With legislation such as country-of-origin labeling (COOL) and the recently passed Food Safety Modernization Act, a growing number of seafood companies are ensuring that they have traceability programs in place.
And it may not be long before seafood traceability is mandatory in the United States. Frank Motta, managing director for SeaSoft, a division of Rhode Island-based industry-specific software development firm Computer Associates, told SeafoodSource recently that a lot of his customers seem to be preparing for the day when seafood traceability is required.
Motta said SeaSoft has quite a few initiatives in the works to help seafood companies comply with new regulations, including a tracking module for U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspections and COOL information.
“Legislation like country-of-origin labeling is really ramping things up,” said Motta. “Import tracking has matured pretty dramatically recently. Computers are moving out of the office and into production and receiving and shipping areas.”
SeaSoft also has a browser-based user interface that’s been scaled to run on any device that can access the Internet, including smart phones. Sales reps can enter orders, confirm inventory availability and check order status from their phones, and executives can monitor key business performance indicators.
“We have a full warehouse management system within warehouses, tracking inventory by pallet ID or case ID. And it’s very timely, much quicker than in the past, and it’s done simply by sending folks out with hand-held devices. What used to take days to physically do can now be done in hours,” explained Motta.
“Back in the day, you would create a work order by hand and then manually keep trace of things. And then it would go back to a production manager at the end of the day, and it wasn’t an easy thing to do. Now you can scan labels, which immediately deducts it from inventory and puts it in a work-in-progress state,” said Motta. “By having these machines in key data capture areas throughout plants, we’ve cut down on redundancies and have much more accurate data capture abilities.”
Traceability is especially important for seafood since seafood products have a relatively short shelf life. Under the Food Safety Modernization Act, the FDA now has the authority to impose fees on companies caught distributing contaminated products, said Motta. With a traceability system, companies can avoid incurring such fees.
“One recall can end a company,” said Motta. “With [SeaSoft software], companies can determine what product needs to be taken off the shelf — specifically which invoices — and the size of the recall will be much smaller. When they know there’s contaminated food in the marketplace, they won’t have to do a major recall because they won’t have to trace back a whole week, which isn’t necessary when proper details are kept.”
