Co-funded by the European Union, the Sea2See project recently started with the objective of implementing an innovative blockchain-based traceability technology to improve trust and transparency in the seafood sector, and thus boost sustainable seafood visibility and consumption in Europe. The project involves 14 European partners, including Tilkal.
Consumers are globally asking for more transparency on the products they buy. Seafood products are no exception: most of them have a complex history and are exposed to a lack of solid and trustworthy information about their origin, species, fishing gear, sustainability, among others.
In this sense, environmental and food safety policies in the European Union aim to ensure more sustainable, inclusive, safe and healthy seafood production and consumption in Europe. Several challenges continue to impede the achievement of the desired level of transparency and traceability of seafood products, amongst which the lack of digitization and tailored tools to achieve end-to-end traceability, or the capacity to clearly link sustainability and traceability of EU seafood which should be achieved through the ability for real-time assessment of sustainability indicators across value chain actors.
To answer these challenges, Sea2See will leverage technology improvement and develop an innovative end-to-end blockchain-based traceability platform to ensure transparency in the seafood sector, build consumer confidence and give actors with sustainable practices a competitive advantage by making them more visible to consumers.
Sea2See also aims at significantly increasing the consumption potential since the consumers, in part, will be engaged through participatory strategies showing how web-based and digital tools can provide trustworthy traceability information, to support sustainable purchasing decisions.
“The interactive and accessible blockchain-based platform that the Sea2See project is developing will contribute to significantly increase Trust, Transparency and Traceability of the European Seafood Sector throughout the value chain, and to implement societal and sectoral strategies for co-creation, communication and awareness-raising about the benefits of sustainability fished and farmed nutritious seafood, from the producer to the end consumer”. Carlos Mazorra, SEA2SEE Coordinator, R&D and Innovation Director of Smartwater Planet, S.L.
Within the framework of the Sea2See project, Tilkal will lead processes to implement a blockchain-based traceability platform with reporting and data model adapted to seafood specificities, and bring auditability, control and transparency to the seafood sector:
Interested actors of the seafood value chain will be able to join a decentralized network empowering data collection and confidential data sharing between them, upstream or downstream, while providing full data auditability, reciprocal responsibility of participants, and transparency.
In collaboration with Sea2See partner Page Up, adequate data collection tools will be made available to professional users to digitize and ingest data using global identification standards (B2B mobile application, APIs, etc)
A business platform (SaaS) will deliver real-time end-to-end supply chain monitoring and analysis
Finally, the platform will include a set of mobile applications bringing transparency to the end-user by sharing product-specific information, including real-time information.
Launched in July 2022 and ending June 2026, Sea2See consists of a consortium of 14 partners from 6 EU countries and comprises an interdisciplinary mix of competencies and expertise derived from the private, academic, and NGO sectors. The novel Sea2See traceability system will be tested and validated in 5 pilot sites in different European countries to trace value chain of different seafood products.
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