Hacking for Oceans: Small is Beautiful

Rethinking supply chains to increase seafood traceability, using the Hacking 4 Environment: Oceans Lean Methodology

Guest authored by Tom Collinson, Hacking for Oceans student at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Father and son fishing duo, Danny and Tommy Phillips, in front of their boat Scorpio on Cadgwith Cove beach. Photo Credit: Tom Collinson

The story I am about to tell has its genesis in a special course that I took called Hacking 4 Oceans, but more about that later…

It was 6:30 am, and we had just set sail from the small village of Cadgwith Cove on Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula. Known to locals as “The Cove,” it’s been used as a fishing port since medieval times. Each morning before sunrise, the ten or so fishermen hailing from Cadgwith make the centuries-old pilgrimage from their houses on the valley sides to the pebbly beach where they launch their boats. 

On the day I joined local father-son duo Danny and Tommy Phillips, the sea was glassy and calm, almost oily in the windless morning. The Phillips family has lived in the Cove since at least the 1800s, and Tommy’s great-great-grandfather fished these same waters.

I was aboard their boat, Scorpio, to document a day-in-the life of these small-scale Cornish fishermen for the Cornwall Good Seafood Guide (CGSG), a local charity that works to encourage consumption of sustainably caught local seafood. I had been learning about the Phillipses’ fishing methods and, most importantly, not getting in the way as they cast heavy nets and shellfish traps over the side. The “Meet the Fisherman” profile I would write later was intended to show people how Danny and Tommy worked, demystifying an industry that, while centuries-old, is increasingly rare in the UK. 

Britain exports most of the seafood it catches, primarily to the EU, and imports most of the seafood it eats. This backward arrangement results from a conservative British seafood palate and a burgeoning demand for high-quality British fish in foreign markets. As a result, Cornish people might go a lifetime eating exotic species from distant waters but never eat the local catch. To reduce the fishing industry's environmental impact and support the local industry, the CGSG is working to flip this trend by celebrating the quality of Cornish fish, telling fishers’ personal stories, and educating people about sustainable seafood.

Joining the Phillips family on their boat was my first task for the GCSG, which I learned about through the Common Mission Project’s Hacking for Oceans (H4O) program at the University of California Santa Cruz, where I’m a graduate student. I enrolled in the intensive 10-week class to learn how to apply Lean Startup tools to solve real-world marine conservation problems. 

Danny and Tommy Phillips remove crabs and fish from their tangle nets. High-value catches like this monkfish will be sold to local fish merchants, while lower-value species like this spider crab will be shipped abroad. Photo Credit: Tom Collinson

As a marine ecologist, enrolling in H4O was a significant departure from my comfort zone. I’d rather discuss Echinoderms than entrepreneurship. However, H4O’s promise to train students on how to identify scalable solutions for real-world conservation problems in just ten weeks sounded like a good opportunity. So I formed a team with four other graduate students, chose a marine conservation problem to focus on, and signed up for the course. 

The Problem 

Our focus was on the thorny problem of traceability in seafood supply chains. The capture and transport of fish worldwide form an impossibly complex web of fishers, processors, transporters, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers. This makes it exceedingly difficult to track the movement of fish from sea to table. It’s further complicated because many people benefit from the grey area offered by the industry’s complexity. Bad actors can make a quick buck selling illegally caught, mislabelled, or poor-quality fish to ill-informed buyers. Poor traceability and transparency at sea are untold environmental destruction, labor abuses, and food safety issues, among other issues.

There are ways to combat this problem. For one, improving retailers and consumers’ ability to track their seafood from line to plate would allow regulators to shut down illegal seafood activity while providing consumers with information about the sustainability, ethics, and quality of the fish they’re buying. This leverages a bottom-up pressure on the industry to drive changes in seafood production and distribution. 

Over the next two months, my team would try to find a way to increase traceability in seafood supply chains using the Lean Startup Methodology, which H4O and its sister programs, Hacking for Defense, Hacking for Diplomacy, and Hacking for Local, are built around. 

The Approach

The idea behind the Lean Methodology is that most startups fail because the company fails to understand the problem it’s trying to solve. Entrepreneurs can overcome this common pitfall by talking to various established experts and stakeholders to learn industry “pain points,” hypothesizing solutions to these challenges, and then sharing these hypotheses with experts to see if the theorized solutions are feasible, desirable, and viable. This approach lets startups rapidly iterate ideas for solutions without wasting time, money or resources on solutions that might be innovative but not effective.

