Note: Global seafood supply chains are undergoing rapid transformation as governments, investors, and buyers demand greater transparency into how seafood products are sourced and traded. This article examines how tightening regulatory frameworks, growing investor scrutiny, and emerging digital technologies are reshaping traceability expectations across the USD 195 billion global seafood trade, with expert highlights from Furqonuddin Ramdhani, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Koltiva. It highlights key regulatory developments, evolving financial governance trends, and the role of interoperable digital systems in strengthening supply chain visibility from first-mile production to global markets.
Executive Summary
- Traceability gaps are emerging as a strategic risk across a USD 195 billion global seafood trade. With global fisheries and aquaculture production reaching over 223 million tonnes annually, tightening regulations and growing investor scrutiny are exposing weaknesses in how seafood products are tracked across increasingly complex supply chains (FAO, 2024).
- Investors are treating traceability as a material risk management issue. In 2025, 45 institutional investors managing USD 9.6 trillion in assets engaged with seven major seafood companies with a combined market capitalization of USD 146 billion, urging stronger traceability commitments to address risks associated with illegal fishing, biodiversity loss, and human rights concerns (FAIRR, 2026).
- Digital traceability and interoperable standards are emerging as operational solutions. Technologies aligned with frameworks such as the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) allow companies to capture standardized supply chain data, improve interoperability across platforms, and strengthen visibility from first-mile production to global markets.
Why Seafood Traceability Is at a Turning Point
Global seafood supply chains are entering a period of profound transformation. Governments, investors, and consumers are demanding stronger transparency into how seafood products are harvested, processed, traded, and distributed across international markets. These demands are reshaping regulatory frameworks and pushing companies to adopt traceability systems capable of verifying supply chain data across multiple stages of production.
The economic scale of the sector makes this shift particularly significant. Global seafood trade exceeded USD 195 billion in 2022, making it one of the most valuable internationally traded food commodities in the world. At the same time, global aquaculture and fisheries production exceeded 223 million tonnes, supplying more than 20 kilograms of seafood per person annually (FAO, 2024). Together, these figures illustrate the immense scale and complexity of seafood supply chains that span thousands of actors, from fishing vessels and aquaculture farms to processors, exporters, distributors, and retailers across global markets.
With seafood supply chains expand across continents and involve multiple intermediaries, maintaining transparency across these networks has become increasingly complex. Products may pass through fishing vessels or aquaculture farms, landing sites, processors, exporters, distributors, and retailers before reaching consumers.
This complexity creates significant traceability challenges. While many seafood companies have made public commitments to improve supply chain transparency, implementation remains uneven. Weak traceability systems can obscure product origins, complicate food safety responses, and allow illegal or unethical practices to persist within the global seafood trade.
In this context, traceability is rapidly emerging as a strategic infrastructure for global seafood trade, as tightening regulations and growing investor scrutiny expose the risks associated with opaque supply chains. Across the seafood industry, companies are beginning to explore digital traceability infrastructure capable of capturing standardized supply chain data and verifying product origins across complex global trade networks.
Why the Traceability Gap is Becoming a Strategic Risk
Regulatory pressure is increasing
Across major markets, regulatory frameworks are increasingly converging around a common objective, in which seafood products must be traceable throughout the supply chain using verifiable and standardized data.
In the United States, the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) requires importers to report harvest event data and maintain chain-of-custody records for certain seafood species. The program aims to prevent illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing products from entering the U.S. markets (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2025). On the other hand, the country is also strengthening traceability requirements through the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Rule 204 to become mandatory in 2028. This rule requires companies to record additional traceability data at specific supply chain events in order to enable faster responses to food safety incidents and product recalls (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2025).
Meanwhile, starting 10 January 2026, the European Union has implemented a mandatory digital catch certification system requiring all fishery products entering the EU market to be accompanied by a fully electronic catch certificate under EU Fisheries Control Regulation. Implemented through the CATCH platform, this system replaces paper-based documentation and enables the submission, validation, and exchange of catch data between exporters, importers, and control authorities. By standardizing and digitizing catch certification processes, the system aims to strengthen oversight, improve traceability, and combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing across global seafood supply chains (European Commission, 2026).
