Our mission to eliminate seafood waste often strikes a chord with those who hear it. It’s understandable - sustainability is a hot topic these days. In many cases though, people aren’t sure how to connect the dots between this and our focus on building the world’s seafood marketplace.
Let’s break it down for you here…
Imagine a 140,000 seater stadium filled with people - that’s the seafood industry. Each seat is a business. You’re on one side of the stadium with a pile of fish. The fishmonger (retailer) who needs the fish is on the other side.
The only people you can speak, and therefore sell, to are the ones you can shake hands with - roughly the 20-30 people around you. That’s the average number of contacts the typical seafood trader has.
It’s a global industry operating at handshake level
You manage to sell your fish to someone at the edge of your circle. Now they have a pile of fish to sell.
They do the same, selling to one of their 20-30 contacts. But they’ve now added a little bit onto the price to ensure they’re compensated for their efforts. And this continues - up to as many as 7 or 8 times before it finally reaches its destination.
Sounds simple right? Inefficient and increasingly expensive depending on where you are in the chain, but nevertheless relatively simple.
Now imagine that the price of fish is constantly going up and down throughout this process.
What would you do if you bought the pile of fish and then the market price suddenly dropped?
You might decide to hold onto it for a day to see if the price goes up. But it’s a perishable product - as you continue to hold onto it, its quality (i.e. freshness) reduces; and the lower the quality, the less it’s worth. You need to make the call on whether to take the risk and wait, or sell it for a loss and move on. The information you have to help you make the decision is limited at best, and you have no real way of knowing how reliable any information you do have is.
And despite any uncertainty, you can’t wait too long. The fish has around 10 days total before it’s no longer fit for consumption (depending on the species).
This happens every day, with lots of piles of fish.
So how does our marketplace help?
Through connecting wholesale buyers directly with primary processors (the suppliers responsible for turning the fish into something that goes on your plate).
By reducing the number of middlemen in the process we can help create a fairer market price as well as reduce the time it takes for the fish to pass through the supply chain.
And when we combine that with transparent information to help both suppliers and buyers make decisions with confidence, we can help to ensure every fish harvested makes it onto someone’s plate. 😀
