Last week we officially launched the latest version of the Seafood Souq platform. We’re thrilled to have now scaled our platform to serve more customer segments in the F&B industry providing them with a tool to simplify procurement and source worldwide seafood products direct from the producer. Our new iteration of the platform is a complete suite of services and solutions for the seafood industry covering the value chain from harvest to table.

Our new features and solutions fall into the following groups:

Discovery
We’ve launched a seafood marketplace with an emphasis on keeping the eCommerce experience intact at all stages, optimising the user experience and interface to improve customer engagement and provide a tailored solution, specific to the seafood industry and its products.

Businesses can now compare prices, search for products, and place orders directly to the seafood producer with just a few clicks. With smart filters and seafood specific categorisation systems, business customers and purchasing managers can discover, find, and procure their products easily with full visibility of the supply chain.

Procurement

We’ve created a full suite of integrated wholesale capabilities to empower consumers to negotiate prices and request preferential rates based on order quantities and company profiles. This is in line with our commitment to ensure market dynamics and offer an improved procurement experience with digital price negotiations to simplify price request processes and give businesses a tool to obtain the best rate.

We’ve also introduced the first iteration of targeted wholesale offerings, as the market is segmented into different buyer groups and profiles, each buyer within a profile segment (e.g. HORECA, Food Services, Retail, etc..) will be able to discover and procure products personalised to their line of business with segment-based pricing and minimum order quantities.

On the payments and financing side, we’ve introduced a fully integrated digital module for business buyers to apply for credit to enable payment terms for their purchases powered by our trade finance partners.

With this digital credit facility, we can give buyers more choice of how they procure seafood products while minimising the amount of paperwork and touchpoints throughout their procurement experience from discovery to delivery.

We will continue to focus on ensuring that our procurement experience is simple and provides the tools necessary for a smooth transaction of goods.

Traceability
Seafood Souq is in a unique position to address a significant issue of lack of transparency and visibility in the seafood supply chain. We’ve been working very closely with our partners to ensure that each fish arriving into the UAE through Seafood Souq is verified and traceable. This is done by closely monitoring and managing the chain of custody of the product from the moment of harvest until its delivery to the restaurant door. This information is collected, verified, and logged in our fully integrated software and provided to the buyer with each order for full supply chain traceability.

The next step for our traceability program is the launch of SFS Trace, an extension of our traceability effort, focusing more on serving data to the end-consumer. SFS Trace is currently being piloted with selected restaurants and retailers. For the first time in the UAE, a restaurant will be able to pass on traceability information relating to the seafood products they serve to the end consumer using smart tags and QR codes located on their tables. Consumers will be able to scan the tag to view traceability information such as date of harvest, how the fish was raised and seller information, and all associated certifications from the seafood producer.

This effort comes at a crucial time when now more than ever we need to focus on responsible sourcing of seafood to ensure the sustainability of our food sources. With SFS Trace, we hope to make our contribution to ending food fraud, reducing food waste, and encouraging responsible sourcing from both business buyers and end consumers.

Scalability
Since the inception of Seafood Souq, we have built and developed a scalable architecture to serve and provide the seafood industry with a full suite of digital products offering Efficiency, Choice, Transparency, and Traceability for the industry. Our proprietary platform and technologies are now scalable as a SaaS suite of solutions for a wide array of stakeholders in the seafood industry. We are currently developing some exciting use cases using our technologies with regional and international partners and clients in the seafood space to bring the power of technology to build trust throughout the value chain from harvest to table.

To explore our new and improved platform click here

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