Stephen DeAngelis, founder, president and chief executive officer of Enterra Solutions, said the war in Ukraine, one of the world’s leading exporters of wheat, corn, barley and sunflower oil, along with the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, have dramatically changed the global supply and demand picture.
“We have been able to use our technology to forecast rather effectively the change in the supply chain, including the challenges of getting grain out of Ukraine, which has resulted in price inflation and demand signal changes from consumers and to be able to use that to balance demand and supply across the global value chain,” DeAngelis told World Grain.
Enterra Solutions, which provides data and analysis to many of the world’s largest companies, including those in the global food industry, also recently added a key human asset with ties to the Black Sea region — Vladyslava Magaletska, former deputy minister of Food and Agriculture for Ukraine and head of Food Safety and Consumer Protection.
Magaletska, who now resides in Warsaw, Poland, joined Enterra in August 2022 as a senior adviser. She helps lead the strategy and expansion of Enterra’s ADS technology and management practices in the global agricultural value chain.
“Vlada and I had a great meeting in Warsaw,” DeAngelis said. “We hit it off personally, and her skillset aligned with what we needed. Her background is unique in that she’s been both a government civil servant but also worked in the commercial banking sector for a trading company. On top of that, Vlada has a PhD in cybernetics from a leading Ukrainian university. We’re an artificial intelligence company, so for her to have a PhD in the field of study that we’re in made for a perfect match.”
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Magaletska said that from 2014-16 she was responsible for “any kind of grain export activities in the country as well as making sure deals were set up for producers to produce and sell grain.” She opened over 35 export markets for Ukrainian exporters during her tenure and improved transparency in several areas, including food safety, state regulation of pricing and phytosanitation.
She has witnessed during the 21st century Ukraine’s development into one of the world’s top producers and exporters of wheat, corn and other agricultural products, so her reaction to the recent news that Russia, which invaded Ukraine 17 months ago, was withdrawing from the Black Sea Grain Initiative which allowed safe passage of grain from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports during the past 12 months, was one of great concern. She told World Grain that even with the improvements made on the Danube River, an alternative Ukrainian route for grain exports, it can’t replace the volume of grain that is shipped via the Black Sea.
“It’s a quite small amount compared to the southern ports,” Magaletska said “It’s not enough.”
Combining Magaletska’s experience and knowledge of the war-torn region with Enterra’s artificial intelligence-based technological analysis provides an in-depth picture of how the Russia-Ukraine war will impact markets and influence how its clients do business, DeAngelis said.
DeAngelis said the AI-based system is constantly combing for data that is relevant to Enterra’s clients, which he said includes one company in which “20% of humanity that has money buys something from them every day.”
“It’s not just a set of policy choices; it’s thousands of decisions every day that have to be made to form a set of micro-adjustments to balance demand and supply, to balance inflation and balance pricing so that our clients don’t price products too high so consumers can’t afford them,” he said. “We are aggregating all the information to make literally tens of thousands of decisions a day for very large companies so they can function effectively.
“In order to make these thousands of decisions per day, you need to be able to have a class of decisions that are made autonomously (using AI). There’s also the class of decisions where the system makes informed recommendations to humans to take action. There are just too many decisions to have it all done manually, so what we’ve done is build an autonomous, intelligent enterprise.”
If a supply or demand balance goes undetected in the agricultural space, the consequences can be devastating to a company, he said.
“For example, when raw ingredients experience shortages or sell out, businesses may need to pay more for the raw ingredient or find alternative sources or alternative ingredients to produce the end-customer product — likely at a higher price and with a delay to consumers,” DeAngelis said. “In extreme scenarios, it could even lead to the businesses inability to produce and deliver its product to the end customer entirely.”
Enterra’s products and analysis as it relates to global grain production improves understanding of current vegetation health, underlying environmental conditions, such as soil moisture, and eventful impacts on yields, DeAngelis said.
“This means fewer surprises, better decisions and happier customers,” he said.
Climate change, which is having a profound impact on global grain production and consumer demand, is being examined closely by Enterra’s AI system. He noted that migration patterns stemming from climate change are starting to have a significant impact.
“People that live on or near the equator are tending to migrate north or south to get away from the hotter temperatures,” DeAngelis said. “The hotter temperatures are causing crops to be grown differently. We have to find ways of rebalancing. What that means is going to be different demand signals for consumers moving from one part of the world to the next. There will be changing buying patterns.
“It prompts changes in supply, changes in demand signals for consumer preferences of products, and it drives changes in the yield of agricultural products that supply the supply chain. All of this needs to be dynamically modeled and forecasted so you have the right product on the shelf at the right retailer, or online at the right time for people to consume it.”
