The US$90 trillion-backed FAIRR investor network is today publishing a report highlighting a notable gap between global seafood companies’ traceability commitments and their current implementation strategies. The findings point to a potentially sizeable financial opportunity that companies risk missing, as Planet Tracker estimates that investing just 1% of seafood sales into traceability could lift industry profitability by 60%, worth US$600 billion.
The report, Traceability in Seafood Supply Chains: An Imperative for Investors, presents results from Phase 2 of an investor engagement with seven global seafood majors*, supported by 45 investors with a combined US$9.6 trillion in assets. The engagement is led by FAIRR with the backing of Planet Tracker, The World Benchmarking Alliance, UNEP FI’s Sustainable Blue Economy Finance Initiative and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) US.
Company commitments double, but practices fall short of their pledges
The report reveals that four of seven assessed companies now have robust traceability commitments, up from two last year, as Maruha Nichiro and Mitsubishi join Thai Union and CP Foods in disclosing pledges.
However, the majority (5/7) still lack comprehensive traceability implementation plans across their seafood portfolios, casting doubt over how traceability ambitions will translate into measurable outcomes. Nissui and Marubeni have provided no evidence of traceability implementation plans at all.
Added to this, progress on traceability implementation is often species-specific. For instance, the implementation of Thai Union’s SeaChange 2030 targets is only focused on tuna and shrimp, undermining portfolio-wide outcomes.
Companies do not yet recognise the full value proposition of traceability
All seven companies acknowledge overfishing and marine habitat loss pose potential risks to their supply chains. Yet only 3/7 companies currently recognise traceability as a critical tool for identifying and mitigating these risks, suggesting that companies under-acknowledge the potential value proposition of traceability systems.
Over half of the companies (4/7) report persistent barriers to scaling traceability, including paper-based records, fragmented data, species mixing during handling and complex supply chains. To help companies address these challenges, Phase 2 of the investor engagement introduced capacity-building sessions led by WWF-US, focused on digitalisation, data interoperability and alignment with leading standards.
Sustainability certifications and robust traceability systems provide complementary benefits to companies, investors and the ocean
All seven companies have commitments to source at least some certified sustainable seafood, with the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) as the most widely adopted schemes.
Credible certifications, and the assurance systems behind them, play an important role in tying products sold as certified to a certified fishery or farm. But they do not provide supermarkets or consumers with full supply chain transparency for certified products. Leading certifications include ‘Chain of Custody’, which typically provides ‘one-up, one-down’ visibility to actors in the chain. However, this alone does not give any actor a full, transparent view of the end-to-end value chain. Furthermore, significant volumes of certain species, such as squid, have not yet been credibly certified. As a result, all companies remain exposed to risk from products that are neither certified nor traced.
Encouragingly, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) are both actively enhancing their traceability efforts to align with leading practice data standards provided by the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST).