March 10, 2014 — Like many other fish dealers, Red’s Best is teeming with pallets of shiny succulent seafood, fresh haddock and hake, boxes of clams, and more exotic catches, with trails of crushed ice leading from bin to packing crate. But the real prize of Red’s operation at Boston Fish Pier is in a side room, where the company’s salesmen work from computers to market locally caught seafood to high-end wholesalers who sell to restaurants around the country.
Powering this nerve center is a software program developed by Red’s Best founder, Jared Auerbach, that can provide buyers with an incredible level of detail on every fish and mollusk that comes through the doors. Each shipment comes with a label printed with a QR code that, when scanned, links to a Web page of information, from when and where the seafood was caught to a bio of the ship’s captain and even what equipment he used.
“Where we’ve done well is giving people the tools to pass on the story of the fish. We believe there’s value in the story,” Auerbach said. “We’re aggressively marketing” local fishermen.
Instead of just selling any old batch of oysters, Red’s Best can tell buyers when it has Martha’s Vineyard oysters, for instance, that were harvested by a particular fisherman with, say, a reputation for finding plump briny bivalves.
In an age of factory ships and mislabeled seafood, the technology developed by Auerbach does more than promote fresh authentic seafood from local fishermen.
It also provides buyers with a receipt that documents that the fish they are buying is the real thing — that it is in fact Atlantic Cod caught out of Chatham by a hook-and-line fisherman, for example, and not cheaper Pacific Cod.
And in the process, Auerbach can get higher prices for his local fisherman, he said.
Auerbach is among a handful of entrepreneurs in Boston and across the country who are trying to bring technology to the ancient industry of hauling fish from the sea, with innovations that promise to make fishing more economically and environmentally sustainable.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe