Dabas — your shortcut to market

Your prod­uct is ready. The flavours are spot on. The qual­i­ty is there. The pack­ag­ing looks good. Now for some­thing a lot less fun: the huge load of paper­work before the prod­uct can reach the con­sumers through cater­ing and retail.

Loads of paperwork

Those who are going to sell your prod­uct require an incred­i­ble amount of infor­ma­tion: brand, arti­cle descrip­tion, EAN code, size, weight, min­i­mum and max­i­mum tem­per­a­tures, source of the ingre­di­ents. Fairtrade or organ­ic or MSC brand­ing, mar­ket mes­sage, list­ing price … The list goes on and on.

The fast mov­ing con­sumer goods (FMCG) giants in Sweden: Axfood, Bergendahls, Coop, and ICA, demand a dig­i­tal cer­tifi­cate. And so does Martin & Servera, Menigo, Svensk Cater and the oth­er large cater­ing whole­salers. But small­er com­pa­nies are nor­mal­ly con­tent with a prod­uct sheet.

The giants also want the food­stuffs annex that has infor­ma­tion on ingre­di­ents, nutri­tion, aller­gens, whether it’s halal or kosher etc. Catering com­pa­nies need infor­ma­tion on prepa­ra­tion, num­ber of por­tions, nutri­tion­al and health claims and much more.

If you’re sell­ing to local gov­ern­ments the National Agency for Public Procurement Authority demands that you pro­vide a sup­pli­er’s dec­la­ra­tion about ori­gin, GMO-free, cer­ti­fied palm oil, labour con­di­tions and so on.

It’s not easy being a food producer.

What if it would be pos­si­ble to leave this paper­work to some­one else? Someone who would take care of every detail. Or at least if you could get sup­port through­out the whole process, so you would­n’t need to do it again and again. This is what Dabas does.

A database for food and beverage

Dabas is an arti­cle data­base with infor­ma­tion on most of the foods on the Swedish mar­ket. It’s open and free for any­body who needs infor­ma­tion from it. But to appear in this data­base food and drink com­pa­nies must pay an annu­al fee, and then a fee per product.

The data­base is run by Delfi Marknadspartner, who was there at the begin­ning when DLF, the asso­ci­a­tion for com­pa­nies sup­ply­ing FMCGs took the ini­tia­tive in 1991.

40 000 products

With the dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion in the 1980s cus­tomers of FMCG com­pa­nies request­ed that an “elec­tron­ic” ver­sion of the prod­uct sheets should be avail­able in the dietary plan­ning pro­grammes they were using. But when the big plan­ning pro­grammes start­ed charg­ing for each sin­gle prod­uct the sup­pli­ers were reg­is­ter­ing, it became too cost­ly. DLF decid­ed to do some­thing about it.

– We should­n’t have to pay for all the sys­tems who take part of our infor­ma­tion. Instead we place the infor­ma­tion in a cen­tral data­base, so any­body can retrieve it there, says Joakim Browall who is a part­ner at Delfi Marknadspartner.

In the begin­ning the data­base had about 5,000 arti­cles by 50 food pro­duc­ers. Now, 28 years lat­er, there are more than 40,000 prod­ucts from more than 500 food pro­duc­ers.

More small and medium sized companies

Lately, Dabas has seen more and more small and medi­um sized com­pa­nies in their data­base. One of the rea­sons is stronger regulations.

– The EU no. 1169/​2011 pro­vi­sion on food infor­ma­tion to con­sumers, pub­lished in December 2014, means that detailed infor­ma­tion on any giv­en FMCG must be avail­able online. This has led to that also the small com­pa­nies are real­is­ing they need a solu­tion for that, says Joakim Browall.

An intermediary for the rest of the market

When a sup­pli­er reg­is­ters a prod­uct in Dabas it becomes search­able by every­body – from author­i­ties and com­pa­nies to jour­nal­ists and consumers.

In the Dabas data­base you can search or click your way around to find any of the more than 37,000 arti­cles that are list­ed there. Each arti­cle has detailed infor­ma­tion avail­able to any­body, with­out the need to reg­is­ter an account or to pay for the information.

The benefactor hidden in the wings

– Dabas is an infor­ma­tion provider for all the large pro­cure­ment and dietary plan­ning pro­grammes in both the pub­lic and the pri­vate sec­tor, says Joakim Browall.

Within hos­pi­tal care, elder­ly care and ser­vices, a pro­gramme called Matilda is often used to plan diets of indi­vid­u­als, with infor­ma­tion avail­able in Dabas. For cater­ing com­pa­nies there are the dietary and menu plan­ning ser­vices Aivo, Mashie, Kostdata and Aromi.

You can say that Dabas is the bene­fac­tor hid­den in the wings.

Oiling the wheels of the public procurement machinery

An exam­ple of how Dabas is used in the pro­cure­ment and dietary plan­ning pro­grammes is the han­dling of sup­pli­er’s dec­la­ra­tions required when local gov­ern­ments do their procurements.

The National Agency for Public Procurement has pro­duced cri­te­ria for sus­tain­able pro­cure­ment which are meant to con­tribute to reach the Swedish envi­ron­men­tal objec­tives. When procur­ing local gov­ern­ments can state which of these cri­te­ria are to be fulfilled.

– In Dabas a com­pa­ny can state which of the cri­te­ria of the National Agency for Public Procurement regard­ing sus­tain­able pro­cure­ment a cer­tain arti­cle ful­fils. Dabas is then the infor­ma­tion hub for ver­i­fi­ca­tion of and adher­ence to the cri­te­ria, says Joakim Browall.

When local gov­ern­ments are procur­ing food and drink for schools, elder­ly care, hos­pi­tals etc. they can in these pro­cure­ment and dietary plan­ning pro­grammes choose to see only those prod­ucts which match their set cri­te­ria. They can also down­load the sup­pli­er’s dec­la­ra­tion for every prod­uct and cri­te­ri­on. All sup­plied by Dabas.

Validoo – you mean vindaloo?

Another exam­ple where Dabas acts in the back­ground is spelled Validoo. It is a brand owned by GS1 Sweden, which in turn is owned by the asso­ci­a­tion for sup­pli­ers of FMCG and Svensk Dagligvaruhandel (SvDH).

GS1 Sweden is a mem­ber of the inter­na­tion­al GS1 organ­i­sa­tion that sets stan­dards giv­ing prod­ucts, ser­vices and places all over the world a unique iden­ti­ty. They col­lect data on these and share this infor­ma­tion with­in and between busi­ness systems.

GS1’s most known stan­dard is the bar­code present on all prod­ucts, prob­a­bly on yours too. But that’s not where Dabas enters the scene, they are there in the part about shar­ing information.

Validoo is Sweden’s largest data­base with arti­cle infor­ma­tion accord­ing to the GS1 stan­dard. The data­base holds infor­ma­tion on 330,000 prod­ucts from 2,500 sup­pli­ers and is used by about 70 recip­i­ents with­in FMCG, cater­ing, phar­ma­cies and the Swedish out­let for alco­holic bev­er­ages: Systembolaget.

Article infor­ma­tion is col­lect­ed from var­i­ous entry sys­tems of which Dabas is the largest when it comes to food and beverage.

Joakim Browall thinks that Dabas and Validoo are com­ple­men­tary to each other:

– Together we con­tribute, in dif­fer­ent ways, to a high­er effi­cien­cy in the branch and we help each oth­er to fur­ther devel­op the stan­dard. Generally we work well together.