There are high fives in the office when Magnus Houston finds out Coast and Glen is one of the Guardian’s digital innovation winners. “To get recognition for our work is really great,” he says. “All of the team have been working so hard.”
The entrepreneur is making waves in Scotland’s fishing industry with Fishbox, a subscription seafood service. To work as sustainably as possible, they have developed an algorithm in collaboration with Sterling University to create a shopping list for their buyers visiting fish markets. It’s a model that considers customer preferences – based on predefined “loves, likes and dislikes” – and can be tailored to whatever comes in fresh on the boats that day.
“To scale the business with perishable goods, you have to have a shopping list to go to the market,” Houston says. “You’re dealing with wild produce, so you might get to the market needing five boxes of cod, but you can only buy two. What else do you buy? You don’t know what customer’s preferences are.”
Customers will only ever receive a love or like, he explains. So if there’s not enough cod for example, “the algorithm recomputes and says ok, you can only buy two boxes of cod, but you could buy a box of pollock and three boxes of coley. You might need to buy more or less fish to get the right quantity of portions for the boxes.”
It’s not a sector that Houston knew much about 10 years ago. He had raced motorbikes professionally for Suzuki until a bad accident ended his career. After recovering, an outing on a friend’s lobster boat changed his life forever. He admits, “it was a bit of a Forrest Gump moment because I didn’t know anything about fishing – I had to teach myself everything on YouTube.”
Despite such amateur beginnings, Houston did start to make an income from the sea. It was at this time that he says he was “eating like a king. I wasn’t even really a big fish fan before that but every night I was thinking ‘oh my God, this tastes so good; how does this taste so good?’”
The trick, it would seem, is how fresh the fish is when it gets to your plate. Houston now works with his market buyers to target ships that have not been at sea for long periods of time, and connects UK customers with their local fishing industry, rather than sourcing produce from abroad.
So far, the response has been impressive. Since launching two years ago, the business now sends 1,200 boxes every month. “We’ve had a lot of growth,” Houston says. “We have 23 staff now and 10 of them were employed in the last year. You don’t see many fish merchants who have a CTO, back-end developer, or a UX designer.”
Houston admits they’ve spent “thousands and thousands” developing their site, but is impressed with how easy SAP Anywhere software makes it for small businesses who are just getting started. “It’s such good value for money … to be able to upload your images and text and that’s your e-commerce website done. It’s a brilliant opportunity.”
Toby Davidson, vice president of product strategy for SAP Anywhere and one of the competition judges says: “Coast and Glen is a company that’s taking an innovative business model to a fairly traditional sector. Using technology they’ve been able to deliver a more responsive and efficient service for customers and have some ambitious plans for the future.
“SAP Anywhere is able to offer small businesses with big ideas the ability to continue growing their enterprise by harnessing the power of digital technology. It’s exciting to see how they’ll take things to the next level.”
In the future, Houston hopes Fishbox will continue to grow at the same rate it is now. There are hopes that the algorithm could have benefits for the wider industry, in promoting sustainable consumption and allocating the fish at market to the appropriate buyers. It’s telling that some of the business’s biggest fans are the fishermen themselves: “The fact we’re making heroes of them and what they catch ... they just think it’s tremendous.”
This advertisement feature is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with SAP Anywhere, sponsor of The Disruptors hub on the Guardian Small Business Network.
