Having your ducks in a row: Seafood Supply Chains

From rural remote to dense and urban, the seafood we sell is shepherded along with critical control points prone to mishaps. Does the seafood supply chain sound complicated? Well it is.

Our company, Smokey Bay Seafood, has to cast its line further than the sea to get seafood from the ocean deep to the dining table. From rural remote to dense and urban, the seafood – live shellfish, fresh and frozen seafood – that we sell is shepherded along with critical control points prone to mishaps. Does the seafood supply chain sound complicated? Well it is.

Picture in your mind’s eye a remote sand bar off the Coast of Vancouver Island, and a person with a rake and shovel sifting for clams or picking oysters on a foggy winter morning, or a crabber handling a winch on an aluminum skiff on choppy seas in Puget Sound. Then imagine sitting at a table at the Hotel de l’Opera in Hanoi. Vietnam or Casa Carmela in Valencia, Spain, a bowl of steamed clams or some cracked crab claw placed in front of you.

One might ask ‘how did it get here?’ but one rarely does. Usually we are too hungry or occupied to think about the steps undertaken for the privilege of dining on seafood from our Pacific Coast. Personally I rather focus on the journey from the plate to my mouth instead of the entire seafood supply chain.

A google search on the origin of the term ‘having one’s ducks in a row’ reveals a multitude of possible origins. From shipbuilding, to bowling alley, from Mother Nature to Carnivals, having one’s ducks in a row is a term that applies beyond these origins. Evidently having one’s ducks in a row means things have to line up in order to flow, to be right.

The first step in the seafood supply chain involves no fuel, no line, no fish, it is purely digital and legal. Determining if the raw material, the fish or shellfish itself, is permitted for the purposes intended for. I do not in this case mean IUU (Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated), something discussed in previous blog posts. Rather I mean is the stage the fish at in compliance for the next stage in the value chain.
For example in Washington State a Shellfish Harvester is not permitted to sell directly to an exporter, distributor, or retailer unless they are, as in Smokey Bay’s case, a licensed shellfish shipper or shellfish packer on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) interstate shellfish list.

Another example is Dungeness crab for export markets, no matter how fresh, how good, how alive and wholesome the crab is, it cannot be exported to China unless it is packed in a plant approved by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). While for countries such as Singapore, and Taiwan a State registered plant is sufficient.

THE DUCKS

First DuckTherefore, the first duck is to know your regulatory requirements. The source, logistics and customer can all be aligned but if it doesn’t meet the requirements of either the local or the export country then nothing can be done.

The second duck is the terms of sale and financing considerations. Where and when is the seafood and the money exchanging hands? This will depend on where you are situated in the value chain. For Smokey Bay it depends on what type of seafood – live, fresh or frozen, where it is going – USA, EU, UK, Asia, Canada.

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For example live manila clams CIF Europe (Cost, insurance, freight) are prepaid 72 hours prior to shipping from Vancouver. Live crab is CIF Vietnam prepaid 72 hours prior to shipping. Fresh oyster meat to Toronto is different with a free on board (FOB) Vancouver payment in 21 days Live Dungeness crab is cost and freight to Los Angeles on a 7-day payment. And frozen Albacore Loins are FOB Vancouver payment 30 days.

For less than truckload shipments, LTL, no financing is generally needed, for truck loads or ocean containers a letter of credit, or an escrow account might be needed. Export development financing and insurance especially when shipment values are quarter of a million dollars or more. An amount easily hit with a 40 foot ocean container of Smokey Bay black cod, or frozen scallops on the half shell.

Once you determine the regulatory space, and terms of sale, the next step is the logistics process. Moving from the seafood packing plant to the buyer. Often the fish will be bought and sold one more time before getting to the wholesaler or retailer.

So the third duck is usually driving a truck, flying a plane or perched on ocean container cargo ship. For logistics the main considerations are departure schedules, cut off times, transit time, temperature control, and costs. You might also need to consider customs clearance. Whether to use air cargo or land transport is a decision based on a few more factors such as transit distance, quantity shipped, and the needs and capabilities of the customer. Ocean freight is used for frozen seafood, generally further afield and can be a technical and financial exercise to arrange.

The fourth duck is quality control and customer satisfaction. For Smokey Bay our customers are both producers and distributors. Quality control starts at harvest, and is again monitored and managed at the packing plant. Quality in paperwork and logistics is the surest way to avoid snags, along with the quality control at receiving.

Thankfully concepts of quality control have evolved from being an upstream endeavor. Traditionally preventive controls (HACCP) and quality management programs (QMP) were tracked up to the point your company was situated in the value chain and no further. For example, once the fish was sold down the line, it was thought of no more.