We named our team “Tracing Nemo” and began market research. Our assigned mentor was Dan Gonzales, an experienced entrepreneur from San Francisco and a product lead for BMNT Inc. Our community sponsor, Sara Lewis, is the Traceability Division Director for the Santa Cruz-based NGO FishWise. They guided us as we looked for interviewees and developed our ideas. 

First, we took to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn seeking subject matter experts to speak with us. We received responses immediately, from fish wholesalers to tech developers, and from government agents to geneticists. We aimed to complete 100 interviews to develop a deep understanding of traceability and ways to improve it. 

Our first round of interviews taught us about seafood traceability. While a simple concept, it was a vast field with various groups already innovating new traceability tools -- it seemed someone was building solutions for every corner of the industry.  

However, we kept hearing that the scale and complexity of the seafood trade rendered industry-wide traceability almost impossible. Fish is the most traded food commodity globally, and our demand for fish is the highest it's ever been. In 2018, fishers caught 84.4 million tons of fish from every conceivable corner of our oceans using many methods. What's more, traceability solutions would shoulder industry players with more administrative work and red tape, making it an undesirable quest for many.

This led us to re-think the traceability problem. Maybe the solution didn’t lie in developing new technologies or regulatory tools but innovating how seafood supply chains are organized. Could we circumvent traceability challenges by helping to shorten seafood supply chains? We resumed the interview process to find out. 

The Re-Mix

We spoke with small-scale fishers, merchants, and processors to see if our hypothesis held true. It turned out that in localized systems, where there are far fewer actors in the supply chain, there is a strong “culture of compliance,” and people are less likely to break fishing rules, mislabel products or sell bad fish as there are immediate repercussions for being caught lest their tight-knit community reject them.  

One of the most valuable insights we gleaned was that coronavirus had disrupted international seafood markets and more fishers were selling their catch locally. This was done either directly to consumers using platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp to get the word out or via Community Supported Fisheries (CSFs). At the same time, more Americans were turning to CSFs instead of visiting supermarkets. CSFs work on a subscription model, with orders often delivered to doorsteps. Coronavirus shortened supply chains in front of our eyes while proving that localized food systems were more resilient to global disruptions. 

A sketch of Tracing Nemo’s CSF marketing consultancy model. Using seed grants, we would develop engaging marketing materials to help CSFs increase customer retention and charge a small commission on new subscriptions.

For us, this was the golden ticket. CSFs saw such an increase in sales that some were employing extra staff and still struggling to meet demand. CSFs’ fish are 100% traceable, and they were finding that full traceability was a powerful marketing tool; their customers were more likely to buy fish if they knew exactly which boat it had come from. 

Hook, Line, and Sinker

After ten weeks, 63 interviews, and 110 email threads, we found our solution. We wanted to make sure this trend, driven by coronavirus restrictions, would become part of the new normal for seafood. Acting as a nonprofit marketing consultancy, we would help CSFs retain new customers and identify emerging consumer groups by making their fish “catchy.” Our solution would include creating promotional materials like recipe books and online content, connecting fishers and CSFs, and building user-friendly tools to help CSF customers trace their fish. The goal was to get more people eating locally caught, traceable seafood, and shift away from murky globalized seafood supply chains. 

However, the quarter was drawing to a close, and my teammates had other fish to fry, so we didn’t turn our idea into reality. Still, I knew that our group was on to something, and I wanted to keep pursuing our thread. Of all the organizations we found in our research, I thought the CGSG was the most exciting. They were localizing seafood systems, supporting traditional fishing industries and were committed to conservation and sustainability. So I did as I was taught: I set up a final interview to ask if they could use some extra help.

Back aboard Scorpio, the midsummer sun was high in the sky, and fish came over the side thick and fast. Some of this catch would go to Danny and Tommy’s usual export wholesaler, but an increasing amount was headed for Cornish fishmongers and newly conceived home delivery companies. As I snapped pictures and made notes to keep clear of the stray crabs crawling on deck as I did so, I was happy to know that I was helping to change the way we think about seafood in the UK. Danny and Tommy still represent a struggling breed of small-scale Cornish fishers. Their industry is still beset with challenges, but with domestic fish consumption increasing and groups like the CGSG in their corner the future of their industry is looking up. 

With unique classes like H4O, I’m increasingly optimistic about the potential for students to innovate new solutions to the urgent ocean challenges we’re facing. 

Readers can view Tracing Nemo’s final presentation slides and video on the UCSC Hacking for Oceans website.