Spanish seafood firm partners with IBM for supply chain tracking

Spanish multinational seafood giant, Nueva Pescanova Group, has partnered with The IBM Food Trust to trace the shrimp and prawns it fishes on the blockchain.

Spanish-based seafood firm, Nueva Pescanova Group, has announced its working with IBM to utilize its Food Trust platform — a distributed ledger technology platform designed for supply chain traceability.

According to a June 8 announcement from IBM, the partnership is already underway, with Nueva Pescanova utilizing blockchain technology to track shrimp fishing in Argentina and prawn cultivation in Ecuador.

In the announcement, Ignacio González, the CEO of the Nueva Pescanova Group, stated the tracability platform will help the firm in meeting the United Nation’s Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (DGST) standards, stating:

“We want to offer our consumers all over the world rigorous and detailed information on the traceability of our seafood products, from their origin until they reach their tables. Now is the time for businesses across the seafood sector to begin addressing the GDST standards.”

Nueva Pescanova Group is a leading multinational seafood firm that was founded in 1960. The company covers the cultivation, production, processing, and distribution of seafood.

IBM’s Food Trust traceability platform was designed for the food industry, enabling members of the network to view comprehensive supply chain data from products in “near real-time” — offering significant efficiency savings to producers, minimizing fraud across the global market, and ensuring safety and sustainability obligations are met.

Sustainability is an issue of increasing importance to seafood consumers, with IBM referencing its 2020 Europe Food Sustainability study, which found that nearly 50% of respondents would buy more seafood if they had more information on its “origin, safety and production.”

The partnership adds to the growing list of food and agricultural firms that have partnered with IBM for blockchain-based supply chain solutions.

In February, Multinational retail giant Carrefour partnered with IBM to track the supply chain of chicken and microgreens. In December 2020, Cointelegraph reported that Nestlé, Dole, and olive oil giant CHO were already leveraging the IBM Food Trust Network.