Traceability in the Fishing Industry: What the Regulation Requires and How to Manage It Without Spreadsheets

Traceability in the fishing industry is the ability to reconstruct, at any moment, the complete journey of a batch of fish or seafood: from the catch area or the fish market where it was bought, through every production process (filleting, packaging, freezing), to the customer it was sold to. In practice, this means that when facing a health alert, a customer complaint, or an inspection, a company can identify within minutes exactly which batch is involved, where it came from, and who it was supplied to — without relying on anyone's memory or digging through folders of paper delivery notes.

EU regulation requires that any food chain operator be able to identify who they received a product from and who they supplied it to — the principle known as "one step back, one step forward." For a fishing or frozen goods company, this means systematically recording species, catch area or origin, fishing gear when applicable, batch number, and catch, intake, and expiry dates at every point in the process. It's not a new requirement, but it's followed very unevenly depending on how information is handled day to day.

What information must be recorded for each batch

A traceable batch needs, at minimum, these data points linked together:

• Species, and where applicable, the scientific name or commercial designation required by labeling regulations.
• Catch area or origin (FAO zone, or country of origin for aquaculture or imported products).
• Fishing gear used, when regulation requires it on the label.
• Batch number, assigned at the time of the fish market purchase or the raw material reception.
• Catch date, warehouse intake date, and expiry date, to rotate stock properly and respond to any incident immediately.
• Weight at every transformation step (weight at the fish market, weight after filleting, weight after packaging), because weight changes at each process and every change must be recorded.

When any of this data lives on paper, in a worker's memory, or in a spreadsheet that isn't updated in real time, traceability stops being reliable at the exact moment it's needed most.

Backward and forward traceability

Traceability runs in two directions, and both matter equally:

• Backward: from a sold batch, being able to reach the supplier, fish market, or vessel of origin.
• Forward: from a fish market purchase, being able to reach every customer who received something from that batch, even if it was split across several orders or blended during a production process.

This second direction is the one that causes the most problems in practice. A single batch of raw material usually ends up spread across several orders and several customers after going through production. If the link between "incoming batch" and "outgoing orders" isn't recorded at the moment it happens, reconstructing it afterward — with a health alert already in progress — is slow and error-prone.

Fresh and frozen aren't traced the same way

Fresh and frozen products share the same base data (species, origin, batch), but differ in what needs to be monitored:

• With fresh product, shelf life is short and the margin for error is minimal: a traceability failure can mean selling or discarding product without enough certainty about its origin or actual catch date.
• With frozen product, the lifecycle is longer, but extra data comes into play: freezing date, storage conditions, and, in many cases, toll processing — where the product leaves the company, is transformed at a third party's facility, and comes back. Each of those movements must be traced as if it were another step of the company's own production.

Treating both cases with the same recording criteria simplifies daily work, but requires the system in use to clearly distinguish between the two states and their associated dates.

Where traceability breaks down in spreadsheets

Spreadsheets aren't the problem by themselves — the problem is what usually happens to them in the day-to-day of a warehouse or production floor:

• They get updated at the end of a shift, not at the moment of each movement, so for hours the real information and the recorded information don't match.
• Each person uses their own template or their own criteria to note a batch, and over time inconsistencies appear that nobody catches until something needs to be found urgently.
• They don't automatically link a fish market purchase to the sales orders where that batch ended up — that relationship has to be reconstructed by hand, order by order.
• There's no automatic alert for upcoming expiry dates: someone has to remember to check the sheet.

None of these failures are the fault of whoever maintains the spreadsheet. It's a tool that wasn't designed to automatically relate purchasing, production, and sales — and traceability, by definition, is exactly that relationship.

How a digital system helps without changing how you already work

The most honest way to solve this isn't to add more recording steps — it's for the system you already use for goods reception, production, orders, and labeling to generate traceability as a natural byproduct of every movement, not as a separate task. In La PesquerApp, every batch that comes in through a fish market purchase or a supplier order is automatically linked to the production runs and the orders where it's used, with expiry date and location always visible, and the full "one step back, one step forward" relationship available the moment it's needed — without keeping a spreadsheet running in parallel.

If you'd like to see how that end-to-end traceability looks with your own operation's data, you can request a demo.