Seaweed Supply Chain Traceability: How Uluu Is Building a Sustainable and Certification-Ready Supply Chain
Editor's Note:
Seaweed is emerging as a critical renewable resource for sustainable material innovation, but scaling the industry requires transparent and traceable supply chains. This article is an editorial adaptation of information originally released by Uluu and published by AntaraNews, examining the company's efforts to build a traceable and certification-ready seaweed supply chain in Indonesia. It highlights Uluu's collaboration with local suppliers, farming communities, WWF-Indonesia, and KOLTIVA to strengthen responsible sourcing, certification readiness, and long-term value creation for coastal communities.
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Executive Summary:
Uluu, an Australian company that converts farmed seaweed into polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) as a replacement for fossil-based plastics (green queen, 2025), has established PT Uluu Solusi Indonesia and completed its first fully traceable seaweed shipment from South Sulawesi. The seaweed came from CV Persada Semesta, a local supplier, and its origin and movement were recorded digitally from farm level through processing and shipment using Koltiva's traceability system.
Alongside the shipment, Uluu launched an Aquaculture Improvement Program (AIP) in Luwu, South Sulawesi, through Seafood Savers, WWF-Indonesia's business engagement platform. The program works with supply chain partner CV Persada Semesta to bring farming practices and management systems in line with the ASC-MSC Seaweed Standard. Uluu's target is Indonesia's first ASC-MSC certified seaweed supply chain.
Indonesia is the world's second-largest seaweed producer, but most of its harvest moves through layers of collectors and traders before it reaches a processor, leaving buyers with little visibility of farm-level origin. This article looks at what it took to close that gap on a single shipment, why certification readiness depends on data captured at source, and what the pilot suggests about scaling traceability across coastal aquaculture
The Growing Need for Seaweed Traceability in a Changing Market
The journey toward truly sustainable materials begins long before a product reaches the factory floor. It starts with the communities producing the raw materials, the partners responsible for moving them through the supply chain, and the systems that make every stage visible, verifiable, and accountable.
This reality is becoming increasingly important as manufacturers, brands, and consumers seek greater transparency into where materials come from and how they are produced. For companies pioneering alternatives to conventional plastics, traceability is no longer a competitive advantage. It is becoming a fundamental requirement for responsible growth.
One company taking significant steps in this direction is Uluu, an Australian biotechnology company creating natural materials from seaweed as an alternative to fossil-based plastics. The company ferments sugars extracted from farmed seaweed into polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs, a family of biodegradable polymers that can substitute for conventional plastic in a range of applications (green queen, 2025). Recently, Uluu announced the establishment of PT Uluu Solusi Indonesia led by Dian Kurniawati as President Director, completed its first fully traceable seaweed shipment from South Sulawesi, and launched an Aquaculture Improvement Program (AIP) with WWF-Indonesia to support certification readiness among its supply chain partners.
Together, these initiatives represent an important milestone in Uluu's mission to build a transparent, scalable, and responsible seaweed supply chain while creating long-term value for farming communities across Indonesia.
Why Traceability Matters in Modern Seaweed Supply Chains
Historically, seaweed supply chains have operated through multiple intermediaries, with limited transparency between farm-level production and downstream buyers. This fragmentation creates challenges for companies attempting to verify sourcing practices, measure sustainability impacts, or comply with evolving market requirements.
As demand grows for sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics, manufacturers face increasing pressure to demonstrate the origin, integrity, and sustainability of their raw materials. However, building transparency within agricultural and marine supply chains is rarely straightforward.
The scale of the challenge in Indonesia is considerable. The country is the world's second-largest seaweed producer after China, and much of that volume comes from smallholder farms scattered across thousands of kilometres of coastline.
Seaweed often moves through multiple actors before reaching processors and manufacturers. Farmers sell their harvest to local collectors, who aggregate volumes from numerous communities. The material can then pass through warehouses, exporters, and processing facilities before becoming part of a finished product.
Without reliable traceability systems, it becomes difficult to answer essential questions:
Where did the seaweed originate?
Which farmers produced it?
How was it cultivated?
Were sustainability commitments met?
Can benefits and premiums reach producers fairly?
