Why “Boat to Plate” May Not Be Realistic, but Traceability is Still Important

Something I often hear is, “You will never be able to trace a lobster back to the boat.” I admit - this is generally true. Through the process of sorting, grading and processing lobster, product is mixed and resorted multiple times so that “Boat to Plate” traceability is not realistic without major changes to how the industry functions. The fact is, you must pool the product from a lot of boats to create a large enough supply of each grade for each sales order.  

So, what’s the good of traceability in the lobster business?  

Well, we need to think of it from the consumer or, more importantly, the retailer side. A retailer doesn’t care too much about what boat the lobster came from. Rather, they want to know: 

• Is this product sustainably caught? 

• Is this product legally caught?  

• Most importantly, do we take on any Headline Risk* by selling this product? 

*Headline Risk is the possibility that a news story will adversely affect a company's bottom line or impact the performance of a specific sector. (For example, Albertsons drops High Liner products after supplier is implicated in forced labor exposé.)  

So, what does that mean for the lobster industry? 

A live lobster buyer is permitted to blend lobsters during grading and packing, provided they can prove that each pound originates from lawful, documented, and regulated sources. This ensures that the batch remains 'traceable,' regardless of whether the lobsters are sourced from 100 different boats. However, the moment lobsters from an unverified source are added to the mix, the traceability of the entire batch becomes compromised.

This will become very important as we approach the US Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) traceability compliance deadline of January 23, 2026. I have fielded many calls from major US retailers about this deadline, and they are currently forcing their Tier 1 Distributors to digitize their data to make it easier to comply. It is only a matter of time before this push is felt all the way back to processors and harvesters. 

We still do not know the exact rules that will be applied to the lobster industry, but we will continue to engage our partners so that our customers and the industry are best prepared to comply.