When a consumer in Lagos picks up a bag of flour or a pack of medicine, there is a quiet question behind the purchase: is this the real thing? On October 24, 2026, Chekkit brought that question into a room full of the people best placed to answer it.
The Trust Summit, held at The Zone, Gbagada, gathered brand owners, manufacturers, supply-chain specialists and technology providers to talk about one idea: product traceability. The day’s consensus was clear. The essence of traceability is to secure the distribution chain, and the tools to do it are maturing fast. What the industry needs now is collective adoption.
From warehouse to final consumer
For Dotun Babatunde, Head of Digital Marketing at Olam Agri, the standout was seeing traceability working in practice rather than on a slide.
“It has been very interesting to see how technology is being used to build trust for brands, and to be able to track how products move from the warehouse all the way to the final consumer,” he said.
That end-to-end view matters because a product passes through many hands between factory and shelf. Every unmonitored handover is a chance for diversion, tampering or counterfeiting. Traceability turns those blind spots into data points a brand can see and act on.
The adoption problem
If the technology works, why isn’t it everywhere? Speakers kept returning to the same answer: traceability only pays off when the whole chain takes part.
Suraj Vaswani, Head of Business, Strategy & Planning at Dana Pharmaceuticals Limited, offered one of the day’s most quotable ideas. “Everyone should come together in unison. Perhaps we should start marketing traceability the way we market other products, stressing that it is important to the whole ecosystem.”
It is a notable reframe. Traceability is usually treated as a back-office compliance cost. Vaswani’s point is that it should be sold, to consumers and partners alike, as a feature worth paying attention to.
Halima Baba, Manager of Business Development at the Africa Resource Centre for Excellence in Supply Chain Management (ARC ESM), pushed the argument beyond any single sector. “Beyond the pharmaceutical companies, everyone playing across the value chain matters. For traceability and its adoption, it is important that all stakeholders work together and look out for the same thing.”
Her message lands hardest in pharma, where a medicine can leave the factory genuine and still be swapped or diverted before it reaches a patient. A secure system is only as strong as its least-connected participant.
Trust, from the shopper’s side
Foluke Makinde, Associate Marketing Director, Core Categories at Golden Penny Foods, Flour Mills of Nigeria, brought the conversation back to the person at the end of the chain.
“Consumers go for what they know, and going for what they know involves trusting the brand,” she said. She described the summit as a good development, giving brands a chance to interact with consumers and build the trust they need, and stressed that trust is built over time.
For tech builders, that is a useful reminder. A verification scan or tracking dashboard is not the end goal. It is one more way a brand keeps its promise, again and again, until loyalty becomes habit.
What comes next
One gap stood out by the end of the day: trade partners. Distributors, wholesalers and retailers control much of the journey between warehouse and consumer, and attendees said the next edition should bring them into the room.
That feels like the right next step. The summit showed that Nigeria’s brands, supply-chain experts and technology providers largely agree on the problem and the tools. The next phase is execution: connecting every link in the chain, and making traceability something consumers expect rather than something they never notice.
If this year’s Trust Summit was about building consensus, the next one will be about building momentum.
