Posts Tagged ‘traceability’


Fish Value Chain Traceability

November 16th, 2008 by Andrew

TraceFish- project  initiated by EU coordinated by Fiskeriforskning (Nofima): the task of the project is to develop standards about what kinds of information should follow products of farmed and wild-caught fish, respectively, and how these data should be coded and transferred electronically.

As per this project, it is mandatory for a fish farm to keep records of supplier and identity of raw materials, assigning a unique ID, and making records of which product go to which customer. Only identifiers of raw materials and finished product are sent to next level in the supply chain.

According to latest reports, ISO committee is commencing project to develop standards for “Traceability of captured Fish and Farmed Fish”, final version of which will be delivered by 2011.

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Posted in End Users, Logistics, Market, Regulations, Value-add | 2 Comments »


Aquaculture regulation

September 26th, 2008 by Andrew

I guess this is a spinoff of Andrew’s post in relation to Brand Canda.

For the aquaculture industry to florish there will have to be inforcement of standards based on the roles outline in Andrews post.

As the industry grows, there is likely to be imitators who will try to profit from using low value of fish traded as higher value fish. One possible approach to reducing the chance of this may be imposing standards of accountability and traceability and environmental impact that are audited regularly. This goes towards a new area which has not really been considered that is the ethical side of aquaculture.

In the modern economy, the consumer is strongly aware of the suppliers ethical alignment, especially when it comes to food. Take Nestle for example, whose extremely wide range of products are frequently boycotted by anti-formula/pro-breastfeeding circuit for the companies past marketing strategies.

As such regulation in the aquaculture industry would be a positive thing in two major ways: to keep out those less scrupulous imitators and for the safety of the consumer. Perhaps this could be facilitated by an international system of labeling ethically farmed fish which is likely to promote customer loyalty to a particular brand in those circles concerned by such issues.

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Seafood Plus project

September 21st, 2008 by Andrew

The Seafood Plus project is an EU 6th Framework project bringing together over 70 research institutions to work on over 20 research proposals.

It is the largest aquaculture project ever funded by the EU at 26m Euros.

The aim of the project is to make it possible to reduce health problems, to prevent major diseases and to increase well-being among European consumers by using the opportunity to apply the benefits obtained through consumption of health promoting and safe seafood products of high eating quality.

Sea food is widely defined and includes finfish. The project will focus on 6 research areas:

  • Seafood and human nutrition
  • Seafood and consumer behavior and wellbeing
  • Seafood safety
  • Seafood from source to consumer product
  • Seafood from aquaculture
  • Seafood traceability to ensure consumer confidence

A key theme of the project is therefore to increase demand for seafood by bolstering customer confidence through improved traceability – they term it “from fork to farm”.

They have looked into technologies such as RFID. They have also done very interesting work around understanding the market demand for fish, for example highlighting that many people want the benefits of Omega 3 through a tablet rather than a whole fish due to taste and odour considerations, and also that fish needs to be adapted to suit popular modern cooking techniques such as stir frying.

I think this is a particularly valuable area of research as the majority of the research cited on this site appears to be motivated by a push strategy (i.e. being led by the industry) whereas this research represents a pull strategy, i.e. being led by the market.

Summaries of their results so far can be found at http://www.seafoodplus.org/Popular_articles.327.0.html 

Further information about the project can be found at http://www.seafoodplus.org/Home.326.0.html

It is also possible to become an Associate Member of the Seafood Plus project, giving access to their research findings faster and in clear language.

This is mainly designed for aquaculture SMEs and larger businesses but may be something that members of the Finfish community could be interested in? More details are available at http://www.seafoodplus.org/Associates_of_SEAFOODp.395.0.html

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