Nearly 20 years ago, Renaud Enjalbert, who is now the CEO of Rennes, France-headquartered fresh food e-procurement platform Klarys, began his career in the seafood industry by importing and exporting products between France and the U.K., as well as wholesaling products to retailers and other businesses.
Enjalbert worked closely with producers of langoustine, scallops, and lobsters but soon grew frustrated at the day-to-day inefficiencies he was seeing in the industry.
“As a wholesaler, half of my mornings were spent calling suppliers to know what was available in stock and at what price they were selling. Then, I would sell those products to my customers, but most of the time, what I had already sold was no longer available,” he said. “I was making phone calls all day long, so I wanted to digitalize tasks that have traditionally been very time-consuming in the seafood industry.”
In 2015, Enjalbert achieved just that with the creation of Klarys, which started as a platform aimed at giving suppliers and buyers digital access to real-time information on price and availability, simplifying their workflow and reducing the need for the constant phone calls he used to make.
“For a buyer, they could say, ‘OK, I want some lobster’ and immediately see which supplier had what they wanted in the quantity they needed and for the right price,” Enjalbert said. “It basically gave everyone an aggregated view of the market.”
Early on, buyers on the platform were mostly restaurants and hotels, and suppliers comprised all types of seafood producers scattered across Europe. Though Klarys was finding success, Enjalbert said he believed his platform could become more efficient – just as he had recognized with the seafood supply chain early in his career.
Enjalbert noticed that the way the platform was set up limited its ability to attract larger players in the industry, as 90 percent of its users at the time were restaurants.
“If you want to impact the industry, you need to have the large players with you. Restaurants are great, but they don’t impact the whole industry,” Enjalbert said. “We felt that to have some real impact, we needed, for example, to shoot for a retailer who’s turning over EUR 1 billion [USD 1.1 billion] a year.”
That led to a pivot in 2021, in which Klarys shifted away from its status as a digital marketplace toward becoming a software-as-a-service company where users could customize their own marketplace, essentially building their own Klarys.
“Instead of operating our own marketplace, we started providing separate marketplaces to companies so they could onboard all their suppliers and, potentially, all of their customers, making everything that was previously separating themselves from their supply chain much more efficient – all in real time,” Enjalbert said. “Through the change, it automated administrative tasks, organized data flows, and improved traceability.”
That latter benefit is especially prudent, according to Enjalbert, as increasingly stringent regulations and investigations into labor abuses around the world have shifted traceability from being an optional benefit for companies to a necessity.
Klarys Marketing Manager Lucas Demange said the updated platform also has a role in …
