Sustainable Food Source (9)- WWF-Singapore

Enabling efficient automated sustainability assessments of seafood procurement for businesses

Continued demand for unsustainable seafood is threatening fish stocks and will lead to issues in food security, causing businesses in the seafood sector to face key challenges such as supply volatility and price instability. Through our partnerships with the hospitality and F&B industry, WWF-SG identified the challenge of identifying unsustainable products and finding suitable alternatives in their seafood procurement lists as one key barrier hindering businesses from engaging in responsible seafood procurement is. Current practices require not just technical expertise in understanding what constitutes seafood unsustainability but also the need for man-hour intensive efforts to identify such products within procurement lists.

This challenge is not unique to sourcing responsible seafood. With more companies committing to sustainability and implementing sustainable procurement guidelines, businesses are facing a growing need to make quick and efficient sustainability assessments of their current procurement lists such as for packaging and other food products, to find suitable alternatives accordingly. This growing trend is also aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 12: Ensure Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns and the Singapore Green Plan 2030.

Eligibility

WWF- Singapore is seeking the development of a tool that lowers the barriers for any seafood procuring business along the seafood value chain to source seafood responsibly, by making identification of unsustainable products and alternative sourcing from validated sustainable sources effortless within the procurement process. The tool should be seamlessly integrated into the current workflow, easy to interpret & navigate, and provide a dynamic procurement experience for the abovementioned food-related businesses.

The tool should have the following key features:

• Automatically upload and process seafood procurement data from businesses
• Conduct an automated & real-time analysis to produce a visual sustainability procurement assessment based on a WWF-provided seafood sustainability dataset (also known as the red-list) that would include global sustainability assessments on specific seafood stocks
• Be platform agnostic for close & broad-based integration with commonly used procurement systems such as ARIBA and SAP
• Provide dynamic recommendations for alternative seafood products and supplier contacts based on a WWF-provided credible and verified supplier directory
• Log-in & business-specific features allow for registration and saving past results in their accounts, and providing feedback.

In the long term, we would like for solution providers to consider:

• Long-term commercial viability for the platform including a subscription membership model or other revenue-generating features, as well as continued maintenance and update of platform features
• Search engine optimization to enable non-users to be brought into the platform
• Dynamic updates of the sustainability dataset and supplier directory when new data is made available
• Data mining of procurement lists to identify high volume but data-deficient fish stocks to inform future sustainability assessments
• Future expansion into other sustainable products for business procurement, such as alternative materials for plastic packaging, sustainable pulp or paper products, or plant or cell-based meat
• Future expansion into wider markets such as individual consumers

The timeline for the desired implementation would be late 2022.

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Benefits

• WWF-Singapore will provide S$20,000 in seed funding for the winning proposal

Application Process

For Application CLICK HERE

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