Today’s shrimp supply chains are long, complex, and often opaque. Without visibility, it is impossible to handle food safety concerns, prove legality, and verify sustainability—all issues that consumers, investors, regulators, and media are increasingly demanding. Traceability is essential to demonstrating that a product is ethically and sustainably sourced.
Despite the growing number of regulations being put in place, opportunities for fraud, labor rights violations, and environmental degradation remain extensive in the food sector – especially in the seafood industry. It is incredibly challenging to document activities that occur far from the shore with little to no monitoring mechanisms, such as illegal transshipment of both food and feed products, human rights violations on fishing vessels, or even destruction of natural ecosystems. If traders are unable to track the origin of products, it puts company reputations all along the supply chain at risk, raises significant shareholder concerns, and impacts brand value and corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Traceability has become recognized as an integral process to address issues of food safety and food quality by governments and businesses and to verify claims of sustainable and responsible production. When retailers know which farms, processors, and feed producers played a role in producing their goods, they can hold them accountable, drive improvement, and help move the industry towards more environmentally and socially responsible practices.
© Audra Melton / WWF-US
Working alongside stakeholders from the farmed shrimp industry, WWF developed an open-source, free, cloud-based smartphone app and desktop web portal called transparenC. The transparenC application can be used by farmers, buyers, and everyone in between. The affordable option avoids expensive licensing fees that have hindered past technological efforts.
Conceived in collaboration by WWF and Republic Systems, the app was developed using farmed shrimp as a test case, but the tool can easily be applied to other commodity supply chains. This user-friendly system prioritizes connecting different supply chain actors, which is a critical step towards understanding where our food comes from.
© Scott Dickerson / WWF-US
In addition to digital tools, there are also scientific techniques that exist to verify the origin of seafood products. For example, elemental profiling is a type of forensic analysis that can help authenticate the origin of farmed shrimp products using the unique fingerprint of metal ions left by the soil and water that the shrimp were grown in.
WWF has been working with researchers from Auburn University to undergo an elemental profiling assessment to determine the geographic origin of farmed shrimp from Thailand, India, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
