Can someone select a product and identify the supply chain that provides it?

Question

Can someone select a product and identify the supply chain that provides it.
How many different firms contribute to the development and delivery of the product from beginning to end?
What new insights do you have about this product?

Answer 1

Let's see if this is what you need. In the retail grocery produce isle is a display of lettuce. That lettuce traveled to the grocer by a wholesale distributor's truck. The distributor loaded up at a wholesaler's warehouse hub. The wholesaler bought from produce packers. The packers were contracted by several farmers to harvest and clean their lettuce in the field, which was then boxed and parked in cooling sheds until the packers found a good buyer. So when I pay the grocer, the grocer pays the distributor, the distributor pays the wholesale warehouse, the warehouse pays the train or truck that delivers from the packers, and the packers pay the farmer, less their charges.

How many firms? Hmm, the number of farmers growing lettuce for public sale (as opposed to virtical integration, wherein a company grows its own for its own supplies), that and there are scads of picking and packing houses, produce warehousing is probably the least numerous in the web, then all the truckers and traders that supply places that buy lettuce for sale (which could include stores that also use their own, like a grocery that also makes salads and sandwiches). Pretty hard to pin those numbers down, but I suspect the department of commerce and department of agriculture could give some numbers, but they aren't specific.

Oh, yes, and I used to live where a fair amount of winter lettuce was grown and sold insurance to some folks in the business (farmers, pickers, packers, truckers) and we talked. That and my undergrad degree was in how businesses work (I don't want to get more specific than that).