Beaver Street Fisheries Catches RFID
The frozen-seafood dealer may be a small fish in Wal-Mart’s sea
of suppliers, yet it met the retailer’s RFID mandate a year ahead of schedule—and it expects to land internal benefits as well.
By Elizabeth Wasserman
Apr. 1, 2005—Beaver Street Fisheries, a Jacksonville, Fla., frozen-seafood dealer, was founded in 1950 by the Frisch brothers and their mother as a small retail fresh-fish store on West Beaver Street. The company has expanded to become one of the top seafood suppliers in the United States, importing fish from 50 different countries. Its warehouses and U.S. Department of Commerce- inspected seafood-processing plant take up two city blocks.
For the past 15 years, Beaver Street Fisheries has been a Wal-Mart supplier. Today, the company ships 270,000 cases of frozen lobster tails, snow crab, breaded jumbo shrimp and other seafood products to Wal-Mart each month. Yet, Beaver Street Fisheries is not one of the retailer’s top 100 suppliers, so it doesn’t have to comply with Wal-Mart’s requirement to put RFID tags on pallets and cases shipped to the retailer’s distribution centers until January 2006. (Top 100 suppliers began tagging shipments in January 2005.)
Nevertheless, as of December 2004, Beaver Street Fisheries has been tagging 5,000 cases—including three different product lines—shipped each month to Wal-Mart’s Perishable Foods Distribution Center in Cleburne, Texas. The seafood supplier met Wal-Mart’s mandate one year and one month ahead of schedule.
“We decided to be proactive and jump into it and grab the bull by the horns,” says Howard Stockdale, CIO of Beaver Street Fisheries. “We’ve always prided ourselves on being the value-added supplier. We wanted to provide that additional value not just to Wal-Mart but also to other customers coming down the pike.”
Apr. 1, 2005—Beaver Street Fisheries, a Jacksonville, Fla., frozen-seafood dealer, was founded in 1950 by the Frisch brothers and their mother as a small retail fresh-fish store on West Beaver Street. The company has expanded to become one of the top seafood suppliers in the United States, importing fish from 50 different countries. Its warehouses and U.S. Department of Commerce- inspected seafood-processing plant take up two city blocks.
For the past 15 years, Beaver Street Fisheries has been a Wal-Mart supplier. Today, the company ships 270,000 cases of frozen lobster tails, snow crab, breaded jumbo shrimp and other seafood products to Wal-Mart each month. Yet, Beaver Street Fisheries is not one of the retailer’s top 100 suppliers, so it doesn’t have to comply with Wal-Mart’s requirement to put RFID tags on pallets and cases shipped to the retailer’s distribution centers until January 2006. (Top 100 suppliers began tagging shipments in January 2005.)
Nevertheless, as of December 2004, Beaver Street Fisheries has been tagging 5,000 cases—including three different product lines—shipped each month to Wal-Mart’s Perishable Foods Distribution Center in Cleburne, Texas. The seafood supplier met Wal-Mart’s mandate one year and one month ahead of schedule.
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“We decided to be proactive and jump into it and grab the bull by the horns,” says Howard Stockdale, CIO of Beaver Street Fisheries. “We’ve always prided ourselves on being the value-added supplier. We wanted to provide that additional value not just to Wal-Mart but also to other customers coming down the pike.”
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