Victoria Co-operative Fisheries Ltd.

For nearly 70 years, Victoria Co-operative Fisheries Ltd. (VCFL) has been the backbone of the community in Northern Cape Breton, says General Manager Osborne Burke, his voice ringing with pride.

“We’re the biggest employer, bigger than the (Cape Breton Highlands) National Park, and we’re a driving force helping food banks and regional hospitals.”

Based in Neil’s Harbour, the co-op purchases, processes and ships lobster, snow crab, Jonah crab and halibut to Canada, the U.S. and Asia. The co-op currently has about 115 member harvesters and, in peak season, adds another 125 staff working in the co-op’s restaurant, on the wharves, processing and trucking.

While the focus on quality products and serving the community hasn’t changed since the company’s inception in 1955, digitization is helping propel VCFL into the future.

An ACOA client since 2011, VCFL received a $100,000 non-repayable contribution through ACOA’s Digital Acceleration Pilot (DAP) in 2022 for an inventory digitization project that saves time, improves accountability, reduces human error and increases accuracy, says their marketing manager, Joel Burton.

The Digital Acceleration Pilot (DAP) aims to enhance digital adoption in growth-oriented firms in Atlantic Canada by implementing quick impact projects to bring them along digital transformation journeys.

“DAP has allowed us to move into a new phase with a trusted vendor, a tech firm of repute. A move to traceability is already in place in response to consumer demand for product accountability, and this (contribution) has allowed us to start thinking about our next phase, inventory on the product and sales side,” says Mr. Burton.

VCFL has been working with Sedna Technologies, a small Dartmouth-based tech company that has been building customizable software solutions for Atlantic Canada’s seafood sector for about six years.

The DAP project involved the two companies working together to streamline inventory operations through digitization, eliminating paperwork and redundancies, says Sedna’s general manager, Moira Frier.

“Prior to this, people used paper and wrote down what was being produced,” explains Mr. Burke. “We’d write whatever was produced and manually subtract what was being shipped out, which required a lot of time and effort.”

Now, staff use an iPad on the production floor to automatically enter the product being produced in the computer system, resulting in a significant improvement in inventory records.

“At any given time, we know exactly what is on hand, we have an accurate accounting: as it’s produced, it’s recorded,” Mr. Burke says, adding that staff is onboard and the project is a 100% success. “It makes life easier, with less headaches.”

Ms. Frier says the digitized process was implemented in the Spring of 2023 and the company used it during the crab and lobster season.

“The new module works with everything they’ve adopted. We worked closely with the company to develop and build a custom solution that genuinely streamlines operations and eliminates operational tasks no one wants to do.

“I feel very lucky to work with Victoria Co-op. They are definitely at the forefront of innovation in the seafood industry. At their core, they know how the co-op impacts the community and how intrinsic it is to the survival of the rural community; it’s why they want to digitize, to futureproof operations.”

Mr. Burke says that the company, which ships between 2 million and 3 million pounds of product a year, has a labour challenge, and everywhere the company makes improvements, it reduces the labour need. And government funding for programs like DAP is critical.

“The key word is growth. We’re moving to a smart form of growth, assisted by digitization,” notes Mr. Burton. “The goal is increased productivity. Those efficiencies are improved on by working with Sedna.”

The roadmap continues toward digitization in other areas, he concludes, with more customer-facing plans, including a move to greater e-commerce and improving retail and wholesale.