New Purchasing Model Comes to Seafood Marketplace

Open Ocean Trading is offering fishermen and commercial seafood buyers throughout New England a whole new way to buy and sell their product, with the aims of enhancing business stability, transparency, sustainability and profitability.

The company’s model employs forward contracts and online trading to unite diversified groups of buyers and fishing vessels that can lock down a price for seafood days, weeks or months before the sale. According to Open Ocean, this method gives buyers and sellers greater control over their costs and inventory while offering them deeper market insight and an opportunity to streamline their supply chain.

Buyers for restaurants, grocery stores, distributors, and other retail and wholesale businesses will have far greater control of short- and long-term purchasing budgets, said the company, which has offices in Duxbury and Gloucester, Mass.

Open Ocean’s online trading platform, FYSH-X , enables buyers and sellers to directly negotiate forward contracts to reach agreed-on prices and terms. FYSH-X gives fishermen unique vessel profiles and the ability to extend both their story and product further into the supply chain, the company noted. The platform additionally allows for pre-trip flexibility regarding fuel purchasing, trip length, destination planning and other major decisions that Open Ocean said boost vessel profitability whatever the size of volumes under contract. Forward purchasing also helps shield buyers from marketplace volatility and ensures the freshest product is delivered in place and on time, the company added.

“Our platform brings greater stability to the industry that benefits everyone involved because it provides an opportunity for both buyers and fishermen to look forward and plan ahead,” explained Keith Flett, Open Ocean’s founder. “FYSH-X takes the guesswork out of trying to run a profitable business.”

The company leveraged the knowledge of market professionals and applied almost a decade of research to the development and implementation to create FYSH-X for both the domestic and international seafood trade.