Open Country is New Zealand’s second-largest dairy company. With Fonterra comprising 80% of dairy farms, competition for supply is fierce. However, there is little room in margins to buy volume. Instead, Open Country’s strategy is to be competitive with pricing, and use the service and support it provides to farmers as a means of differentiation.

The brief from Open Country was to create a mobile app that would help their farmer suppliers to produce more and better product. However, this was also coupled with a directive to emulate the Fonterra app as this was the industry benchmark.

My initial response was to help the client see that if their ultimate objective was to differentiate Open Country from competitors, this couldn’t be achieved by following. It was also clear that the Fonterra app had not been designed in consultation with farmers, and that there was considerable scope for creating a more intuitive and useful resource. As such, our only option was to innovate.

I began by facilitating a series of workshops with a cross-section of New Zealand dairy farmers, to learn about their use of technology, the challenges they face and the various ways in which real-time access to production and quality information could help their businesses.

These insights were used as briefing material in a subsequent Design Sprint (https://www.gv.com/sprint/) in which we (design and development team working alongside client decision makers and subject matter experts) were able to design and test a prototype of the app in just five days.

The resulting Open Country app provides farmers with real-time production and quality information, designed for use out on the farm where it’s needed. Nearly all of Open Country’s 1,100 farmer suppliers are using the app on a regular basis, and it is widely regarded as the best in the industry. The strength of this offering has been a major factor in Open Country’s continued success in recruiting new farmer suppliers.