The final duck, considers the quality of the business we are selling the seafood too. If the customer is purchasing seafood from us to resell, then they themselves need to have proper cold storage equipment, and procedures in place to ensure quality and prevent spoilage. To have a quality product you need quality businesses supporting you up and down the line.

It’s a lot of ducks to line up, but with them lined up the seafood flows.

Depth of the Sea: Fishing in the Deep Sea

The European Academies Science Advisory Council warned of the “dire consequences” for marine ecosystems and against the “misleading narrative” that deep-sea mining is necessary for metals required to meet the transition to a low-carbon economy.

The deep sea is generally defined as the depth at which light begins to dwindle, typically around 200 meters (656 feet).

Picture a parched desert, where for kilometers around there is mostly nothing growing, every few hundred meters an edible vegetable plant blooms, fragile and rare. While beside the desert is a natural garden where vegetables, and fruits grow in abundance.

I believe most of us would feel a bit guilty, sad or bad knowing we were eating a salad made from an ecological rare desert vegetable when the option is there to eat juicy tomatoes and arugula without devastating the garden from which it was grown.

I like using land based analogies for making a point about oceans. Humans are land based creatures after all, so it is a relatable way to get a message across. The deep ocean is like a desert, it is not that productive, normal processes of growth of sea life is very slow. The sea life at great depth lives naturally a very long time, some live up to 150 years or more. Annual growth rates for deep ocean biomass is usually less than 1 per cent. Fish live in complete darkness with no sunlight to help accelerate growth.

“The deep sea is the world’s worst place to catch fish” says marine ecologist Dr. Elliott Norse, founder of the Marine Conservation Institute in Bellevue, Washington USA. “Deep-sea fishes are especially vulnerable because they can’t repopulate quickly after being overfished.

This summer the deep sea has received more notoriety than usual because of the demise of the OceanGate submersible Titan. By now the cause for implosion of the ill-fated sub has been well combed over with the verdict being a nonchalance for safety by its creator and captain combined the jerrybuilt of its structure and controls. Basically it was a combination of mindset and material that directly led to the sub’s and crew’s tragic end.

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When considering any activity at great ocean depth you need your head screwed on straight and serious investment in infrastructure to reduce risks. But the sparseness of deep sea fisheries make such investments costly given the return on such investments. This fact offers perfect segue into another land based analogy – mining.

“With slow-growing fish, there’s economic incentive to kill them all and reinvest the money elsewhere to get a higher return-on-investment. Killing off life in the deep sea one place after another isn’t good for our oceans or economies. Boom-and-bust fisheries are more like mining than fishing,” Dr. Norse said.

Last month July 2023 deep sea fishing and mining interests collided. Ireland and Sweden joined ten other countries calling for moratorium on extraction of metals from seabeds as a UN-backed authority prepared for crucial talks.

I find this debate interesting personally because prior to entering the seafood business I worked in mineral exploration for the world’s largest gold mining Placer Dome company with mining operations in ecologically sensitive areas all over the world. This mining company which at the time seemed as permanent as granite dissipated in 2006.

Last month, the European Academies Science Advisory Council warned of the “dire consequences” for marine ecosystems and against the “misleading narrative” that deep-sea mining is necessary for metals required to meet the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Environmental considerations aside, mining is an expensive endeavor especially if you are doing it deep underwater. The economic incentive for competitive extraction is questionable. To be competitive at today’s gold prices which are approaching an all time high you would need to keep your cost of extraction to below $890 an ounce.

I doubt you can do that safely at ocean depth. If we use the cost to be a passenger on the Ocean Gate sub as a yardstick for a pricing model that indicates its true costs, $250,000 per person for what was to be an 8 hour tour. In this case even more investment would have been needed for success.

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I can’t see any resource activity at deep ocean justified either environmentally or economically. As for tourism I need to do more research. But personally I think visiting the Titanic for entertainment a bit crass. It’s a graveyard and some reverence is needed there, as for the creatures of the ocean deep.

Though some of the fish we sell come from the ocean deep such as black cod (150 to 300 meter). We are sourcing within a managed quota based fishery operating for decades.

Albacore (300 to 400-meter depth) is arguably a deep water fish. However, these are not ecological sensitive zones and the stocks replenish with a life span of 12 years. In contrast Orange Roughy, a popular seafood our company avoids, lives for over 200 years (1500-meter depth) and was thankfully delisted by Canada’s largest retail chain Loblaw’s. I would feel terrible eating any fish or animal that has a centuries long life span.

Smokey Bay Seafood avoids selling fish harvested from fragile environments. All the seafood we sell can be traced to its source. The seafood we sell is from regional, coastal, small scale fisheries on both Pacific and Atlantic Coasts: Dungeness crab, Pacific oysters, manila clams, wild sea scallop, sea urchin and whelk for instance. All this seafood comes from ocean depths and regions abundant as the garden I mentioned in the introduction to this blog post.