Digital Boost 3.0 Powers Benson Lobster's Next Phase of Growth

For more than 50 years, Benson Lobster has been a cornerstone of New Brunswick's seafood industry, connecting Grand Manan fishermen with customers across North America, Europe, and Asia. As the family-owned company prepares to launch a new seafood processing facility, Benson is evolving from a traditional live lobster wholesaler into an integrated processor and exporter.

To support this next phase of growth, Benson partnered with Tracktile through TechImpact's Digital Boost 3.0 program to assess its digital readiness and identify opportunities to improve efficiency, traceability, and decision-making.

Tracktile's assessment found that many critical business processes still relied on a pen-and-paper approach, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems, limiting real-time visibility and creating challenges for scaling production and meeting increasingly stringent traceability requirements. Through Digital Boost, Benson received a strategic roadmap for modernizing its operations with centralized data, digital tools, and AI-enabled insights, positioning the company for long-term growth, stronger compliance, and greater competitiveness in the global seafood industry.

Tracktile conducted a comprehensive assessment of Benson Lobster's operations, beginning with on-site observations, stakeholder interviews, and a review of the company's existing technology and data. The assessment documented several operational challenges, including duplicate data entry across four live holding facilities, weekly inventory counts completed by hand, production planning based largely on experience and intuition, and the absence of a centralized system of record. Tracktile also benchmarked Benson's digital maturity against industry leaders, finding the company to be at an early stage of digitalization despite strong growth ambitions.

The assessment identified significant opportunities to improve efficiency, visibility, and traceability. Inventory reconciliation remained a manual, time-intensive process, while purchasing, inventory, production, and sales relied on disconnected paper records and spreadsheets, limiting real-time visibility and end-to-end product traceability. These challenges will become increasingly critical as Benson expands processing capacity, pursues additional certifications, and grows into export markets with stringent traceability requirements. To address them, Tracktile developed a phased digital transformation roadmap that modernizes core systems, eliminates manual processes, and lays out the foundation for advanced analytics and AI-driven decision-making.

By replacing paper- and spreadsheet-based workflows with Tracktile's cloud-based platform and AI-powered tools, Benson can achieve end-to-end traceability, real-time operational visibility, and meaningful labour and cost savings. The roadmap begins with implementing a centralized digital platform and barcode-based lot tracking to eliminate duplicate data entry and provide instant inventory visibility across all facilities.

As reliable data is established, AI-powered analytics can optimize inventory turnover, improve production planning, forecast processing yields, and support faster, more informed decision-making. Looking ahead, Benson will be well positioned to adopt emerging technologies such as computer vision for quality inspection and IoT-enabled monitoring, ensuring the company remains competitive as the seafood industry continues to embrace digital innovation.