Bumble Bee IT Addresses Growing Consumers’ Demand for Knowledge of Their Food

• By
 
• KIM S. NASH

Bumble Bee Seafoods LLC is on track for a June launch of a website that lets consumers trace the origins of their tuna, via codes printed on cans that will provide information about where and how the fish were caught and by which fisheries.

The move comes in response to increasing interest among consumers about the provenance of products, especially food, said Bumble Bee CIO Tony Costa. “We’ve heard it loud and clear.”

Ritchie Tongo/Zuma Press

Yellow fin tuna lined up in General Santos City, Philippines.

Whole Foods MarketInc., for example, has technology projects underway to supply shoppers with data such as animal welfare ratings and whether a food contains genetically modified ingredients, as CIO Jason Bueschel told CIO Journal in September.

Satisfying consumer demand for supply chain information “can mean the different between a good and a bad corporate reputation,” said Stan Aronow, a research vice president at Gartner Inc.Companies in other industries are also working to provide customers with detailed information about how their products were made, Mr. Aronow noted. That includesIntel Corp., with its effort to build a “conflict-free supply chain” that avoids building computer processors with minerals from geographic regions known to exploit labor.

Visibility into the food supply chain is a hot topic for environmentally conscious consumers, said Monica Jain, founder and executive director of Manta Consulting, which advises startups. “People especially want to know if their fish was caught illegally,” said Ms. Jain, who founded Fish 2.0, which connects fishing businesses with potential investors.

At Bumble Bee, much of the data for the traceability project already exists in the company’s supply chain systems, Mr. Costa said. The goal is to extract and present it in a way easy for consumers to understand. To do that, the technology group built its own tools, he said.  Bumble Bee is the target of an acquisition announced in December by Thai Union Frozen Products PLC, a seafood company that owns rival Chicken of the Sea. The $1.5 billion deal is not yet approved by U.S. regulators.