Most of the traceability infrastructure now operating in Indonesia was built for land-based commodities. Cocoa, coffee, palm oil and rubber supply chains have spent the past several years registering producers, mapping plots and recording transactions, largely because buyers in Europe began asking for plot-level evidence of where a shipment originated. Seaweed has not been through that process.
Some of what was built for those crops carries over. Producer registration, capturing the first sale between producer and collector, and following custody through each subsequent handover work the same way whether the material grew on land or in water. Other parts do not transfer at all. Land-commodity systems are anchored to a mapped plot boundary and a land tenure record, and seaweed farming has neither in any comparable form. Farms are lines and rafts in coastal water, boundaries shift with the season, and many producers hold no document tying them to a specific site.
That gap is why a marine pilot is worth watching. It tests whether an approach developed for deforestation risk can be adapted to a supply chain where the underlying asset is not a plot of land. Digital traceability transforms these challenges into opportunities by creating reliable, verifiable records that connect supply chain actors from production to final delivery. Through structured data collection and transaction monitoring, organisations gain greater visibility into sourcing practices while establishing the foundation for responsible supply chain management.
For Uluu, answering these questions is critical to creating a responsible, scalable supply chain that aligns with its mission of replacing fossil plastics with renewable alternatives derived from seaweed. Uluu sources seaweed from Indonesia, particularly South Sulawesi, and requires traceable and certified seaweed supply to support its production model.
Turning Traceability into Action - Supporting a More Transparent Seaweed Ecosystem
While traceability is often discussed as a technology challenge, successful implementation requires a combination of digital systems, operational processes, and stakeholder participation. To support its first fully traceable seaweed shipment, Uluu collaborated with CV Persada Semesta, a supplier based in South Sulawesi, and KOLTIVA, a global agritech company specializing in traceability and sustainable sourcing solutions, and WWF-Indonesia.
Through KOLTIVA's digital traceability ecosystem, information regarding the origin and movement of seaweed was recorded digitally from the farm level through processing and shipment. This enabled participating stakeholders to gain greater visibility into supply chain activities while establishing a foundation for continuous improvement.
To further strengthen sustainability performance, Uluu has launched an Aquaculture Improvement Program (AIP) in South Sulawesi in partnership with WWF-Indonesia, involving CV Persada Semesta.
The program is designed to help participating suppliers prepare for certification against the ASC-MSC Seaweed Standard, one of the leading certification frameworks for responsible seaweed production.
The initiative focuses on several key areas:
· Responsible farming practices
· Environmental performance
· Social performance
· Traceability systems
· Supply chain management
Importantly, the program is being developed through close collaboration with suppliers, farmers, and local implementation teams to ensure that improvements are practical, achievable, and relevant to local conditions.
Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach, the program emphasizes learning, adaptation, and continuous improvement. This allows stakeholders to identify challenges, test solutions, and strengthen systems before expanding them more broadly.
By combining traceability initiatives with certification readiness efforts, Uluu and its partners aim to create a stronger foundation for responsible seaweed sourcing while supporting long-term market access opportunities.
Certification Readiness Begins with Reliable Data
Traceability alone is not the final destination. It serves as the critical first step toward broader sustainability goals, including certification, market access, and continuous improvement.
Uluu has also launched an Aquaculture Improvement Program in South Sulawesi together with WWF-Indonesia, involving CV Persada Semesta, with the objective of preparing suppliers for certification against the ASC-MSC Seaweed Standard. The programme focuses on farming practices, environmental and social performance, traceability, and supply chain management.
For producers and buyers alike, certification frameworks increasingly provide assurance that products meet recognised sustainability benchmarks. However, certification readiness depends on the availability of accurate, verifiable, and accessible supply chain data.
This is where digital traceability becomes indispensable.
By collecting and validating information at the source, organisations can establish clear links between production activities, transaction records, and sustainability indicators. These capabilities help streamline audits, improve data accuracy, and strengthen confidence among downstream stakeholders.
More importantly, digital systems enable continuous improvement rather than one-time compliance exercises. Supply chain actors can identify gaps, monitor progress, and collaborate more effectively on sustainability objectives.
