Traceability and marine ingredients: Beyond the jargon!

Marine ingredients, such as fishmeal and fish oil are crucial elements of the seafood industry. They provide us with essential nutrients, indirectly through the farmed animals that we eat, and directly through health supplements such as fish oil capsules. 

With production facilities all around the world that manufacture marine ingredients, the raw material used  can be whole fish, by-products, or a mixture of the both. And what are by-products? Most simply put, they are offcuts and trimmings from fish that were originally intended for human consumption. Previously overlooked and underused by the seafood industry, by-products have become an abundant source material and currently make up around a third of the world’s production of marine ingredients.

Traceability: The challenge too big to ignore

Raw materials used to produce marine ingredients represent a unique challenge in terms of traceability as they can be made up of multiple species from a diverse range of fisheries. This makes it challenging to identify or segregate the by-product material. In addition, the supply chain is often complex and hard to define.

The broader seafood industry, including organisations like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), USAID Oceans and Fisheries Partnership, and Seafood Alliance for Legality and Traceability (SALT), acknowledges traceability as a useful tool for food safety, and as a means of combating illegal fishing, and ensuring species authenticity. However, implementation is challenging due to difficulties with data collection, disparate standards, fraud, technological gaps, and a lack of interoperability, which are all factors that the 2021 NOAA Fisheries workshop highlighted as obstacles to widespread adoption.

Regulatory requirements such as the newly agreed EU Fisheries Control System and the forthcoming traceability requirements by the US FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) have put pressure on the industry to develop digital traceability systems. However, one of the biggest challenges posed by evolving traceability regulations is data sharing between multiple stakeholders. It is common for suppliers in the seafood industry to purchase multiple traceability systems in order to share information with different customers. This is not only frustrating for the industry, but also costly and counterproductive.

So, what can be done to improve traceability?

The answer is to look at how other industries standardise processes and enable interoperability to allow effortless data exchange between the systems used by suppliers and buyers. Take the development and ubiquity of the internet for example. You could connect your laptop to any router in the world, irrespective of the brand or make of either product. Equally, you can send an email from a Gmail account to an Outlook account despite Google and Microsoft being two completely different companies. This is thanks to the use of standardised systems of communication that allow different products and companies to communicate and operate with each other. For traceability to become the norm throughout the industry, we must all work together using a common language.

Finding a common language for seafood

We need a standardized language and processes to implement traceability systems and ensure the long-term growth of the industry, and this is where the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) comes in. GDST is an international, business-to-business platform whose aim is to create global industry standards for seafood traceability. Using the framework provided by GDST, MarinTrust aims to enhance all aspects of traceability, most importantly the collection, usage, transfer and management of data.

MarinTrust will work with marine ingredients producers to provide transparency and leadership throughout the industry. The aim is to collaborate with all certified facilities under the MarinTrust programme to build the foundations for full innovative traceability.

What have we achieved so far?

MarinTrust has performed two digital traceability pilots, one in the UK and one in Peru.

In the UK, we worked closely with stakeholders involved in the marine ingredient value chain, including fishmeal producers and retailers. This pilot focused on the understanding of by-product sourcing activities and on the evaluation of existing traceability systems. The pilot was successful in developing the first draft of relevant key mapping elements, while also demonstrating the complexity and variability of processes in the seafood supply chain.

In Peru, we put this map into practice and investigated all aspects of the production process, from fishing to feed dispatch, to assess how the GDST standards can be implemented to enable the use of blockchain.

These pilots confirmed that there are multiple issues relating to interoperability, not least a bottleneck of data exchange caused by disparate and proprietary data systems. In addition, it showed us that it is hard to ensure data integrity when companies rely on manual data entry.

Where next?

The next step is to undertake more pilots in different parts of the world to further test existing data systems and to gain a deeper understanding of the sourcing, production and trade of marine ingredients.

MarinTrust is working with GDST to make the sourcing, production and trade of marine ingredients more explicit within the GDST standards enabling an effortless data exchange between suppliers and buyers of marine ingredients. During the dialogue with GDST, MarinTrust proposed some new Key Data Elements (KDEs) to create the link between wild capture and aquaculture standards.

The MarinTrust programme will continue to contribute towards the standardisation of traceability. Elements of innovative traceability have been included in the current Chain of Custody Standard and MarinTrust is focussing on traceability in the forthcoming Version 3 of the Factory Standard. For relevance and compliance, traceability is a must in the marine ingredients industry and innovation via digitalisation is paramount.

Traceability cannot be done alone, so join the conversation and spread the word.