The loss of privacy in the Internet age is not such a bad thing, if you’re talking about fish. With the rise of both imported product and sustainability pledges made by retailers, a seafood product’s full history is becoming more important than ever to track down and verify.
Fortunately, seafood software developers are making it easier for suppliers to report where a fish came from and every step it took along the supply chain. In addition, the increasing availability of these programs on wireless, handheld devices is helping increase the efficiency and accuracy of both external and internal data management.
“At some point in time if you can’t prove where you’re getting the product from, the retailers won’t buy from you,” says Steve Weaver, systems analyst with Lan Infosystems in Plymouth, Mass., maker of NetYield software. “Country-of-Origin [Labeling] started that with the retailer requiring that information, and I think now the sustainability programs are going to have another level of compliance needed just to be a business partner with that retailer. An offline system for recording that information just isn’t good enough anymore.”
Lan Infosystems has taken the features already in place for NetYield, a weight-based inventory control and accounting software, and enhanced them to make it easier and faster to find out where a product came from.
“We’ve added some additional tools and made it easier to get that reporting out of the system and see what’s going on as the inventory’s moving and not have to replicate that information every time,” says Weaver.
He points out that a product’s history is not always a straightforward answer in the seafood industry. A whole fish may become a skin-on fillet, which may become a skin-off fillet or other value-added product. That fish may also have been commingled with fish from several boats that fished in different areas.
All of that information is important to know whether you’re verifying if a product came from a certified-sustainable fishery or you’re tracking down product for a recall.
Click here to read the full story, which ran in the January issue of SeaFood Business magazine >
