Sydney Fish Market will transform the way it trades seafood with a new digital trading platform poised to change the way the $3 billion Australian seafood industry operates. 

Sydney Fish Market has signed an agreement with Sydney-based agri-technology business ShoreTrade to roll out the platform, which will facilitate a national B2B online marketplace.  

Sydney Fish Market will hold an exclusive license in the fisheries sector to ShoreTrade’s award-winning technology in Australia and New Zealand. The platform will complement the Market’s physical auction, which will be upgraded when the new Sydney Fish Market building on Blackwattle Bay opens in 2024. 

The opt-in platform will connect more sellers and buyers across the country, as well as provide access to variety, quality, and volume of species. The new online seafood marketplace will facilitate trading 24 hours a day, seven days a week, offering industry intelligence, including daily market pricing across both direct and auction trade, trading volumes and supply-and-demand data.

Sydney Fish Market CEO, Greg Dyer added, “Sydney Fish Market has decades of experience in large-scale, high-quality seafood trading, and has played a significant role in sustainably growing Australia’s seafood industry. The new trading platform will create further growth opportunities for our company and for our traditional suppliers here in NSW, while attracting new operators from the wild caught and aquaculture sectors across the country.

“This game-changing modernisation of our operations will help Sydney Fish Market stay ahead of the curve. The technology will offer new functions, including presale ordering and supply, fixed priced selling for fishers and availability alerts for targeted species for buyers. The system will enable fishers to negotiate a price to go out and catch what buyers need – a reversal of the way the market currently works. The technology will help stabilise the market and help the industry deal by providing multiple trading opportunities without sole reliance on the physical auction.”

ShoreTrade founder, Peter Manettas said, “ShoreTrade was founded to create a more robust trading environment for the industry. The ability to aggregate data sets including trade data, catchment data, customer market segmentation across multiple locations and species allows the technology to be used to create more sustainable ecosystems, robust sales channels and transparency.

“We are enthused to collaborate with Sydney Fish Market to enhance our vision of a digital ecosystem for the industry that will become a leading light of digitisation within the Australian agribusiness sector.”

Sydney Fish Market is working closely with ShoreTrade on the platform integration, with a launch in early 2022. Sydney Fish Market received funding from the NSW government to help support the development of the trading platform.