Supply chain risk management firm Authentica is using an ingredient as simple as baker’s yeast to bolster food safety and risk management in the global seafood supply chain.
Authentica Founder and CEO Mike Borg told SeafoodSource at the 2025 Seafood Expo North America, which took place 16 to 18 March in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., that importers, distributors, and anyone else who receives food products in their final packaged form obviously want to ensure they’re getting what they paid for. However, that can be difficult in a supply chain as complex as seafood’s.
That’s where Authentica’s technology comes in. By applying a little bit of baker’s yeast to a food product – which the firm calls a BioTag – at any point along its supply chain an importer or distributor can run the product through a standard molecular test to ensure that BioTag is still accounted for.
Borg said applying the BioTag is most valuable at the earliest possible point in the supply chain, preferably at a food product’s point of origin, such as a fish farm or processing facility.
“It’s applied to seafood in various ways, most often during a wash or an ice bath, and we apply it at just a few parts per million. You wouldn’t know it was there unless you were testing for it,” he said. “It doesn’t affect the products you apply it to. It’s not going to grow because it’s inactive. It’s not living.”
Borg further explained that the technology not only ensures that a shipment has come in as advertised, it can also determine whether any part of a shipment was adulterated somewhere along the supply chain. In other words, if the BioTag is not detected throughout an entire sample, some part of the shipment was altered.
“Let’s say a shipment was partly adulterated with lower-quality, non-sustainable shrimp. We can verify how much of that shipment was adulterated,” he said.
Authentica, which was spun off from Burlington, Ontario, Canada-based biotechnology solutions firm Index Biosystems – a firm that Borg also founded – is so confident that its BioTags can detect deviations in quality that it is offering compensation if it fails to do so.
“We financially guarantee that we can detect where the fraud or misrepresentation is occurring along the supply chain,” Borg said. “If not, we pay out up to 100 percent of each shipment’s value.”
By trade, Borg is a software and data engineer, but grew fascinated with genetic science and molecular biology. One startup he worked with earlier in his career was a medical cannabis production company in which Borg tracked products through DNA tracing – a methodology Borg believes has been enhanced through the BioTag yeast technology his firm has developed.
“So many of the challenges present throughout supply chains relate to the inability to inextricably link the digital with the physical. If you don’t have a digital-physical link regarding data, you’re solely relying on trust,” he said.
The BioTag technology, which Authentica markets as a “microscopic passport,” is especially important as the seeming unpredictability of global tariffs make a product’s point of origin essential to define for importers and exporters around the world, Borg added.
“The last thing you want is for a particular shipment to be called into question at a border due to some discrepancy, such as a documentation issue,” he said. “This would be the gold standard in verifying compliance with the shifting requirements we’re seeing. The demand has been incredible.”
Signaling the strength of that demand, Index Biosystems closed an oversubscribed USD 5 million (EUR 4.4 million) fundraising round in early March, led by Austin, Texas, U.S.A.-based KdT Ventures with support from firms Ferment, Undeterred Capital, Trailhead Capital, CoFound, and Conscience VC. Borg and Index quickly followed the announcement of the funding with the launch of Authentica.