Uluu's declared target gives that data a clear endpoint: the first ASC-MSC certified seaweed supply chain in Indonesia. Certification against the standard is assessed at the level of the farming unit and the chain of custody that carries the product to market, which means the record has to hold up from the farm through every subsequent handover.
Technology Alone Is Not Enough
One of the most overlooked aspects of traceability is human adoption. Even the most advanced digital systems cannot create transparency if users lack the knowledge, confidence, or support needed to implement them effectively. For this reason, successful supply chain transformation depends not only on technology but also on capacity building, training, and stakeholder engagement.
Through its implementation support model, KOLTIVA works alongside supply chain actors to help facilitate onboarding, digital adoption, field engagement, and practical application of traceability workflows. This approach recognizes that sustainable improvements occur when local actors understand the value of participation and have the tools necessary to contribute effectively. As supply chains become increasingly data-driven, empowering people remains just as important as deploying technology.
In practice, traceability tends to fail at the first sale rather than at the platform. A collector buying from twenty farmers in a morning has every reason to record one aggregated volume instead of twenty separate transactions, and once that aggregation happens the farm-level link is gone for good. No amount of downstream system design recovers it.
What changes that behaviour is usually mundane. Recording has to take seconds rather than minutes, it has to work on the phone the collector already owns and on a weak signal, and there has to be a reason to bother, whether that is faster payment, a receipt the farmer will accept, or access to a buyer programme that requires the record. Field teams that spend time in the villages, speak the local language and stay through several harvest cycles are what separate a system that is installed from one that is used.
Seaweed raises the stakes on this. It is harvested several times a year rather than once, so the recording habit has to survive a repetition that an annual crop never tests.
Creating Value for Farmers and Coastal Communities
Beyond visibility and compliance, traceability can help create more inclusive and resilient supply chains.
Transparent systems make it easier for organizations to connect sustainability programs, supplier development initiatives, and potential premium mechanisms with verified sourcing communities.
For seaweed-farming households, greater supply chain transparency can help strengthen engagement with buyers, improve access to support programs, and create opportunities for long-term participation in sustainable value chains. This aligns closely with Uluu's broader mission of creating positive environmental and social impact alongside material innovation.
By building relationships directly with suppliers, cooperatives, and farming communities, the company aims to ensure that the benefits of supply chain development extend beyond the final product and reach the people responsible for producing the raw material.
Building the Future of Traceable Seaweed Supply Chains
Uluu's first fully traceable seaweed shipment represents more than a logistics milestone. It demonstrates what becomes possible when traceability, responsible sourcing, and local collaboration are integrated into supply chain development from the beginning rather than added later as a compliance exercise.
The establishment of PT Uluu Solusi Indonesia, the successful completion of the traceability pilot, and the launch of the Aquaculture Improvement Program all represent important early steps toward a larger vision: creating a seaweed supply chain that is both fully traceable and prepared for independent certification.
The work is still in its early stages. As Dian Kurniawati, President Director of PT Uluu Solusi Indonesia, emphasized, Uluu is beginning with focused pilots in Indonesia, learning alongside its partners, and continuously improving the system before expanding to a broader network. Yet these first steps offer valuable insights into how sustainable supply chains can be built through collaboration, transparency, and shared commitment.
As demand for renewable materials continues to grow, the future of responsible sourcing will depend not only on what products are made from, but also on how clearly businesses can demonstrate where those materials come from, how they are produced, and how value is shared throughout the supply chain.
Through collaboration among suppliers, cooperatives, farmers, WWF-Indonesia, KOLTIVA, and local communities, Uluu is helping lay the foundation for a more transparent, accountable, and certification-ready seaweed supply chain in Indonesia.
About the Editor
Editor: Daniel Prasetyo, Head of Corporate Communication at KOLTIVA
Daniel Prasetyo brings more than a decade of cross-industry experience leading corporate public relations and corporate communications initiatives. He integrates brand building, market positioning, and stakeholder engagement into strategic communication programs, playing a key role in supporting business growth and strengthening the company’s brand reputation.
Image Source and Copyright Notice
The images used in this article are sourced from Uluu’s official LinkedIn account and are included solely for illustrative and reference purposes.
Image Attribution: The photographs referenced in this article are copyrighted by Uluu and were originally published on Uluu’s official LinkedIn account.
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