Determining Seafood Quality: The Best Practices of The Old Industry
How does one determine seafood quality? It’s a question that is absolutely imperative to what we do here at Coastline. As soon as fish is pulled out of the ocean a figurative clock begins to tick on freshness. At Coastline, we began our business knowing that as time passes and the handling of fish increases, seafood quality degrades significantly. But to what degree? And what factors are most influential in fish being fresh? Learning how and why fish degrades under various conditions were crucial topics that the team at Coastline developed an expertise in early on.
To start analyzing freshness, it is important to recognize that different species will stay fresh for different durations out of the water. Generally speaking, flounder tends to last the longest out of all saltwater fish with roughly 21 days of shelf life if properly handled and stored (from point of catch). Various types of Salmon will last between 6 and 13 days and Sablefish typically lasts only 10 days.
Unfortunately, in today’s seafood industry the best indicators of fresh fish are still a well trained eye and nose. The going logic is that fish with no ‘fishy’ odour and minimal scale discolouration is the freshest one could hope for. Top restaurants around the world actually train their chefs to recognize high-quality seafood through these and other comparable metrics.
However, technology has outpaced the fishing industry. Large players fishing with factory-sized ships have moved too slowly to embrace traceability on a fish-by-fish basis. This has allowed an information deficit to exist at the restaurant level where executive chefs have to rely on pattern recognition instead of actual data. This process can easily lead to mistakes with rookie chefs or even worse: it provides an incentive for large players to disguise freshness. This is where Coastline Market’s software has an opportunity to bridge a burgeoning gap in the industry. Not only do we reduce the number of intermediaries handling the fish, but we also track individual restaurant batches with third-party verification of past batch locations and time histories. Data is the key to unlocking a new era of seafood verifiability and it is now only a matter of time before we enter it.
