Craig Herkert and Maria Emmer-Aanes join Transparent Path advisory board
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON — NOVEMBER 29, 2018 — Transparent Path, creator of an innovative IoT+blockchain platform for food facts and traceability, today announced the additions of Craig Herkert and Maria Emmer-Aanes to its advisory board.
CRAIG HERKERT brings his lifelong knowledge of the food business to the company’s advisory board. Starting his career in grocery at age 15 at a Jewel-Osco® in Chicago, Craig rose through the ranks to leadership roles in international merchandising, marketing, and operations. He has served as president of Acme Markets, as well as EVP Marketing for Albertsons, where he spent 23 years with the American Stores and Albertsons companies. Craig later served as President and CEO of Walmart Americas, where he managed a $52B book of business across Canada, Mexico, Central and South America.
Craig went on to become CEO of SuperValu, one of the largest companies in the US grocery channel. In addition to his role with Transparent Path, he currently advises a number of startups including GrocerKey, Tea Drops and Tierra Nueva. His considerable experience will guide Transparent Path in addressing retailers’ roles and interest in the supply chain.
Also joining the Transparent Path advisory board is Numi Tea’s VP of Sales and Marketing MARIA EMMER-AANES. A well-known figure in the organic food industry, Maria brings years of food branding, packaging and shopper marketing knowledge to the Transparent Path team. Maria got her start at Grey Advertising in New York before moving on to sales and marketing leadership roles at Target, Great Harvest Bread Company, Nature’s Path Organic Foods, and Litehouse, Inc.
Maria also lends her expertise and counsel to both the Numi Foundation and the Chef Ann Foundation. The former is dedicated to empowering communities through providing clean, safe drinking water and education for low-income students. The Chef Ann Foundation actively supports school districts nationwide through grant programs.
In the food industry, supply chain data is ripe for an upgrade
“The food supply chain is an increasingly complex and dynamic global ecosystem, often rife with contradictory goals,” said Eric Weaver, Transparent Path CEO and Co-Founder. “We’re seeing a lot of acrimony among supply chain partners, mostly because the entire ecosystem lacks a single source of truth. For example, if a trucking company delivers a load of fresh cherries to a foreign buyer, but the product sits in customs and spoils, the buyer will often blame the shipping company, who may or may not be able to prove they met their service level agreements. Then the lawyers get involved and the biggest litigation budget wins — or the trucking company takes the hit in order to preserve the relationship.”
“Now imagine a supply chain where contamination is identified upstream, long before processors, distributors, shippers, retailers or consumers incur any financial, reputational or health risks. Fewer recalls. Trucking companies that don’t get bullied into a million-dollar insurance premium payout. And most importantly, imagine consumers not getting exposed to spoiled meat, because we were able to identify a temperature violation long before the food arrived at retail. That is what we are working to solve. Craig and Maria have lived in retail for decades. With their help on messaging and process, our team will be able to speak to producers and retailers much more powerfully, connecting the dots between our solution and their key performance indicators.”
“Maria, Craig, Eric and I are all Midwesterners,” added President and Co-Founder Mark Kurtz, “and as you’d expect, we’re all quintessentially fact-based, no-nonsense and pragmatic. We can see past the hype to the opportunities that IoT and blockchain technologies bring to food companies. Eric and I are thrilled to add these two very senior food industry leaders to our advisory board as we approach 2019.”
About Transparent Path
Transparent Path Inc. is a supply chain technology company that brings together IoT sensors and blockchain-based traceability to remove all doubt about product origins and provenance. Our software and hardware solution, along with our innovative ProofScore™ transparency ranking model, provides both supply chain partners and consumers with facts about where food and packaged goods products come from, how they moved through the supply chain, and environmental conditions along the way.
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