Tracking the Catch

You won't find tractors or combines bringing in this harvest. Seafood, pulled from the cold waters of the pacific and destined for dinner tables in the U.S. and overseas. This is Pacific Seafood in Warrenton, Oregon. And here, as in many areas of the heartland, the question of food quality has taken on a much higher profile. So here, from ship to shore to store each piece of fish is tracked. Craig Urness of Pacific Seafood says, "Whenever I go out to restaurants, I always want to make sure that, you know that they're a customer of ours if I can. I always ask and I know that it's going to be at the highest quality."

Craig says news stories about salmonella in poultry; e coli in produce and contamination from products overseas have prompted consumers to be more demanding about where their food comes from. So, beginning with catches just in from the ocean; Pacific Seafood begins a detailed tracking system to deliver that kind of information. Craig goes on to say, "It allows us to track our product we sell to our consumer back to the vessels which is a very important food safety feature with the current regulatory environment."

Jim Copenhaver is a shrimper who works the waters off Oregon and Washington. He believes that tracking the catch provides protection for him as well as consumers. Jim says, "One benefit of this system is they can track product coming off individual boats from the time that it was caught to the time it's in the marketplace. So if there was a specific problem with a certain batch, they could get right to the source of it instantly."

A generation back, tracking like this would not have been possible. But Jerry Boisvert says thanks to technology the company and consumers have detailed information. Jerry explains the process after fish have been unloaded from the truck, "Well, the fish received with ice. We got true cod here and we're going to be putting that on the line next. Obviously the filleters are going to cut many kinds of fish today. Probably 15 or 20 species. So we have true cod being de-iced. It will go up this conveyor and we'll actually weigh every pan of fish. Right now they're finishing up with Dover sole." The bins weigh about 50 pounds each. As each bin comes off the scale, it gets its own tracking tag. If a recall happens, how do officials know where the fish came from? Well, that's where this tracking tag tells them all they need to know. That includes the individuals who fillet the fish. As it passes through their hands, their workflow shows up on the tag.

Jerry says, "So each pan of fish is presented to a filleter. They'll pull a pan off, do the cutting, obviously they're yielding the fillets. That tag is going to go back into their pan of fillets along with their ID tag so they have a tag that shows their name and that's going to identify how long it took to cut this pan, what his yield was because we know the weight of the raw product and we'll also know the name of the fillets when we weigh the stuff at the other end." Jerry describes the next part of the process, "Well, Carrie here is getting the finished fillets coming down from the filleters and she's going to take those two tags, put the fish on the scale, which is going to give her the weight automatically, scans the two tags and that filleter has just been credited for the fish that they cut today." The fish then moves on packed and tracked. Jerry says, "The packers here have weighed ten pounds in their pan and then he'll slip that pan of filets into a bag then we'll vacuum seal it. All we're doing is trying to protect the environment of that particular fillet. We'll put a label on every single box that they're packing so down to the lowest level of inventory. Any customer who gets this box tells us the ID on that box it will then allow us to track it all the way back to the vessel. "By building quality control into each step of the seafood's journey, there is greater oversight on product safety, something the company considers important to future business. Jerry says, "Quality is big time in this business. I mean if you have a reputation for quality, you get the customers." Jim adds, "It allows me to concentrate on what I'm good at doing and it allows them to concentrate what they're good at doing."

The average American eats about 17 pounds of seafood each year and sales at home and abroad are a multi billion dollar industry. Staying current with technology to insure food safety is something consumers are expected to demand more of in the future. Craig says, "Part of the culture of our company that change is going to be constant and that stagnation is decline. The production control system that we're looking at is always under constant improvement, constant changing, looking for ways to better the system."

Secretive and Slippery
While there are some 25 thousand "identified" species of fish on earth, it's believed that there may be as many as 15 thousand species not yet categorized. And that "slimy" feel you get when you pick up a fish is because fish secrete a type of mucus which helps to protect them from parasites and lets them move through the water faster.