Backstory

Backstory is an agricultural intelligence software company that connects fragmented farm, environmental, certification, and operational data into trusted decision intelligence for organizations across the food and agriculture value chain. Founded by Melissa Baer, who brings over two decades of firsthand experience across food systems, farming, and premium brands, the company was built to solve a persistent industry challenge: critical agricultural data already exists, but it is scattered across farms, certifications, environmental sources, production systems, partner organizations, and spreadsheets, making it difficult to verify claims, assess risk, or identify opportunities with confidence.

The company's flagship product, Prove, is a supplier evidence management platform that consolidates corporate and product claims, certifications, and compliance documentation into a single centralized system. Prove is designed to help brands, retailers, processors, and certification bodies maximize return on investment from their certifications by improving data flow, simplifying user management, and reducing the reporting and audit burden on farmers and growers. The platform enables organizations to substantiate premium claims with trusted, farm-level digital evidence rather than self-reported data.

Backstory serves a broad range of stakeholders in the agricultural ecosystem, including food retailers seeking stronger premium sourcing programs, food brands defending and growing sustainability and provenance claims, food processors looking to reduce supplier acquisition costs and improve supply resilience, financial institutions requiring farm-level risk and resilience data for lending decisions, government agencies, environmental bodies, agribusinesses, and catchment and water management organizations. The platform is positioned as a trust layer for agricultural commerce, enabling buyers to pay premiums for supply that is clearly differentiated and evidenced.

Key capabilities include predictive risk intelligence, supply chain traceability, certification management, and seamless integration of trusted third-party data sources. Rather than simply reporting historical data, Backstory's platform is designed to surface real-time insights and forward-looking signals, helping organizations identify emerging risks before they escalate, uncover hidden opportunities, and determine which producers warrant investment or attention.

For farmers and growers, Backstory aims to reduce repetitive compliance, reporting, and audit work by connecting trusted data sources so that the same information does not need to be submitted multiple times across different systems. Farmers retain control over their own data while enabling downstream organizations to access the intelligence they need. For consumers, the platform helps brands substantiate premium food claims with credible, independent, farm-level evidence, strengthening trust in what makes a product genuinely premium. Notable clients and partners include regenerative agriculture organizations, global logistics and retail brands, and certification schemes operating at a national scale.