Help Center

1. Account & Profile Setup

Creating Your Account

You can sign up for Material Transition using your Google account, Microsoft account, or a standard email and password. OAuth sign-in via Google or Microsoft is the fastest path — it requires no password and keeps your credentials managed by the provider you already trust. To sign up with email, navigate to /signup, enter your work email, create a password, and verify your address via the confirmation email sent through our Resend-powered transactional email system.

Completing Your Profile

After signing in for the first time you will be prompted to complete your profile. We recommend filling in your company name, job title, and industry so that the platform can surface the most relevant supplier categories for your use case. Profile information is stored securely in Supabase and is never shared with third parties without your consent. You can update your profile at any time from Account Settings.

Workspace Creation

Material Transition supports workspaces for team collaboration. When you first log in, a personal workspace is created automatically under your account. To invite team members or create a shared workspace, visit your account settings and follow the workspace setup wizard. Workspaces use a UUID-addressed model — there are no public-facing URL slugs, keeping your team's data private by default.

2. Supplier Discovery

Using the Discovery Page

The Discovery page is your primary search interface for finding suppliers across the full Material Transition database. At the top of the page, the search hero accepts free-text queries — type a material name, supplier category, location, or certification to get started. Results appear as supplier cards below, each showing the supplier name, category, location, and a short AI-generated summary.

Filtering Results

• Category filter: Narrow results to a specific material type (biopolymers, chemical suppliers, food suppliers, etc.).
• Location filter: Restrict results to a specific country, region, or proximity radius.
• Certification filter: Surface only suppliers with specific certifications (organic, REACH, GFSI, cruelty-free).
• Sort order: Relevance (default), name A–Z, or most recently added.

Supplier Cards

Each supplier card in the results list shows the company name, data category badge, location, and key attributes extracted from the source record. Clicking a card opens a detail panel with the full supplier profile, including website, AI-generated summary, key properties from the JSONB data model, and any certifications on file. From the detail panel you can save the supplier to your workspace or copy a direct link.

3. Geographic Mapping

The Map Interface

The Map page renders all geocoded suppliers from the Material Transition database on an interactive MapLibre GL JS map powered by OpenStreetMap data. No API key or third-party map service account is required. The map loads instantly and supports smooth pan, zoom, and click-to-inspect interactions across the full 59,000+ supplier dataset.

Basemap Toggle

Use the basemap toggle in the map toolbar to switch between the light CARTO Voyager style and the dark CARTO Dark Matter style. The light basemap is optimized for daytime use and dense urban supplier clusters; the dark basemap is better for presentations and low-light environments.

Supplier Pins & Detail Panel

• Supplier locations are clustered at low zoom levels and expand to individual pins as you zoom in.
• Clicking a pin opens the detail panel on the right side of the screen, showing full supplier information.
• Use the category legend (bottom-left) to toggle visibility of specific material categories on the map.
• The toolbar search field filters visible pins in real time without leaving the map view.

Geographic coordinates are parsed from a combination of combined "Lat/Long" fields (covering ~56,000 records) and separate Lat/Lng columns (~3,700 records). If a supplier has no coordinates on file, it will appear in Discovery results but not on the map.

4. Materials Database

About the Database

The Materials page provides access to the full polymorphic materials database — currently over 59,000 records stored in a single material_transition_database table using a JSONB properties column. This design allows one schema to accommodate 500+ distinct material attribute patterns without requiring separate tables for each material type.

The 7 Data Categories

• Biopolymers: Biodegradable plastics, biobased composites, PHA, PLA, and related polymer families.
• Advanced Biomaterials: High-performance materials for medical, aerospace, and specialty industrial applications.
• Biomass Feedstocks: Agricultural residues, cellulose, lignin, and other biological raw material sources.
• Chemical Suppliers: Industrial chemicals, specialty reagents, and process chemistry providers.
• Food Suppliers: Food-grade ingredients, additives, and processing aids.
• Cosmetic Suppliers: Cosmetic-grade actives, excipients, and formulation ingredients.
• Beverages Suppliers: Beverage ingredients, flavors, and functional additives.

Filtering, Sorting, and Details

Use the category dropdown to limit the table to one or more data categories. The search field runs a full-text query across name, summary, and keyword fields. Click any row to open the detail drawer, which surfaces all available JSONB properties for that record including source metadata, certifications, and the AI-generated summary. Columns can be sorted by name, category, and date added.

5. Products & Suppliers

The Products Page

The Products page presents supplier-linked product records in a card grid layout. Each ProductCard shows the product name, category badge, supplier name, and key attributes. This view is designed for product-first discovery — when you know what type of product you need but not which supplier makes it.

Viewing Supplier Relationships

Clicking a ProductCard opens the product detail view, which includes the full product specification from the source record and a link to the parent supplier profile. From the supplier profile you can view all other products offered by the same company, jump to their website, or open their pin on the Map.

