- Kalalohko is joining the IOTA Business Innovation Program and wants to make the seafood supply chain more transparent and fair with verifiable data instead of labels.
- For this, the project relies on IOTA Identity (actor identities), IOTA Notarization (unchangeable proof of origin/process) and the IOTA Gas Station (Kalalohko covers fees).
Kalalohko is new to the IOTA Business Innovation Program. The EU-funded project wants to clean up the seafood supply chain, not with a new seal, but with verifiable data. Kalalohko wants to use IOTA Identity, IOTA Notarization and the Gas Station for this.
According to the IOTA Foundation, the seafood industry is characterized by non-transparent, centralized structures, to the detriment of local fishermen, ecological stability and increasing import dependency.
And the market is gigantic. The IOTA Foundation quantifies the seafood market in its official press release for 2025 to around 262.26 billion US dollars. Furthermore it says:
“Falling prices, rising costs and market oligopolies have made fishing economically unviable for many and accelerated a decline in local activity that is harming both communities and marine biodiversity.”
According to IOTA, Kalalohko wants to build a supply chain that is not only efficient, but also enables transparency and fair conditions along the entire chain. And it’s about money and distribution, not just tracking.
As IOTA describes it, Kalalohko wants to enable “higher wages for fishermen and more work for local logistics players”. Ideally, the end result is “fresh, locally sourced fish” and “lower prices for end users such as restaurants and municipalities”.
Why IOTA and why a public DLT at all?
Tommi Lindholm, Chairman of Kalalohko, says in the press release:
“We are in the business of shaking up a very conservative industry with well-established, centralized power structures and fixed processes. From our perspective, IOTA wants to challenge exactly this mindset and bring transparency, decentralization and accountability to trading.”
As long as central gatekeepers have data sovereignty, an internal system remains just another control instrument. IOTA also provides a second reason: regulation and sustainability pressure.
The IOTA Foundation mentions “upcoming EU regulations” as well as a concrete signal from nature conservation: WWF Sweden has classified industrially farmed rainbow trout from “green” to “yellow”.
The message: Origin and sustainability must be reliably verifiable in the future – not as marketing, but verifiable.
Kalalohko wants to use three IOTA building blocks. IOTA Identity is intended to provide “a unique, tamper-proof digital identity” “for every actor in the logistics chain, from fishing operations to restaurants.”
IOTA Notarization is planned as an end-to-end protocol. The release says it is intended to “serve as a single, unchanging record of a fish’s entire journey” – ensuring “that its provenance is verifiable from the moment it leaves the net.”
And then comes the part that often decides in practice whether something like this is used: fees.
“IOTA Gas Station will ensure that all of these transactions are transparent and provide a seamless user experience by covering all transaction fees,” said the press release.
Kalalohko doesn’t just talk about seafood. The project wants to later transfer the model to other areas “with similar supply chain dynamics”, including “high-quality artisanal products” and “other protein verticals”. IOTA sells this as a scalable pattern: a setup that starts in a difficult market and is then intended to be transferable to other industries.
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