New Resources for Seafood Buyers

By: Rick Stein, Vice President, Fresh Foods, FMI

For a seafood buying office, one of the first major career challenges can come in understanding the various specifications for various seafood products. Indeed, buying offices may vary from organization to organization. Different buying offices create multiple ways of describing what buyers actually want. The suppliers are often caught up trying to interpret each organization’s requirements. If a standardized form was created that allowed retailers to enter their specific requirements, the industry would become much more efficient.

In collaboration with National Fisheries Institute, the FMI Seafood Strategy Leadership Council (SSLC) has created just that: fillable forms for retailers and wholesalers to use when sending seafood product specifications to suppliers. SSLC’s goal was to streamline and standardize the language and specifications for each seafood species to help suppliers comply and fill orders. The fillable forms allow organizations to indicate their product requirements and enable seafood suppliers to consolidate their communication.

We believe these forms will allow:

• Buyers to communicate their needs in a more robust and consistent way.
• Suppliers to be able to review product specifications that use consistent language.
• Buyers to learn more about the specific requirements they need to communicate to maximize efficiency.

FMI and NFI encourage our members to utilize these forms and have organizational buyers adopt them. Forms currently exist for shrimp, scallop and snow crab, while additional forms are being developed for salmon (farm-raised and wild-caught) and finfish. As the industry changes, we are fully committed to keeping these forms robust and up to date. Learn more and download the forms at www.FMI.org/Seafood.

Seafood Product Specification Templates