Customer Spotlight: How Helios Helps a Global Sourcing Director Navigate Unprecedented Disruptions and Climate Change

Michele Conners, Global Sourcing Director at JQI

Francisco Martin-Rayo, CEO/Co-founder of Helios AI

As the global produce market continues to be impacted by unprecedented climate disruptions, companies like Just Quality International are having to rethink their strategic sourcing approaches. In a conversation with Michele Conners, the Global Sourcing Director at Just Quality, we explore how her team is leveraging the Helios platform to navigate the increasing complexity and volatility of agricultural supply chains.

Michelle shares a compelling case study on how Helios helped inform their green bean sourcing strategy, providing a comprehensive global view that enabled them to proactively shift focus to more promising regions. She also discusses the growing importance of the strategic sourcing role, as companies struggle to keep up with disruptions driven by climate change and other factors.

Part I - Where Francisco interviews Michele

Francisco: Hey Michelle, thanks for taking the time to chat with me today! I know you mentioned wanting to do something a bit different for the blog post, rather than just going through a standard Q&A. What were you thinking?

Michelle: Well, I had a couple ideas. We could do a two part conversation - first highlight a case study and then have a broader conversation between the two of us.  On the case study, I really think that the information that Eden did early on with green beans was incredible.

Francisco: Ah yes, the green bean story - that was a great example of how you all leveraged the global insights from Helios. Walk me through what happened there.

Michelle: Absolutely. So the situation was that green bean supplies were really tight, and the season was coming to an end. We wanted to use the Helios data to help position ourselves for the upcoming season.

What we did was ask Eden (Helios’ CTO and co-founder) to pull reports from all the major green bean growing regions around the world - places like the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, Belgium, Poland, Egypt, and so on. When we looked at all that data compiled by Helios, it really gave us a clear picture of where the challenges and opportunities were going to be.

For example, we could very easily see that Belgium had no inventory, they had a horrible pack. And it was legit. Helios validated that terrible pack, that they had nothing in inventory. If I'm going to go and position myself to our sales team and say, “Okay, we're just waiting for Belgium to kick in.” Well, what you have to keep in mind is when there's nothing in the pipeline, no one gets product when the pack starts. You get in line for that product. So that wasn't going to help us.  What the data also showed us was historically, in Belgium, temperatures were running very high, with not that much rain at that time. So based on Helios data we're not anticipating that they're going to have a great pack. So we're not going to put all of our focus on Belgium.  Same with the Northwest, not for the same reasons. I think they were having too much rain.

So based on all of that data, what we ended up doing was identifying that we were going to put all our focus on Poland.  And that's how we use your data. So we went and told customers, “We know you're waiting on green beans. Everyone is out of stock, so we really need to wait for Poland to come on. This is Poland's timing, and this is when we'll be able to start shipping.  And all of that came true - it was awesome for us.

Francisco: That’s so awesome to hear!  Let’s shift gears a little bit - I’m currently at the European Polaris conference, and we continue to hear about all of the disruptions that are happening globally because of climate change.  Our hypothesis is that you're going to see more and more of these disruptions because of climate change. And at the same time, you have a more interconnected world where buyers can compete with you across global markets - how do you think that makes your job more difficult? 

Michelle:  Yes exactly, and this is how Helios becomes a part of our strategic planning. The difficulty currently lies within ourself, and it's making time to go check the data. 

When a new season starts, and new crops start, we should have someone logging in and checking our dashboard every other day. For example, our processors are wonderful people, but of course they're going to do conditioning. Things like, “Oh, you know, we don't have any product and it's very hot, it's cold, it's dry, it's wet, and the currency is a mess.”  And so as JQI that’s a flag that we need to go check. And so I think that the burden is really just putting dedicated personnel on watching that data. And it doesn't take that much time. 

One of the things you and I have talked about is how do we maximize the reports that we get from Helios.  And you guys are always so accommodating.  Anytime we have an ask, next thing I know it's in my mailbox. And I love that. 

Francisco: Thank you! Reach out anytime, always happy to help!  You know, on the reporting side it’s a really interesting point.  Had we started this company five years ago, we never would have been able to do it because we wouldn’t have had access to generative AI and weather data wasn’t detailed enough.  So we would have had to hire all these analysts to write individual reports.  Instead, we use Cersi (our genAI engine we launched in October 2023) to generate all the weekly reports and global commodity reports. Otherwise, we couldn't do it at scale.