Seafood traceability is the ability to fully trace a product from the point of sale back to its point of origin. This is required to follow general food law, fisheries control, and fish marketing. Meanwhile, the seafood traceability programs create a system that facilitates better data collection and retention, sharing, and analysis among relevant regulators and enforcement authorities for imported seafood—marking a significant step forward for addressing illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing and seafood fraud.
What is Seafood Traceability Programs Role
The Seafood traceability programs are vital for food safety, prove the legality and verify sustainability. With seafood the most globally traded food commodity, all three aspects are vital, yet there are no international standards related to documentation and record keeping nor to tracking protocols. Traceable seafood means its origin and the way it was caught can be verified. Shockingly, around a third of all seafood traded globally is not what it says it is. This is called seafood fraud. There are two reasons for this: intentional and unintentional.
Traceability become one of the major requirements of seafood industry and some main seafood global market such as U.S develop Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) that establishes reporting and record-keeping requirements for imports of thirteen seafood species groups, to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated-caught and/or misrepresented seafood from entering U.S. commerce. SIMP provides additional protections for our national economy, global food security, and the sustainability of our shared ocean resources that have been implemented since December 31, 2018.
Importance of Seafood Traceability Programs
The need and importance of seafood traceability programs push all stakeholders in the seafood industry to implement traceability in their supply chain. Implementing and managing traceability data is a challenging process for seafood products even managed manually in remote area, small-scale fishers and low infrastructure make traceability difficult to manage. Technology helps to leverage this initiative and create a reliable traceability data process on the supply chain.
Solutions
Nowadays digital traceability plays an important role to support seafood traceability programs and ensure the sustainability of products and food safety issues. Sahabat Laut Lestari a leader in technology provider for seafood traceability develop and introduce TraceTalesᵀᴹ as a trusted traceability software solution for seafood processing companies to digitally capture and manage data collected through all stages, from receiving the raw materials, processing, and packaging, to the shipping and distribution cycle.
