Leading Australasian TradeTech company TradeWindow (NZX: TWL) is working with the New South Wales Wine Industry Association (NSW Wine) to transform how its members share the unique story behind every bottle with buyers around the world. New South Wales is Australia’s second largest wine producing state after South Australia, accounting for 32% of Australia’s $44 billion wine industry.

TradeWindow’s US FDA award-winning Assure+platform, (formerly known as Rfider), allows producers and exporters alike to engage their customers digitally by instantly connecting buyers to the information they need to make more informed purchasing decisions.

John Pennington, Executive Manager at TradeWindow, says that Assure+ provides a mechanism for businesses to share their stories and prove provenance and sustainability claims.

“Today’s resellers and consumers demand greater transparency and digital age convenience from the brands they choose. The Assure+ platform has been designed from the ground up to help producers capture, store, manage, and share the types of information needed to meet their transparency objectives, be they related to ESG-, provenance or quality,” said Mr Pennington.

The ‘catalogue’ function of Assure+ allows event organisers to select the wines they’d like to showcase at an event and make them instantly available via a unique QR Code. Wine producers control exactly what information they would like to make available and retain full control of the brand experience. NSW Wine was able to onboard 17 wineries onto the Assure+ platform in a matter of days and create its first industry event catalogue in a few seconds. Behind the scenes, the platform ensures product information is presented in the user’s chosen language and that any region-specific content is displayed accordingly.

Fullglass Management Director, Simon West, says the platform has lifted the brand experience and story-telling game for its customers.

“Assure+ enables our winery clients to showcase their portfolio in a uniform digital platform. This a content-rich, electronic catalogue, in which we can tell unique stories behind the wine, direct our core messaging to targeted end-users, and also have the options of traceability and counterfeit elimination,” says Mr West.

The Assure+ platform also gives wineries the ability to instantly create unique identifiers and digital labels for every bottle they produce.

“While we believe digital labels are an inevitability for access into many markets, the opportunity for brands competing on sustainability, ethical production, and high quality to engage consumers in highly innovative, digital ways is massive. Over 80% of consumers in some markets are willing to scan digital labels to receive up-to-date product information.”

“Assure+ is helping our members to tell a more comprehensive and engaging product story to their trade buyers, in a way that meets the digital expectations of the premium brands that NSW Wine represents.”

Darren Oemcke, Director of Hydra Consulting, is pleased with the benefits that his team is seeing through using Assure+.

““We were really pleased with how we were able use Assure+ in the practical application of presenting wines to trade. It added an additional dimension to the tastings, providing easy access to deeper information about products via QR code to the catalogue. We were able to provide better opportunity to connect directly to the winery and a lasting post-event resource for the tasting attendees. Ease of use was a core requirement, and the interface is smooth and intuitive,” says Mr Oemcke.

Mr Pennington adds that, “We are delighted to assist leading brands around the world to tell the stories behind their products. An integral part of this storytelling involves bridging supply chain traceability and transparency information gaps so that decarbonisation, circularity, and ESG initiatives can be better measured, monitored, and shared all the way to the end consumer. The Assure+ platform provides a solution to tackle these challenges.”