answer isn't better standards — it's standards that deliver value people can feel in their operations," she said.
Jaco Voorspuij provided the technical depth, explaining how GS1 Digital Link and the Smart Data Escrow (SADIE) architecture work together. The 2D barcode and Digital Link serve as the carrier to information sources, but the industry needs more than identification — it needs authentication, authorization, and trustworthy attestation of data exchanged between trading partners. SADIE provides that capability layer on top of GS1 standards: decentralized resolvers, dynamic linking, smart contract execution, and cryptographically secured claims that can be verified without exposing underlying data. As Jaco put it: "GS1 solved identification. SADIE solves authorization. Together, it's a complete solution."
Drew then walked the audience through active pilots. Driscoll's and Walmart are working with a 2D barcode on berry clamshells that unlocks different data for different audiences — freshness data for retail receiving, shelf-life predictions for operations, sustainability attestations for compliance, and origin stories for consumers — all from a single code, with data sovereignty maintained.
Martha closed the panel's main arc by grounding the vision in operational and governance reality. SCOTF's strategy is not one-size-fits-all — its engagement is nuanced for each region and regulatory environment, from WTO engagement on Technical Barriers to Trade to work with European and Southern Hemisphere governmental and non-governmental entities. "We're globally influential because we're locally relevant," Martha told the room. "The same framework works in Berlin, Bogotá, and Cape Town — because the problems are the same, even when the contexts are different."
The Workshop: Event Storm
On Wednesday afternoon, the SCOTF team hosted an invitation-only Event Storm workshop. Participants from GS1 member organizations around the world rolled up their sleeves to map how data flows today in fresh supply chains, identify friction points, and co-design realistic adoption pathways. When asked about the biggest frictions in making GS1 standards work in practice, the most common responses were that data doesn't flow between partners, that standards exist but adoption is too complex, and that there is no alignment between trading partners on what "good" looks like — familiar themes that SCOTF's technical working groups are addressing head-on.
If the industry doesn't shape those decisions together, someone else will shape them for us.
The Human Thread
But these weeks also carried something heavier than the agenda.
Without sharing details that aren't ours to share — these weeks brought sharp reminders of how fragile everything is. Health scares. Illness sweeping through the group. Travel that tested patience and flexibility.
And somehow, those things didn't darken the trip. They illuminated it.
Here's what keeps coming back: we take so much for granted. The ease of getting on a plane. The freedom to sit across a table from someone. The luxury of calling people "colleagues" when they've long since become something closer to family.
To the people who made these weeks what they were, thank you. The work goes beyond deliverables and agendas. It always has.
What's Next
The conversations in Berlin, Antwerp, and Amsterdam confirmed what we've been hearing from every region: the industry is ready to move from frameworks to implementation. The next opportunity to be part of that is the Fresh Futures Global Collabathons on March 31 and April 16 — two virtual, hands-on working sessions where participants from across the supply chain will collaborate on the practical challenges of standards adoption, data interoperability, and pilot design.
Interested in getting involved?
Sign up here - or contact us at info@scotf.org to learn more about working group participation, pilot opportunities, and upcoming retail engagement events.
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