An impressive start of the new business season for SAE2SEE consortium. From 1to 3 October 2024, the project held its 5th management meeting in the hospitable and sunny Athens. Our gracious hosts NAYS LTD had organized a wonderful event, handling the multifaceted agenda with professionalism and excellence.
The morning of first day welcomed all partners at Amalia Hotel with a tight and busy schedule, aiming to encompass reporting on advancements on various activities from the work plan. Progress is remarkable. Among the main objectives of this ambitious project, is to increase consumer confidence in seafood products by improving their traceability and promoting sustainable industry practices. To that regard, the University of Aveiro are focusing their efforts to upgrading the Report identifying the main barriers to the introduction of seafood blockchain technology. By the end of next year its representativeness will be enhanced by enriching the existing cross-country analysis with an analysis by sector, including indicators like legal barriers, price, unacceptance of the blockchain technology by producers, retailers, importers and other industry stakeholders.
The first edition of the Massive Online Open Course on seafood literacy is about to be completed, already receiving great feedback from participants. SUBMON is building on that to improve its content and experience for the consumers while looking towards the next activities for consumer engagement like cooking workshops on less known fishes and cooking techniques, and publishing a guide to small fisheries and a recipe book along with Ethic Ocean. The amazing news is that the content of the latter is planned by Tilkal to be integrated in the final version of the consumer app. What is also being considered is adding the nutritional information about each species to both the web-based application and the platform, seen as an added value for the user.
Partners listened with excitement to the significant advance of the project’s technology development. The integration of the dataflow funnel capturing real-time aquaculture production information from the SmartWater Cloud, with its transmission to the Sea2Sea traceability platform, has been completed. A quick and intuitive data input from various production sites, such as auctions, packaging, logistics and retail, is enabled through a full set of professional mobile apps, which development continues and is on track. The current focus of Tilkal and PAGE UP falls on building the software needed for data management inside of the deployed cloud architecture.
With the transitioning of SEA2SEE to demonstrations, the collaboration with the pilot sites has intensified in order to facilitate the fine-tuning of the different tools with the end-to-end scenarios and to illustrate in very specific terms how the collected information upstream is returned to the various users. Working closely with each site allowed for configuring the consumer applications, ultimately resulting in five demonstration apps that are ready for use in the field by the demonstrators.
During this process, technology partners conducted important meetings with external advisors to ensure that the Sea2Sea traceability platform aligns with the current market needs. Additionally, an in-depth analysis was run to confirm that the platform remains at the cutting edge of traceability technology, adheres to the latest regulations and effectively supports the seafood industry’s sustainability objectives.
An overview of the different tabs from the web app (Sea bream use case web application)
During the second day, the SEA2SEE consortium was privileged to visit one of the aquaculture pilot sites in Greece, where Sea Bream and Sea Bass are grown. Besides being a lot of fun to be out in the tender warmness of the autumn sun, field visits like this, help us understand the importance of the role environmental conditions play in the process of farming and the logistics required for traceability.
Day trip to a Greek aquaculture installation
The 5th management meeting ended with the first multi-stakeholder workshop. Its aim was to present to external stakeholders in Greece the advantages and technical capacity of the end-to-end blockchain model through the development of traceability applications for professional and customers’ needs. The workshop highlighted the Greek seafood value chain particularities and the Sea2See Traceability Platform demonstration tailored to it. We were honored to have as guests to the event experts from the Greek aquaculture sector, representatives of production and packaging branches, National and Regional Authorities, Academia and Aquaculture Associations.
It was a busy three-day experience, having passed with the glimpse of an eye. Days, dense with work tasks’ alignment but also, social bonding through sharing delicious food, drinks and stories. Partners left Athens recharged and happy with the long path we’ve walked together, looking ahead to the next chapters during the upcoming months.
Stay tuned by following SEA2SEE on social networks.
