New in Goldfish: MSC Vessel Lists

MSC is the world's largest seafood ecolabel, but if you have ever tried looking up vessels associated with a certified fishery you now that it can be quite a task.  As experts in taming unruly datasets to support supply chain integrity we decided to tackle this one, and I'm pleased to share the team's work!    

Cleaning up and putting MSC vessel lists to work in our API and platform started with digitizing all MSC fishery certificates last summer.  Of the 275 active certifications, we found that 212 of them include a vessel list—either as a posted PDF or link somewhere in the supporting documentation.  Our team painstakingly uncovered, digitized and indexed over 11,000 vessels across all of these lists. As it turns out, that was the easy part.  There is no auditor guidance for reporting vessel lists so the vast majority of them are inconsistent, hard to decipher and incomplete—picture trying to validate a list of vessel names with no flag or identifiers.  It took months to research each certificate and leverage our extensive vessel database to fill in the gaps, but we were finally to uncover and validate the identity of the remaining vessels.

What information do you have about vessels?

We’re so glad you asked, and you're certainly not the first! Goldfish maintains a harmonized dataset of over 150 vessel attributes sourced from around the world. Here’s the full readout on just one vessel (with the new MSC information highlighted):

Today's announcement is a big step toward transparency, but there is much more work to be done.  Auditors need to start submitting vessel lists with at least the vessel's name, flag and identifier such as a national registration or IMO number.  We realize that this is a big request, so to lessen the burden we built a vessel list submission and monitoring platform for auditors!  MSC vessel lists are pre-populated, validated, and ready for updates and support continuous compliance monitoring!  It couldn't be easier to do better.

We’re excited to see how this data will be used to address critical challenges in supply chains and open new opportunities for auditing, research, continuous monitoring and advocacy.

Ready to dive in?

Discover the full potential of Goldfish’s harmonized vessel data and learn how it can work for you. Book a demo today.