Dundee Tech Firm Wins Agri-industry Award
Dundee-based Tayfusion Digital has recently won the prestigious ‘Best Innovation – 22/23’ accolade at the British Potato Industry Awards. The ceremony took place at the British Potato Show in Harrogate, where the event was sponsored by McCain.
The honor was bestowed in recognition of Tayfusion’s DIG (Data Intelligence for Growers) data management platform. This sophisticated and ever-developing software is proving a huge boon to seed and ware potato growers and merchants across the UK.
“Little did we know that a chat with Tim Fletcher of J&E Smillie Ltd (JES), five years ago would bring us to this milestone. Tim was adamant at the time. The ad hoc and cumbersome prevailing system of managing the real-time life cycle growing, monitoring, harvesting, assessing, stock managing, and selling potatoes was a nightmare,” Mark Mander, Tayfusion’s founder and CTO said.
Mark and Tim, each with their area of expertise, proved a winning combination early on. So much so that an initial DIG feasibility study received a significant grant through SMART: SCOTLAND, administered by Scottish Enterprise. From there, a collection of UK merchants and traders have helped them develop and continuously improve the platform.
“The system was originally developed as a robust and comprehensive tool for stock control, quality control, finance, and overall data management for the seed potato industry, which Scotland is particularly famous for. Since then, we have extended the scope of the platform to cover forecasting, quick trading of ware crops, pool pricing, export management & consignment planning, and much more. Most recently, support for UK quality control passports has been added allowing farms to complete their customer passports using the DIG App,” Mark Mander summed up.
