A new Massachusetts company is offering fishermen and commercial seafood buyers throughout New England an innovative, efficient sales/purchasing platform that enhances business stability, transparency, sustainability, and profitability in the volatile seafood industry.
Open Ocean Trading’s (www.openoceantrading.com) model uses forward contracts and online trading to bring together diversified groups of buyers and fishing vessels who can lock into a price for seafood days, weeks or months in advance of the sale. This approach provides buyers and sellers greater control over their costs and inventory while offering them deeper market insight and an opportunity to streamline their supply chain.
Buyers for restaurants, grocery stores, distributors and other retail and wholesale businesses will experience a far greater control of short- and long-term purchasing budgets under the Open Ocean model.
Open Ocean Trading, with offices in Duxbury and Gloucester, has developed an online trading platform called FYSH-X (www.fysh-x.com), where buyers and sellers directly negotiate forward contracts to reach an agreeable price and terms. The FYSH-X model gives fishermen unique vessel profiles and the ability to extend both their story and product further into the supply chain. The platform also allows for pre-trip flexibility regarding fuel purchasing, trip length, destination planning, and other key decisions that enhance vessel profitability regardless of the size of volumes under contract. Forward purchasing also helps insulate buyers from the volatility of the marketplace and ensures the freshest product is delivered in place and on time.
Open Ocean Trading founder Keith Flett said the company’s goal is to offer fishermen and buyers a tool to navigate an often uncertain marketplace and improve business profitability in tough regulatory times.
“Our platform brings greater stability to the industry that benefits everyone involved because it provides an opportunity for both buyers and fishermen to look forward and plan ahead. FYSH-X takes the guesswork out of trying to run a profitable business,” Flett said.
Flett pointed to the struggling lobster industry in Maine as an example of how the FYSH-X platform could benefit the market. “If the sellers had a way to communicate to the market that their catch is larger than expected and the soft shells are coming in early, then the market could respond and tell them to slow down their efforts. Without such a mechanism, the fishermen can only know in hindsight, after making the investment of harvesting, how prices move. Had the lobstermen used FYSH-X to plan ahead and sell their harvest in advance, they could have better measured the cadence of their productivity and avoided the current industry ‘tie-up.’ On our platform, buyers will know what they’re going to get and how much they’re going to pay. Fishermen will know the volumes they should target and how much they're going to receive for their catch before they ever leave the dock,” Flett said.
The FYSH-X platform has already produced numerous transactions in the brief period since its launch. Open Ocean manager Tom Livelli says the FYSH-X marketplace, which he describes as complimentary to the conventional auction-based model, merges the technological characteristics of modern exchange markets with the standard practices of fishermen, fish farmers, and large commercial purchasers.
“We felt there was a need to offer a new tool that provides greater control and planning options for everyone involved in the seafood marketplace, and FYSH-X is the platform that delivers on those things,” Livelli said.
Open Ocean Trading has utilized the knowledge of market professionals and applied nearly a decade of research to the development and implementation of these new concepts in creating the FYSH-X marketplace for both domestic and international seafood trade.
"We are dedicated to bringing stability, transparency, traceability, and market depth in order to provide both buyers and sellers with a secure business platform to enhance their competitive edge," said Flett.
Source: Open Ocean Trading