Price forecasting: Not a hard egg to crack with AI/ML at your disposal

When Egg Farmers of Canada (EFC) was looking for a price forecasting mechanism, they decided to invest in artificial intelligence and data learning models. They entrusted CRG Solutions to unscramble its data for forecasting price trends. Here’s a deep dive into the implementation

- Soma Tah

Eggs are a staple food around the world and one of the inexpensive protein sources too- but there’s a lot involved in the production to plate- impacting the pricing of eggs. Egg prices generally get determined by keeping egg production, feed costs, climate, seasonality, egg export and shipment schedules in mind. With so many variables driving the demand and pricing, an understanding of the drivers of those demands, costs and prices- a price forecasting mechanism certainly comes in handy, but that depends on the collection and analysis of the right data in a timely manner.

Things that keep the Egg Farmers in the dark

Egg Farmers of Canada (EFC), a leading agriculture non-profit in Canada, was aware of this challenge. Hence, to optimize their planning, they wanted to evolve their processes, analyze complex pieces of data quickly and make the right decisions. EFC manages the country’s supply of quality eggs and also develops a national standard for egg farming. In addition to managing the country’s supply of eggs, EFC also manages the supply of eggs to industrial egg product processing plants through the EFC Industrial Product Program. It’s a lot of eggs and a lot of data that EFC had to manage.

The paper-based data collection was a slow and labor-intensive process. For example, every pallet of eggs that enters a processing plant gets tracked for weight, size, and quality. Incidents that result in lost or damaged eggs, as well as defects, are tracked. The movement of eggs throughout the supply chain also gets recorded. This data is crucial to EFC’s mandate to efficiently manage the national egg supply and maintain the quality standards.