Taking Wholesale Seafood Buying Off the Phone

01The problem

A trade worth billions, run on phone calls and trust

Seafood is one of the most traded foods on earth. The FAO expects global seafood exports of about $184B in 2025. The US alone imported over $25B of seafood a year from 2023 to 2025, and about four in five pounds eaten there are imported. Between the boat and the kitchen sit brokers, importers, distributors and wholesalers, and their roles overlap.

For a buyer, that means a few suppliers with all the leverage, quality that is hard to check, and thousands of species to keep track of. For a supplier, finding new buyers is slow, and trust starts from zero every time. Tariff changes in 2025 (average duties on US seafood imports hit 8.43%) sent buyers looking for new sources. A tool for finding them was timely.

The brief. Whalelord sits between seafood buyers and suppliers. Its marketplace had to feel trustworthy to a trade with good reason to be sceptical, and be simple enough for people who have never used a B2B platform.

• Constraint 1The usersExperienced operators who are not comfortable with tech, next to a younger generation that expects consumer-grade speed.
• Constraint 2The teamThree people in three countries. The developer needed a design system packaged to be used fast, so I built it and packaged it to be replicated one to one.
• Constraint 3The starting pointA directory and a four-step quote flow already existed as a rough prototype. Good data, weak experience.

Who did what. Our PM, in the US, gave us the brief and ran sales and the expo. Our developer, in Indonesia, built the product. I designed the whole product end to end, and Compass, its design system, from the UK.

Why buyers stay with who they know

US seafood buyers mostly buy from people they already know. They serve the fish or sell it on to their own customers, so a bad lot costs them their reputation, and the safest supplier is the one who delivered last time. Studies of wholesale fish markets find the same pattern. At New York’s Fulton Fish Market most customers were repeat buyers, and every price was quoted privately. At Marseille’s wholesale market, buyers stay loyal to their sellers.

The caution is earned. Seafood is often not what the label says, and the checks only go so far.

• 1 in 3US restaurants and shops tested sold mislabelled fish
• ½Of US seafood imports covered by federal traceability
• 11%Of seafood firms get trade data straight into their systems

Sources: Oceana, “Casting a Wider Net” (2019), DNA tests of 449 fish; NOAA Fisheries, Seafood Import Monitoring Program; Hardt, Flett & Howell, Journal of Food Science (2017), a survey of seafood companies in North America and the EU

Why they don’t move online. For a business that already has suppliers it trusts, going online solves a problem it doesn’t feel. Research on seafood and food trading platforms keeps finding the same four reasons.

• FrictionThe handshakeDeals are made person to person, often by phone. A platform can look like it takes the relationship away.
• FrictionPrivate pricesEach price is set for one customer. Listing prices invites comparison, and suppliers fear it squeezes their margins.
• FrictionQuality you can’t touchBuyers judge fish by sight, smell and past lots. A photo and a spec sheet don’t replace that.
• FrictionNew fees and paperworkCommissions, onboarding and credit checks: new costs for a way of buying that already works.

Sources: Graddy & Hall, NBER (2009), on the Fulton Fish Market; Kirman & Vriend (2001), on the Marseille fish market; Day, Fein & Ruppersberger, California Management Review (2003), on B2B exchanges; Eurofish Magazine (2024)

The friction comes from how this trade works, since the same buyers already order much else online. Big foodservice distributors already sell mostly online: US Foods says 77% of its independent restaurant customers order that way. The gap is in specialty seafood, where each deal is priced privately, credit runs on relationships, and every lot is different.

Why a directory came first

The US has about 3,600 fish and seafood wholesalers with about $24B in revenue, around 4,800 seafood markets and about 17,300 sushi restaurants (IBISWorld). That is 25,000+ possible accounts before counting other seafood restaurants, hotels and caterers. Seafood Expo North America, held in Boston each March, is the biggest seafood trade show on the continent: about 22,000 seafood professionals on average, and more than 1,000 exhibitors from 48 countries in 2026.

Our PM went to the 2026 show and made contact with 100 to 200 people there, most of them buyers rather than sellers. In a market this size, that doesn’t scale by hand. And in a trade this loyal, the first thing to learn was whether these businesses would take their buying online at all. So the first product was a verified directory: the cheapest test of that question.

Sources: IBISWorld (wholesalers, seafood markets, sushi restaurants); Seafood Expo North America, 2026 (average attendance, exhibitors). The last bar is our own count.

Who else is out there. Platforms sit at two ends. Listings directories connect buyers and suppliers and stay out of the deal. Sale-fee exchanges take a fee on each sale and bundle in shipping or trading. The biggest global B2B marketplace leads with verification: suppliers pay for a checked membership, buyers join free, and fees come on payment. Whalelord borrows that model and adds what seafood needs: catch data on every listing, and a quote before every order.