The United States Food and Drug Administration inspects between 1% and 2% of all imported seafood products for contaminants, and tests as little as 0.1%. Of those inspected and tested more than one in five shipments are rejected.
This rejection level is the highest level of any food category, and so are the business risks, not just from import rejections, but also from the loss of quality and shelf-life from the time taken to inspect and get back test results.
These risks are especially high for farmed seafood with residues from antibiotics and antimicrobials used on farms as well as pollutants that can accumulate via aquaculture feeds using plant proteins and fishmeals/fish oils used in those feeds.
Food safety testing is mostly risk-based due to cost and logistical constraints, and one the key determiners of the risk level is whether or not there is traceability back to the source of both the products and its inputs, and whether or not there is any chain of custody certification with third party surveillance audits to verify the veracity of data entered.
Traceability systems and requirements are often only one-up, one-down, and information on suppliers and the products are often limited to one step down in the supply chain. The most common system in developing nations are spreadsheets with raw data often written down onto paper forms and then later inputted into spreadsheets - formats that can easily be duplicated and/or edited, and, therefore open to falsification.
Decentralised Ledger Technologies (DLT), also known as blockchain solutions, have been touted as being applicable for traceability through supply chains as they are secure and immutable. However the adoption of DLT based solutions seems to be limited. Given the ability to build trust, reduce the risk of food safety inspection, what might the barriers to adoption be? How can we overcome those barriers?