Not all of the interesting stories you'll find at the Seafood Expo North America (SENA) come from the exhibitors. Sometimes intriguing tales come from other attendees. When planning my schedule for SENA, I spoke to a number of people on Twitter, trying to set up meetings for the Expo to hear their stories. One of the companies which interested me was Ocean Executive and I made plans to speak with them at SENA. At the Expo, I met with Mike Budreski (the Founder), M. Nicholas Budreski (Mike's brother and a seafood distributor), and Brian Fong (Sales & Marketing).
Mike and Nicholas Budeski both come from Nova Scotia and have a background in the fishing industry. Their father actually started the sea urchin business in Nova Scotia. Eventually, Mike moved to New York City, getting a job in finance in the energy industry. He now works in the stock market, dealing with energy stocks. During the course of his work, he realized the advantages and efficiency of the technology of the trading platform. He saw that numerous other industries utilized similar trading platforms. With his background in fishing, he started to consider how that industry could benefit from a trading platform too.
With his entrepreneurial spirit, Mike forged ahead to create an electronic trading platform to centralize the seafood marketplace, to bring e-commerce to an old-fashioned industry. He brought in Brian Fong, who has a background in marketing, and Brian's brother, who is a developer and helped design the program. They received some seed money, spent over 9 months in development, and currently have a Beta version of their product. They have about 50 users, from all around the world, and hope to have 500-1000 within a year.
The basic idea is to take the current process of seafood sale transactions and place it online, making it more efficient, quicker and better at record keeping. The new platform is a business to business marketplace, with two main sections, private and public auctions. The private auctions will allow sales to current customers while the public auctions will permit new customers to purchase seafood too. These are anonymous transactions, though each party involved will have the relevant data that is needed. The seller will select a cold storage area as a trading hub, and as soon as the transaction is completed, title will pass.
The platform will focus on frozen seafood, at least at first, as it is more of a commodity and there are no time pressures to sell it immediately as there would be with fresh fish. Users can sign up for free in only a few minutes, and the only fees they must pay are the transactions fees. Ocean Executive does a background check on all users, checking on the economic status of the user's company. They want a system that users can trust.
Besides the benefits of a more efficient marketplace, the platform will also be the source of detailed analytics. The platform will aggregate a wide range of data on all of the transactions that pass through their system, from prices to trading values. Users will have access to all of these analytics for free, a valuable business commodity. Much of this information is unavailable currently as no one is really gathering and collating it.
As the trading platform is still in Beta, that means it will be fine tuned in the coming months, and they hope to have Version 1.0 ready in approximately 6-8 months. Trading will start on the platform in the near future. At this time, Ocean Executive has no real competitors. Allegedly, a similar platform was created about 15 years ago, and it failed though we live in a very different time now than we did then. E-commerce is huge now, and I believe an electronic trading platform is warranted for the seafood industry. Sometimes all a good idea needs is good timing.
I'll be paying attention to what happens with Ocean Executive, to see whether their ideas help to transform the seafood industry.
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