Torunn Halhjem at Trident Seafoods Corp, a Seattle, Washington based company processing primarily Alaskan seafood products says that companies have already been providing virtually all the required information.
"It didn't have much impact. We only had to add two lines to our invoice and on the label that the product was caught in the North Pacific Ocean FAO area 67, and we had to put 'catch method pelagic trawl'," Halhjem says. "Really the ones who had to do the job are our customers, the processors in Europe - they are the ones on the consumer box. They have to say or have a tracking system - if they produce fish fingers they have to identify the fish."
The fish fingers Haljem refers to can be made from a number of white fish; Atlantic saithe, North Pacific pollock, hake from off Africa or South America or hoki from New Zealand.
For quality control reasons Trident has to have the pertinent information so that when it arrives at the customer's warehouse, the vessel name, production date or shore plant number are all on hand to track the product back if there are any quality issues. "There wasn't anything new to us," Haljem says. "We had to track this for years. It was what we see as good food processing factors."
EU regulations
According to EU regulations, the identity of the company that owns the vessel that caught the fish, the registration and national registry of the vessel, the seafood unit (single fish, box block, etc.) species of the fish and the country it was caught in will all have to be provided from the source. The product form, the date or sailing date of the fishing trip, fishing method, storage method and temperature, names of sustainable or ethical fishing certifications for the fishery, name and address of the company receiving the fish and the date and location of the sales transaction must also be included.
Fish trader Peter Krogh at Magnolia Seafoods LLC says Alaska pollock has gained a tremendous following in Europe over the last 20 to 30 years, mostly going in the shatter packed fillet form. The shatter packs are headed, gutted filleted and the skin is removed.
Krogh says once in Europe the fillets go to reprocessors who package the fillets in consumer packages or reprocess it into a cooked form.
Smaller operators are prepared for full traceability as well.
At Lion's Gate Fisheries Ltd in British Columbia, Canada, company president Jack Waterfield says full traceability is not going to be a problem for him when filling his European salmon orders.
Waterfield says his company has full traceability of its product following a request for traceability from a Japanese account.
"It doesn't affect us because we have always been fully traceable right to the day of production," he says.
North American traceability
vasand says many traceability requirements are already covered by the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) requirements.
"For each product that wants to go to the EU a USFDA health certificate has to be issued," he says. "Once you apply for the program you get inspected and you get a number and then when you are issued that number, they send it to EU authorities so that they recognize that number is issued to a vessel or processing plant."
Also in the U.S., internal food tracking requirements such as the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, and the Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) Act are prompting developments in food tracking technology.
In Canada the commercial fishing industry and aquaculture producers have been participating in a national project of called CanTrace set up under the Electronic Commerce Council of Canada (ECCC). CanTrace is a collaborative initiative committed to the development of traceability standards for all food products grown, manufactured and sold in Canada. CanTrace is currently pilot-testing the standards for its one up/one down traceability model.
The ECCC has recommended the adoption of the 14-digit European bar code referred to as EAN-UCC (European Article Numbering - Uniform Code Council).
Also in Canada, canned salmon is already traceable, says Grant Snell, general manager of the BC Salmon Marketing Council.
"With canned salmon they have full traceability," Snell says, explaining that the code stamped on top of the can indicates what cannery that can came from, what the source of the fish was, what canning line it was canned on, and what retort oven it was cooked in on what day.
"So if there was a problem with that product they know exactly where it came from," he says. "They don't think it will be necessary to trace it back beyond that which is good, because each packer that comes in has collected from a number of different boats. "Canned product wise they are pretty well covered already, so it is more of fresh and frozen issue."
Loosing out?
While full traceability of seafood products into the European Union and other markets aims to provide quality and food safety assurance to consumers, some traders are starting to point out the information provided has the potential to eliminate the middle man in many transactions. In fact, one West Coast broker reported that he has already been a victim of an end purchaser of fish bypassing him and going straight to the producer after gathering the information from data he supplied with the product.
"It has happened to me," he says. "On both sides of the supplier and the buyer, and I was not protected."
Confidential knowledge has been sacrificed and a trader depends on the buyer to keep his allegiance, he says. "It makes it very difficult for the middle man to keep his private information to himself," he says. "It is like going to the buyer and giving him all the contacts."