Data Coverage

Product records are sourced primarily from the Knowde dataset (200K+ products) and are cross-referenced against the broader supplier database via entity resolution. Not all products have a matched supplier record — in those cases the supplier name from the source data is shown as plain text rather than a linked profile. Coverage expands continuously as new data is ingested and matched.

6. AI Search & Semantic Matching

How Semantic Search Works

Material Transition uses OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small model to generate 1536-dimensional vector embeddings for every supplier and material record. When you submit a natural-language query, the same model converts your query into a vector and the platform runs a cosine similarity search against the database using a pgvector HNSW index. This means your results are ranked by meaning, not just keyword overlap — searching "plant-based packaging film" will surface relevant biopolymer suppliers even if they never use that exact phrase.

Hybrid Search

For the best results, Discovery uses a hybrid search combining semantic vector search with traditional full-text search via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF, K=60). This blends the precision of keyword matching with the recall of semantic similarity, so you get strong results whether your query is a specific product name or a broad concept.

The AI Drawer

The AI drawer (accessible from any page in the app) connects to a conversational AI agent powered by OpenRouter. You can ask open-ended questions about suppliers, materials, certifications, or supply chain relationships in plain language. The agent has access to the full knowledge base and will cite specific supplier records, data sources, and database sections in its responses. Citations are shown as inline references that link directly to the relevant record.

7. API Access for Developers

Getting Started with the API

Material Transition exposes a versioned REST API at /api/v1/ for programmatic access to supplier and material data. The API is served by a separate SvelteKit application (the apps/api workspace) deployed on Vercel. Full OpenAPI 3.0 documentation is available at /api/v1/openapi.json on the API domain.

Authentication & API Keys

Protected endpoints require an API key passed as either an Authorization: Bearer <key> header or an X-API-Key: <key> header. To obtain an API key, contact us via the Contact Form and describe your intended use case. A demo key is available for evaluation purposes:

• Demo key: mt_demo_1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef
• Rate limit: 60 requests per minute
• Daily limit: 10,000 requests per day

Key Endpoints

• GET /api/v1/materials — List all materials with optional category filter
• GET /api/v1/search/text?q=query — Full-text ILIKE search
• POST /api/v1/search/semantic — Vector similarity search (send {"query": "..."})
• POST /api/v1/search/hybrid — Reciprocal Rank Fusion combining text + semantic
• GET /api/v1/biopolymers — Paginated biopolymer records (auth required)
• GET /api/v1/health — Health check (no auth required)

Rate limit usage is tracked per minute and per day. Exceeding limits returns a 429 Too Many Requests response. For higher limits or enterprise access, contact the team via Contact Form.

8. Troubleshooting

Login Problems

• OAuth sign-in fails: Make sure you are using the same provider (Google or Microsoft) that you originally signed up with. Switching providers creates a new account.
• Email/password sign-in fails: Use the "Forgot Password" link on the login page to reset your password. Check your spam folder for the reset email.
• Session expired: Refresh the page or navigate back to /login. Sessions are managed by Supabase Auth and expire after a period of inactivity.
• Account not found: You may have originally signed up with a different email or OAuth provider. Try the other sign-in option, or contact support.

Missing or Incomplete Data

The Material Transition database is continuously updated from multiple pipeline sources (Apify scrapes, N8N mapping, SQL deduplication). If you notice a supplier that should exist but does not appear in search results, it may be pending deduplication or still in the ingestion queue. For urgent data gaps, use the Contact Form to flag missing records.

Slow Searches

• Semantic and hybrid searches involve vector operations on a 59K+ record database — response times of 1–3 seconds are normal for complex queries.
• If searches are consistently taking longer than 5 seconds, try refreshing the page and running the query again.
• Very broad queries (single-word) may return large result sets that take longer to render — add a category or location qualifier to narrow the scope.

Browser Support

Material Transition is tested and fully supported on the latest stable versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. The map interface (MapLibre GL JS) requires WebGL support, which is enabled by default in all modern browsers. If the map does not load, check that hardware acceleration is enabled in your browser settings.

9. Contact Support

Reaching Our Team

The fastest way to reach the Material Transition support team is through the Contact Form. Provide as much detail as possible — including the page you were on, what you were trying to do, and any error messages you saw — so we can resolve your issue quickly. For API-related inquiries or enterprise access requests, please include your use case and expected request volume.

Response Times

We aim to respond to all support requests within 1–2 business days. Transactional emails (password resets, account confirmations) are delivered in real time via the Resend email platform — if you have not received one within a few minutes, check your spam folder or contact us to resend it. For critical issues affecting production API integrations, flag your message as urgent in the contact form and we will prioritize accordingly.

Additional Resources

• Privacy Policy — How we handle your data
• Terms and Conditions — Platform usage terms
• Contact Form — General inquiries, data requests, and feedback
• API documentation: /api/v1/openapi.json on the API domain