From direct retail partnerships to Canada’s seafood watchdog

It has been one year since SeaChoice announced we would be moving away from direct retail partnerships and pivoting to hold more of a ‘watchdog’ role with regard to sustainable seafood in Canada. In the year since, we have worked hard on behalf of Canadians to find solutions to the challenges facing our Priority Species, to ensure eco-certifications remain credible, and to improve seafood labelling and traceability. Notably, we also launched Seafood Progress, an online resource that assesses and reports on Canada’s nine largest retailers’ sustainable seafood commitments and their procurement against those commitments. This initiative was born from our recognition that continuing to increase the sustainability of seafood in Canada requires the aggregation of retailer leverage across Canada.

Seafood Progress is taking a unique approach to improving transparency and accountability of seafood businesses in Canada. Although there are many initiatives right now that aim to increase transparency and improve business practices, Seafood Progress is the only one (that we know about) that looks at all aspects of a retailers’ seafood sustainability policy. This really stood out for the SeaChoice team when we presented Seafood Progress at the SeaWeb Seafood Summit in Barcelona this past June.

Seafood Progress assesses each retailer’s seafood policy and procurement against 22 key performance indicators derived from the Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions’ Common Vision for Sustainable Seafood. Both consumers and retailers can use Seafood Progress to influence sustainable seafood consumption in Canada.

Consumers can use Seafood Progress to find useful information about the stores where they buy their seafood. For example, you can easily find out what environmental aims a retailer is committed to, what it is doing to tackle the risk of human rights violations in its supply chain, which eco-labels or rankings it uses in its procurement decisions, and what actions it is taking to improve its seafood sourcing. Some of this information will already have been publicly available somewhere online, but Seafood Progress makes it easier to find by bringing it all together in one place. However, the majority of retailers also provided SeaChoice with additional information that had not been publicly released.

Retailers can use the resource to see where they are performing above the national average and where they should improve to meet or beat the current “best practices”. Ultimately, Seafood Progress is trying to bring about positive changes and improvements. SeaChoice will use the profiles to develop tailored recommendations for how each retailer can improve its policies, focusing on resources that are already out there and ready to be used, as well as identifying areas where retailers may benefit from coordination and collaboration.

For example, many of the retailers that SeaChoice met with to discuss their profiles mentioned they struggled to find consistent sources of certified sustainable products because they lack the market leverage to drive change at the global level.  From this we consider there could be mutual benefits for retailers to engage in some pre-competitive collaboration; initiatives that would pool their market share to help bring about the changes that they all want to see.

So help us celebrate our anniversary of change! Go to your retailer’s profile now and see what it is doing – and what it isn’t doing – to support sustainable seafood.