The receiving dock at seafood companies can be chaos. 
We recently watched a harried guy with a clipboard direct six forklifts unloading 14 tractor trailers' worth of seafood one morning. Salmon from Norway, squid from California, tuna from Costa Rica, lobster from Maine, mussels from Canada, oysters from the Chesapeake. The list went on and on.
The FDA today announced the final rule for Food Traceability that was required by the Food Safety Modernization Act law. We will explore this is future blog posts, but let's start with the high level:
Receiving docks are chaotic—and incredibly important. Receiving is a regulated "Critical Tracking Event" in which the buyer is supposed to transcribe the "Key Data Elements" and ensure that the product is what they ordered and that the cold chain has been maintained. Having observed many receiving docks, we understand that the time wasted, the errors introduced, and the money lost can be significant.
There are obvious ways to improve this process, some of which the best companies have implemented. In particular, they get information about a shipment before it arrives and have the product properly labeled with a link to the digital record so receiving involves only scanning—not trying to read someone's handwriting.
Historically, this sort of tool has been available only to the largest companies. But BlueTrace has developed a system accessible to the vast majority of the market.
Many of us might wonder whether the govt has gone overboard with funding, but if they are offering and you are eligible you should at least consider applying.
Shellfish tags are mandated by the FDA and are part of the model ordinance from the National Shellfish Sanitation Program. They play a very direct role in public health protection.
The Global Seafood Alliance (formerly the Global Aquaculture Alliance) publishes one of the best seafood podcasts. The team of Shaun O’Loughlin, Justin Grant, and Maddie Cassidy are awesome. We were lucky enough to be interviewed recently. Always fun to talk seafood and innovation with smart and knowledgeable folks. You can listen on your favorite podcast app or download from their website.
The success of our businesses rely on consumers staying healthy.
Brad Blymier started as a small pedestrian farmer on the eastern shore of Virginia over 12 years ago. Very quickly he realized his natural gift for connecting with chefs and farmers and started helping neighboring farms sell their product. Within a couple of years, he decided to focus solely on the distribution side of the business. Since then, War Shore has grown into one of the largest specialty shellfish distributors in the “DMV” (DC/MD/noVA). Today they deliver oysters, lobster meat, scallops, clams, mussels and other specialty creatures of the sea to a growing array of chefs and major supermarkets. With their new Maine buying station (Maine Oyster Initiative) they are one track to buy over 1.5 million Maine oysters this year which is about 15% of their overall oyster sales.
Supply Chains are the lifeblood of our economy. From how a shellfish gets from the tideline to the table, to how a semi-conductor chip gets from a factory in Asia to a printer on a farm.
Almost every farm starts out selling to local restaurants, but as they scale distributors (aka wholesalers) play an increasingly important role. You will make more money per shell at a restaurant, but there is a limit to how much restaurants can buy. If you are producing more than a few local restaurants and some consumers can absorb, you are probably going to need to work with distributors. We've been talking to a lot of distributors lately and here are some of the things farmers should know.
