AdamH's Profile

Another consideration that I would have if I were Nestle is how greenwashing products could impact customer’s perception of price. In many people’s mind there is a strong correlation between being sustainable and being expensive. Even if Nestle manages to “green” its supply chain without any large increases in price I’d be curious to figure out how much customer’s perception of price changes when the “greening” is emphasized. Given that Nestle produces a lot of more economic priced goods I do think that they’ll need to make sure that they’re conveying their value proposition clearly to customers. On the other hand if a company like Nestle is able to successfully introduce sustainability into their manufacturing supply chain then I think it’ll be a huge impetus for similar companies that are on the more premium end to be forced into making similar moves.

The US has a long history of protecting industries that it sees as being potentially vital in a military situation. We’ve seen this extensively in shipping where there’s a longstanding requirement set forth by the Jones act that all transportation of US goods between US ports has to be done by US ships and we’re seeing it again here. While these regulations likely do help us keep industries that would be useful in wartime alive I think that we’re starting to really see the consequence they have in situations like the one outlined in this article. In my opinion it makes even less sense when we are enforcing these regulations against countries that have been our longstanding military allies.

I imagine that this will be an area where different strategies make sense for different consumers. For the classic french wines I really can’t imagine that consumers will pay the premium prices if the growing methods or grapes themselves are altered too much. On the other side of the coin I imagine that you can continue to produce Franzia with the most economic means available, whatever those end up being. I find the idea of hybrid grapes pretty intriguing, and even wonder if there may be some genes from plants that are used to even more arid conditions (e.g. cactus) that could be put to use in helping grapes grow in hotter climates.

As stated by a number of previous comments I believe that it will be difficult to persuade China to loosen up its agenda on pushing protectionism to better their own businesses at this point in time. It seems clear that for industries that they have relative mastery over that they will favor their own businesses. I think it may make more sense to adapt some sort of Alibaba-like strategy where you create various holding companies and structure ownership so that the company at least “appears” to be a Chinese company. This may require some transactions first as I’m sure the name recognition would pose a problem.

I’d be curious to see if some sort of profit sharing or cost saving agreement could be reached with the farmers in a manner similar to the other agriculture entrepreneurs who were hacking the microbiome of crops. It seems like similar factors may be in place in terms of trying relatively untested methods that could have substantial upside but may first incur some losses. On a somewhat separate note, another concern that I would have as a farmer is that the increase of data, especially of data in someone else’s hand may further commoditize my business. The products that I’m selling are already commodotized, and if the methods (or at least the day-day results of the methods) become well known it seems as if the process may commoditize further.

From a data collection perspective I find this topic very intriguing. While I think that there are potential hazards in transmitting medical data over additional channels (e.g. unsecured wifi networks) I wonder if that could be balanced out with the wealth of data that we could collect from analyzing the videos once we know the patient outcome. Given that the telehealth systems are already integrated with Epic I think it would be a relatively straightforward next step to match the diagnosis code with the video for each patient. This could provide a training set for machine learning algorithms that could start to learn how to assist in diagnosis patients in the future.