In Asia, seafood-producing countries are also strengthening their national traceability frameworks. Indonesia, one of the world’s largest seafood exporters, has taken a notable step toward strengthening national seafood by developing STELINA (Sistem Ketertelusuran dan Logistik Ikan Nasional), a government-operated system compatible with the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) standard. This recognition makes Indonesia the first country to align a national traceability platform with internationally recognized seafood traceability standards. Beyond domestic implementation, Indonesia is also promoting STELINA through regional capacity-building initiatives with partners such as SEAFDEC and JICA to support broader adoption of standardized traceability practices across Southeast Asia (Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, 2025).
Investors Are Reframing Traceability as Risk Management
Beyond regulatory pressure, investor scrutiny is emerging as another major driver pushing seafood companies to strengthen traceability systems. Financial institutions increasingly recognize that opaque seafood supply chains can expose companies to environmental, regulatory, and reputational risks.
In 2025, the investor network FAIRR coordinated an engagement initiative supported by 45 institutional investors, targeting seven publicly listed seafood companies e.g. Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL, Thai Union Group PCL, and others, with a combined market capitalization of around USD 146 billion, highlighting the financial significance of traceability risks within the sector. With 29 investors participating in the dialogue, 86 percent of the targeted firms entered into discussions to strengthen supply chain transparency and traceability practices (FAIRR, 2026).
Digital Traceability as the Operational Solution
As regulatory requirements tighten and investor scrutiny increases, seafood companies must move beyond high-level traceability commitments and implement operational systems capable of delivering verifiable supply chain data. While certification schemes such as those developed by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) provide important sustainability benchmarks, they do not always ensure continuous visibility across complex seafood supply chains involving multiple actors, jurisdictions, and product transformations (FAIRR, 2026).
Since digital traceability platforms are increasingly emerging as a practical solution to address this gap, industry interoperability standards such as the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) play a key role in enabling these systems to function across fragmented seafood supply chains. GDST establishes common technical formats and data requirements that allow different traceability platforms to exchange information while maintaining standardized supply chain records. In late February 2026, four owners of seafood certification standards, including MSC and ASC, together with the Global Seafood Alliance and MarinTrust, partnering with GDST, signed a letter of support for the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST), highlighting a shared commitment to advancing traceability, transparency, and alignment across the seafood sector.
This growing consensus highlights that interoperable digital traceability is no longer optional but a fundamental requirement for global seafood trade. As Huw Thomas, Executive Director of GDST emphasizes, “Standardized digital interoperable data exchange that enables traceability and transparency is being increasingly recognized as a pre-requisite to business. By embracing the GDST transformation journey and becoming GDST capable early on, Koltiva is at the forefront of this digital revolution.”
In practice, digital traceability providers are increasingly helping companies operationalize these standards in real supply chain environments. For example, Koltiva’s KoltiTrace MIS platform supports aquaculture traceability by capturing first-mile supply chain data and enabling standardized data exchange aligned with GDST requirements, helping connect smallholder production systems with global traceability frameworks used by international buyers and regulators. Koltiva has been recognized as a GDST 1.2 first-mile capable traceability solution for aquaculture supply chains, demonstrating the ability to capture and transmit required traceability data across early production stages such as hatchery, farming, harvesting, processing, and shipping.
These implementation experiences were recently shared during a GDST industry webinar, where Furqonuddin Ramdhani, Co-Founder and Co-Chief Product-Technology Officer of Koltiva, presented the company’s journey as one of the first solution providers to integrate the GDST traceability driver into KoltiTrace and successfully pass the GDST capability test. The session highlighted system architecture, key data element (KDE) mapping, data synchronization mechanisms, and Koltiva’s experience using tool developed by the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) to become GDST-capable.