**4. Food traceability and dynamic pricing**

#### **4.1 Inadequacies of existing traceability technologies**

Traceability and real time analysis of food products that can help minimize waste will require new tools for quality assurance, authentication and digital supply chain management that can track products from harvest to market. Such tools must be objective, verifiable, provide data on quality, provenance, and freshness, and easy to incorporate at multiple nodes in the supply chain. Current technologies are inadequate to address most of these challenges and address only some components of the most difficult problems.

State of the art seafood traceability platforms provide tools for establishing chain of custody but lack dynamic pricing features or the verifiable and trusted freshness and authenticity data. These current platforms rely on estimates of shelf life based on catch date and storage conditions. These inputs are insufficiently verifiable and quantifiable for digital tools based on them to be broadly trusted and accepted for dynamic pricing, and they do not address authentication and quality metrics or capabilities at all.

As of 2021, dynamic pricing software solutions also lack higher quality verifiable and trusted freshness and authenticity data and are primarily designed for final retail discounting, often integrated only into broader retailer systems. This makes them less effective for application to upstream supply chain node tasks and adding value for each node in the supply chain.

Products for quantitative measurement of fish freshness rely primarily on destructive laboratory-based methods that are not capable of accurate spot checks of individual fish or fish portions or cannot be realistically and easily repeated at low cost at multiple points along the supply chain. Tools are available that measure tissue conductivity through fish skin, primarily to assess moisture, but they are not designed to address broader nutrient content, species, and traceability.

#### **4.2 SafetySpect's quality, adulteration, and traceability (QAT) technology**

One approach to addressing the problem of traceability and rapid detection of spoilage is SafetySpect's newly developed handheld QAT scanner that optically detects previously established chemical signatures of seafood freshness, quality, and species ID. This device integrates several types of spectroscopic data through its fusion-AI algorithm into simple, human readable reports. The handheld scanner will enable spot-checks of quality, species ID, and freshness all along the supply chain. Integration with a mobile device and app can couple the QAT output to blockchain-enabled, cloud-based, supply chain management platforms for tracking product quality, freshness, and species ID from harvest to market. When integrated with a digital platform using blockchain and dynamic pricing technology, these tools will support the modernization of the global fishing and seafood processing industries, supply chains and retail outlets, as well as provide accurate information to consumers about the sustainability, freshness, and quality of their seafood purchases. Specially designed apps can also integrate smallholder producers in developing economies into the broader, emerging digital supply chain platforms in these markets.

By providing trusted product and pricing data at any node of the supply chain, QAT fundamentally changes the business models of seafood processors, wholesalers and retailers, making it practical to (a) identify mislabeled product, and (b) dynamically price perishable seafood at multiple purchase decision points – beyond traditional final-discounting by retailers. The quantitative underlying data provides high confidence and additional visibility and trust in the freshness of such a highly perishable good, and makes intelligent pricing based on quality/freshness practical at all nodes along the supply chain before final retail sale.

With this capability, QAT will spur innovation in the execution of seafood supply chains by providing accountability at each node for maintaining quality. This will drive improvements in purchase decision making, traceability, authentication, and inventory planning. Retailers can use dynamic pricing in both their purchase and final sale decision making. Given the high proportion of seafood sales attributable to the largest retailers in both developed and developing markets, retailers can have significant economic incentive to adopt such technologies, and the power to encourage its adoption by upstream suppliers.

Technologies like SafetySpect QAT will have four major impacts on the global seafood industry: (1) Reduce waste by tracking fish freshness, thus enabling vastly improved freshness-based dynamic pricing tools at multiple supply chain nodes; (2) Increased visibility and trusted information; (3) Increased value of seafood across markets and positive impact on public health by providing assurance of quality, species, and freshness; (4) Positive impact on a number of sustainability goals including better management of at-risk wild fisheries, combatting illegal poaching of fish and wild animal species, improving food security, and providing better economic engagement and access for marginalized smallholder producers to broader digital supply chain systems and platforms, reducing resource consumption and combatting climate change.
