Media reports about everything from seafood mislabeling to abhorrent labor practices serve as a reminder of the need to maintain traceability throughout the seafood supply chain, but what is the best way to do that?
The nonprofit Future of Fish has produced a guide, Getting There from Here, which offers a snapshot of the state of traceability today and discusses common obstacles. The guide also offers four key principles to keep in mind when looking to enhance traceability. Here’s a short description of each:
- Build it into the business plan: Traceability is like any other strategic investment — it takes research and planning, with a holistic view that considers the economic benefits, not just the costs involved.
- Implement protocols and processes to maximize success: Protocols such as batch/lot numbers can be shared across the supply chain. Maintaining accurate data flow is good for traceability, not to mention the rest of your business. When implementing technology upgrades, consider ways to use those upgrades to improve your data.
- Enhance the data verification process: A traceability program or policy is only as good as the data that supports it. This makes it critical to make sure the data can be verified, not just at either end of the chain, but at every step in between.
- Build trust, share data: No company exists in a vacuum, and the same is true in the seafood industry. Building relationships and establishing practices for exchanging data and other collaborations can help improve efficiency, and it can be done without giving away sensitive proprietary information.
Click here to download a free copy of the guide, which describes these principles in more detail. Also learn more by listening to a discussion of the issue and the guide in the latest edition of SeafoodSourceTV.
