IoT platform for seafood farmers and consumers

Abstract

There has been a strong growth in aquatic products supported by the global seafood industry. Consumers demand information transparency to support informed decisions and to verify nutrition, food safety, and sustainable operations. Supporting these needs rests on the existence of interoperable Internet of Things (IoT) platforms for traceability that goes beyond the minimum “one up, one down” scheme required by regulators. Seafood farmers, being the source of both food and food-information, are critical to achieving the needed transparency. Traditionally, seafood farmers carry the costs of providing information, while downstream actors reap the benefits, causing limited provision of information. Now, global standards for labelling, data from IoT devices, and the reciprocity of utility from collecting data while sharing them represent great potential for farmers to generate value from traceability systems. To enable this, farmers need an IoT platform integrated with other IoT platforms in the value network. This paper presents a case study of an enterprise-level IoT platform for seafood farmers that satisfies consumers’ end-to-end traceability needs while extracting data from requests for information from downstream actors. Keywords: IoT platform, seafood traceability, seafood farmer, reciprocity, supply chain, value