Barbara Granek

A convoluted path from ocean to table

If you set out to design an efficient, transparent marketplace, you would not create today’s seafood industry. Getting a pound of shrimp or a seabass fillet from the ocean to a diner’s plate can involve as many as ten intermediaries. At any step, there’s the opportunity for misidentification, mislabeling, and occasionally outright misleading. Well-meaning restaurants often can’t be certain the halibut they put on the menu is sustainably caught, or even whether it’s actually halibut. And all these intermediaries mean that those who take the most risk—fishermen—receive woefully little money for their efforts.

Barbara Granek comes from a fishing family and worked at her family’s company after getting her MBA from MIT’s Sloan School. “I spent two years immersed in our production hub in Brazil.” She observed first-hand the inefficiencies and inequities of the existing seafood production system. “Fishermen take the biggest risk in the operation and they make the least money. They pretty much give away the fish.”

Making the best seafood available to anyone, responsibly

Barbara founded Fishtag in early 2019 using the knowledge she gained from her family’s business. Fishtag supports both buyers and sellers by connecting them directly on its platform, streamlining the seafood industry supply chain and promoting sustainability. It also provides logistics support that includes door-to-door tracking, quality control achieved by curating what producers it allows on the platform, and secure and immediate payment for producers. “The restaurant can buy directly from the seafood producers and the producers send the seafood directly to the restaurants. We manage the back-office work involved in taking the seafood from the producer to the restaurant: the logistics, the payment,” Barbara says.

Connecting Latin American seafood producers to the U.S.

In its first year of operation, Fishtag significantly boosted the income of 16 fishermen and delivered more than 12 tons of sustainably sourced fish. Real growth came during 2020, amidst the COVID pandemic. With the closure of many restaurants, Fishtag was forced to pivot to sell directly to individuals. In a matter of weeks, the company revamped its sales model, leading to 60-percent growth between 2019 and 2020, with orders increasing more than tenfold. Short-term plans include expanding to nearly 1,000 fishermen and more than 40 restaurants in the first half of 2021.

Barbara plans to take that same rapid innovation approach to move beyond Brazil. “We want to make the direct connection between the Latin American countries and the seafood industry the U.S.,” she says. “This is our long-term view.”