Introduction
Two new projects will be presented - FishEUTrust: European integration of new technologies and socio-economic solutions for increasing consumer trust and engagement in seafood products and Sea2See: Innovative blockchain traceability technology and stakeholders’ engagement strategy for boosting sustainable seafood visibility, social acceptance and consumption in Europe.
The projects were approved in 2022 within the Horizon Europe call “Sea to fork transparency and consumer engagement” . More information about the project s can be found at http://www.sea2see.eu/.
Concept
A network of FishEUTrust co-creation living labs (CLL’s) will be created in three diverse aquaculture regions: The Mediterranean, Atlantic and North Sea. CLLs actors will cooperate in developing and testing new technologies, products, services, policy instruments, planning tools, organizational forms, and governance arrangements. The technological development includes: (i) suite of tools for determining seafood quality, safety and traceability (Farm-to-Fork) integrating metagenomics, genetic biomarkers and stable isotope approach; (ii) digital technologies for traceability based on Product Passport and/or Blockchain, unique identification and labelling of product instances; and (iii) integrated smart control systems based on sensor technologies to monitor freshness and presence of pathogens, antibiotics and biotoxins along the seafood supply chain. Further FishEUTrust innovation platform will be design in an open way to integrate technologies for seafood transparency and connect consumers and other seafood supply chain stakeholders. It will be connected with other relevant European infrastructures, in order to enable an easy access to harmonised and validated data, tools and services needed to identify any socio-economic and cultural barriers in respect to increase the uptake of seafood as well as to support FishEUTrust businesses and education. The gathered knowledge will serve for educating and nudging the producers and consumers through gamification . The platform will provide access through two portals, one aimed for consumers and another for aquaculture and food producers from the EU region to provide data and to enable the promotion of their activities and the growth of new businesses.
SEA2SEE is an innovative European project which main goal is to make actors with sustainable seafood practices more visible to consumers thus giving them a competitive advantage. The objectives include: (i) to develop a co-creation approach to sustainable seafood transparency and traceability; (ii) leverage a set of awareness raising and educational practices to increase sustainable seafood consumption; (iii) develop a blockchain deployment model for seafood industry-specific traceability data collection; (iv) demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of the Sea2See blockchain model; (v) develop a standardized Life Cycle Assessment framework for identifying and quantifying the major sources of environmental impact. SEA2SEE’s ambitious goal is pursued with the development, implementation and validation of a blockchain-based platform that consolidates and analyses data from the seafood value chain, in a system that is flexible enough to adapt to changes in the value chain. This will be completed with professional and consumer applications to increase trust and social acceptance of sustainably fished and farmed seafood. New strategies for stakeholders’ engagement organised around site-specific but also seafood product specific value chains have been developed. A co-creation approach based on early-stage involvement of intended end-users, needs identification and feedback collection on the proposed Sea2See traceability innovation is being applied. Two feasibility demonstrators will be carried out - one for fisheries with one demo site (traditional octopus fishery in the Algarve, Portugal) and one for aquaculture with 3 demo sites (in Portugal, Greece and Spain) . The use of innovative technologies of water quality and cloud-based software production management systems allow the farms to directly upload farm data to the blockchain.To secure the uptake and exploitation of Sea2See results and innovation technologies, Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA), seafood safety and evaluation of the presence of certain non-frequent or emerging contaminants is carried out for each of the 5 case studies. The Sea2See project will contribute to significaltly increase Trust, Traceability and Transpoarency of the European Seafood Sector throughout the value chain.