Tracing the Fish on Your Plate Back to the Sea

Combatting overfishing and fraudulent mislabeling  while getting fishermen a better price for their catch. JL

Catherine Elton reports in Bloomberg:

DNA tests on 1,200 fish samples and found that one-third had been mislabeled.(With tracing) data are uploaded into the cloud, where they can be retrieved by a diner at a restaurant in Santiago by waving a smartphone over the menu.
For decades, José Barrios has made a living pulling flounder and abalone out of the frigid waters off Chile’s central coast using nothing more than nets, an iron hook, and his strong back. Today, the 56-year-old fisherman also taps into satellite networks and the cloud to earn the best possible price for his catch.
Barrios is one of about 250 Chilean fishermen who have signed on with Shellcatch, a San Francisco startup seeking to profit from the growing demand for sustainable seafood. The company hopes its technology will combat the overfishing and fraud that threaten the international seafood trade. The Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that one out of five fish taken from the ocean is caught illegally, depleting stocks of certain species to levels that imperil their survival. Whether it’s to avoid fines for fishing without permits or going over their quota or simply to boost profits, fishermen often try to pass off one type of fish as another. Oceana, a U.S. nonprofit, ran DNA tests on 1,200 fish samples and found that one-third had been mislabeled, according to a 2013 report. “We think technology in the seafood space can disrupt the way business is being done, which currently involves large amounts of species fraud and illegality,” says Shellcatch founder Alfredo Sfeir. “Technology allows you to know the people behind your fish. That’s how it used to be.”

Fishing boats are outfitted with a combination GPS and camera to record the haul.

Source: Courtesy Shellcatch

According to Barrios, he and others who use Shellcatch earn a 25 percent premium, on average, for their catch from upscale restaurants and supermarkets that want to know what waters their lenguado (sole) or chancharro (red snapper) came from. Barrios, who heads a national confederation of small fishermen, believes Shellcatch can help reverse decades of overfishing. “With Shellcatch, we can fish less and still earn the same amount,” he says.
Sfeir, a Chilean American, launched Shellcatch in 2011 and then recruited fishermen to test his technology. Barrios’s 30-foot fishing boat is outfitted with a small GPS-enabled camera that records what types of fish he hauls in and from where. On the dock, he weighs his catch on a video-equipped scale and tags it with unique Shellcatch bar codes and Quick Response (QR) codes. The data are uploaded into the cloud, where they can be retrieved by a diner at a restaurant in Santiago by waving a smartphone over the menu. There are even photos of him making the catch—a detail calculated to appeal to those obsessed with the provenance of their food. “The customers like it because it is super entertaining, and they find out a lot of information about the fish on their table—even the story of the cove where it was caught,” says Vincenzo Rulli, owner of Ocean Pacific’s, a restaurant in Santiago. “Even the foreigners tell us they’ve never seen anything like it.”
Shellcatch has cultivated relationships with more than 50 restaurants, supermarkets, and stores in Chile that buy seafood verified by the system. “People like food that comes with a story,” says Monica Jain, the founder of Fish 2.0, a competition in Carmel, Calif., that connects businesses dedicated to sustainable fishing with prospective investors. “It’s been going on for a while in farming. Recently businesses have been emerging to make this available for the seafood sector.”

The system monitors the location and type of fish caught and uploads the data to the cloud.

Source: Courtesy Shellcatch

Sfeir’s ambition isn’t just to cater to finicky diners. What he’s really trying to do is fill a gap in the market. Many countries already require large commercial fishing boats to be equipped with vessel monitoring systems or human observers to certify that they aren’t straying into protected areas. But these systems are too expensive and often logistically impossible to implement across millions of tiny boats. “One of the big questions has been whether you can ensure traceability with small vessels,” says David Schorr, senior manager of the World Wildlife Fund’s Transparent Seas program, adding that Shellcatch “is saying the answer is yes.”
The company’s hardware has gone through several iterations to make it suitable for small fishermen: The device is compact and waterproof and has a long battery life for use on boats with no power source. The software is constantly upgraded, to further automate the monitoring process. Shellcatch uses video analytics, which can for instance detect whether sea turtles are being accidentally caught in fishing nets. The Mexican government, which is facing the threat of U.S. trade sanctions over the rising death toll of endangered loggerhead sea turtles in the Northern Pacific, is paying the company to monitor 16 fishing boats on the Baja Peninsula. “The U.S. believes Mexican fishermen are catching the turtles in their nets and Mexico denies it,” says Sfeir. “The only way to know what’s really happening is through technology.” He says Shellcatch may soon begin monitoring an additional 200 boats in Mexican waters.

The information can be retrieved by diners via a QR code on a menu.

Source: Courtesy Shellcatch

Sfeir, who has a master’s degree in economics and whose father was the Green Party candidate in Chile’s 2014 presidential election, has financed the business with a combination of contributions from family and friends and funds from environmental organizations, charitable foundations, and governments. The grants have enabled Shellcatch to subsidize the service for Barrios and other fishermen.
Sfeir, 40, is confident Shellcatch can eventually turn a profit by selling its services to fishermen who want to sell traceable fish. He says the business could one day have a lucrative sideline in marketing the data it collects to governments, environmental organizations, restaurateurs, retailers, and distributors. Shellcatch also could benefit from President Obama’s recent push to clean up the seafood trade by promoting the creation of a system that tracks fish from the boat to the plate.
Shellcatch is gearing up to start operations in Peru. In Chile, it recently hit an important milestone when some of the fishermen it recruited began paying for the service. “What we know now is that the technology is successful,” says Maryann Ramirez, who runs the Chile office of the Nature Conservancy, which has supplied $106,000 in grant support and training to help fishermen deploy Shellcatch’s gear. “The real success will come when the fishermen can do it on their own.”