Improve traceability

Seafood products often travel through a complex supply chain before being sold. Maintaining data on how and where the seafood is harvested is essential to verifying its sustainability.

Understanding the issue

To know if your seafood is from an environmentally responsible source, you have to know what kind of fish it is, where it was harvested and how it was caught or farmed.  

This type of information must be recorded at harvest and passed along with the seafood item as it moves through the supply chain. This is known as end-to-end traceability.

In many industries, manufacturers can put a barcode or serial number right on the product. But how do you track a fish? Once a fish has been filleted it can be hard to even determine what species it is.

To complicate things even further, a single fish may change hands and forms multiple times before it is sold at market. There is a high risk that the data about that seafood item gets lost or not carried with the product accurately. But without those data, it is impossible to know if the seafood you buy was caught or farmed sustainably.

A look at the seafood supply chain

Source

Seafood begins its journey when it’s harvested by fishermen or fish farmers. And since seafood is a global commodity, your seafood is often caught on the other side of the world. An astounding 90 percent of the seafood we eat in the United States is imported from other countries.

Processors

Once harvested, seafood is sent to one or more processors to be cleaned, filleted and packed into cans or boxes for market. 

• It’s not unusual for fish to be caught in the U.S., then shipped to China for processing, before being returned to the U.S. to be sold.
• Seafood may switch hands multiple times as it moves from where it was harvested to be auctioned, processed, packaged, distributed and sold.
• Often fish from different vessels or farms are commingled on their way to or when they reach the processing plant. 

Seafood distributors

Once processed, seafood items can often travel to a secondary processor for further product development. Distributors then sell and deliver seafood products to buyers including restaurants, grocery stores or seafood markets. 

Retailers and consumers

Finally, consumers buy the seafood from retailers. Luckily, efforts to improve the traceability of seafood throughout the supply chain are making it easier for seafood buyers to know the environmental and social impact of their seafood.