Agronometrics, a market intelligence company that makes sense of trade data for the fresh produce industry, organized a webinar to provide people in the industry an insight into what goes on behind trade data and to show the ins and outs of their new tool.  

The new Degree of Certainty (DOC) tool that forms part of Agronometric's Global Trade Data (GTD) Platform is designed to measure and visualize the reliability of blueberry exports and import data. 

Key features are certainty estimation for prices, volumes, and values, standard deviation analysis, near real-time, dynamic updates, and the application to export and import data. 

Agronometric's specialty is collecting data about the industry, synthesizing it, and standardizing it, and once that's done, they publish the data in a digestible format for the consumer. 

When introducing participants to the new tool, Agronometrics CEO, Colin Fain, spoke about the company's blueberry trade data, a product they brought together with all the trade data in their hands, put in one database. 

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"This tool features most prominently in the International Blueberry Organization's State of the Blueberry Industry Report," Fain said. "What we've done is taken all of the data reported by the United States, Canada, Chile, Peru, the European Union, China, South Africa, all of the major players, and brought it together under one system, one roof." 

With the Global Trade Data System, the information of the blueberry market in each country is just one click away. All information about imports, exports, history, prices, volumes, and values, are made available within the tool. 

Fain then opened up the conversation about the new Degrees of Certainty tool. "Because this is the global trade data, we have a huge amount of it, so the question is: how much do we trust this data?" 

The tool allows you to calculate how trustworthy it is by looking at how the information is updated.

Peru and trade data

Peru, for example, updates their trade information once volume is loaded onto a ship and it heads out to sea. Taking into consideration Peru's reports and how it updates in time, Fain explains that the Agronometrics team has never had to do an adjustment larger than 170 metric tons in the entire data set they've worked on. 

"What we do is we make that information through a chart," Fain explained, "and we can see that the reported value, the estimated value, and the error range takes into account all of the variants that we've seen in the past. This helps us set an expectation for how that might vary going into the future."

The tool shows you what is being exported, and breaks down the information by destination markets, giving the consumer a decent idea of what's going to be arriving. A powerful tool to "predict" for the future. 

"This industry relies on that," Fain said. "If you want to know what's going to happen in the U.S. when Peru is the major supplier, which is the case, this is your best available indicator for what will happen in the next four to five weeks." 

The tool also provides history that traces back as far as 10 years, so you can see the evolution of Peru, and price ranges and changes. 

Peru is the best information the organization currently make available in global trade data, and the way the information is laid makes the new degree of certainty tool particularly useful for this dataset.

However, the tool is available for all countries, and what the tool does is provide you with a degree of error, that although high at times, can provide the user with an insight into trade and market decisions.