Sustainable Agriculture Mobile Commerce (SamCom) - Extending the rural grocery supply chain through M-Commerce

Despite the popularity of integrated grocery supply chain management as a research area for both academic and industry researchers, little work has yet been undertaken on how to link primary producers into the chain. In this paper we provide an introduction to SamCom (a joint university/ industry project), which will investigate the feasibility of using mobile phones to capture and transmit supply chain food product information from primary producers to the next link in the supply chain: supermarkets, restaurants, or export partners. The project will focus on the sustainable agriculture sector and will comprise two sub-projects: an investigation of the acceptability and use of M-commerce by primary producers themselves; and a technical investigation of the techniques needed to capture and transmit food produce data using mobile phones from remote and rural areas. The paper provides an overall description of the project, briefly covering the existing grocery supply chain literature, then describes the project´s aims (generally, and in terms of the two sub-projects) and finally considers the potential contributions a successful outcome might have to offer.