SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton – May 20, 2011 – Major changes are coming to the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch program.
There is a new director of Seafood Watch – Jennifer Dianto, who has returned to lead the program this year after a three year absence. The Aquarium has a new foodservice contract with Aramark, replacing Compass and Bon Appitit who served the aquarium for many years. And most importantly, according to Jennifer, the program is now aggressively focused on partnering with seafood buyers, and adjusting its priorities in terms of research to those seafood products most important to its corporate partners.
All of this came out at the tenth annual Cooking for Solutions conference, where the Aquarium highlights awards to celebrity chefs and puts on a program for national media focused on sustainability.
At a panel discussing seafood watch, with three people from the Aquarium, and one from EDF, Sheila Bowman, outreach manager, said that use of the Seafood Watch wallet cards had peaked, and was now declining.
She said that a survey of 19,000 people done for the aquarium showed that although they had distributed over 36 million cards, most people looked at it once or twice, and then did not use it. Only 500,000 used it on a regular and continuing basis.
Further, the number of cards distributed annually peaked, at around 4 million, and is now declining.
Jennifer Dianto was very direct. The program had primarily been aimed at consumers over the past years, but now the Aquarium has major business partners at the table, and they need much more specific and granular sourcing information.
They are working with Aramark, Compass, Disney, Whole Foods, Santa Monica Seafood, HighLiner, and Icelandic, for example, whose sourcing needs are going to drive the information gathering priorities for the program.
Jennifer said that instead of 70 or 90 items on a card with green, yellow or red recommendations, they now have a database of over 2400 fisheries, with evaluations that help their partners source from fisheries that are either currently exhibiting best practices, or are improving.
In short, the Aquarium is shifting from a buy / don't buy approach to a fisheries improvement approach. They are doing this because there has been a major change by the industry and major buyers committing to sustainable seafood.
The experience of Icelandic is a good example. Aramark, one of the largest foodservice distributors in the U.S., partnered with Monterey Bay and Seafood Watch on their seafood purchasing program. Icelandic is a major supplier to Aramark, and wanted to support their customer's initiatives. So according to Chuck Spencer, Icelandic USA, they sat down together and looked at which species Aramark depended on that were most problematic in terms of sustainability.
Some of these species were on the 'avoid' list. Instead of dropping them, Seafood Watch made more detailed site visits, put more effort into researching and understanding specific fisheries, and also noted where improvement plans were in place. Jennifer said that needs of partners like Aramark would drive their efforts to evaluate fisheries, as they have limited resources.
High Liner also is a major partner with Seafood Watch, and has had the same type of discussions.
The result is a win/win for both the Aquarium and their partners. This is a far cry from the wallet cards, which often elicited industry outrage because they were so broad brush as to be misleading, and sometimes failed to account for the complexity of many fisheries.
By focusing with more granularity and looking in more detail at actual sourcing problems, the Aquarium is adopting a business facing, rather than a consumer facing approach.
One other aspect of this, that will be developed over the coming year, is greater equivalence and acceptance of work done by other credible NGO's, such as MSC, in the Aquarium's rating scheme. They are committed to the common vision, the joint statement by 17 NGO's who are all working with retail partners in the US, and who see the need to agree on standards for sustainability. They are also building a more transparent database and process with their partners.
The wallet card was produced twice a year; often not keeping up with changes and improving conditions in fisheries. Under the new data driven system, with currently over 2400 fisheries in their evaluation database, the recommendations can be updated weekly and made available through the iphone app, and through buyers guides that are detailed and up to date.
Chefs have loved the wallet cards. It is the buy-in by the chef community that has made Seafood Watch one of the most used sustainability rating systems, and the Aquarium is not abandoning this approach – there will still be wallet cards with buy / don't buy advice. But they are adjusting to the idea that consumer behavior has 'plateaued' and that further gains in sustainability for seafood will come through partnerships with the industry.
Interestingly, this is the same conclusion reached by Waitrose in the UK, as we reported from Brussels.
Two of the most welcome statements made at the conference were, first, that the Aquarium's guide is focused on the science and ecological health of the fishery. It does not account for, and is not designed for, social measurements of things like income distribution, carbon, or other aspects which for some groups keep moving the bar on sustainability, making it an impossible target to reach.
I asked the group whether Monterey graded on a curve – ie. wanted to maintain a balance of acceptable and unacceptable practices, so that each year there would always be species on the red list. Jennifer said unequivocally no. They would be successful if all the fisheries they rated were Green.
This attitude is in fact the basis of a partnership, because the aquarium is saying that their program does not depend on defining an opponent who will always be on the wrong side. Unlike some sustainability groups whose existence depends on conflict, the aquarium is saying that for them, the most important aspect is partnerships that improve fisheries.
This is very much in the mainstream of groups like SFP, WWF, and MSC all of which have made multiple commitments to industry partners in a constructive manner.
The switch over to Aramark in foodservice for the Aquarium also illustrated change.
For the first time, last fall, the Aquarium put its foodservice contract out to bid. Before that they had partnered exclusively with Compass and Bon Appitit. Aramark came in with a proposal that featured hiring a new executive chef, Cindy Pawlcyn, who ran well known restaurants in Napa valley. Th aquarium was pleased and surprised that Aramark would make such a big commitment with a well known chef. Aramark also offered plans to revamp the entire foodservice operation at the Aquarium that gets millions of visitors per year. Aramark also agreed to promote their partnership with Seafood Watch with their other major customers, and made a commitment for sustainable sourcing.
For the cooking for solutions event, Aramark bought about a dozen of their top chefs from resort and park properties around the country.
Also, this year, the program went far beyond seafood. One keynote speaker was Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of the USDA. She said her goal was to grow organic production by 25% a year in the U.S.
And the panel on ecolabels did not have a single representative from the seafood industry, or from any of the NGO's that use ecolabels. Instead, a professor from the Univ. of Arkansas who is developing an academic sustainability consortium, and Dr. Urvashi Rangan, head of technical research at Consumers Union were two of the panalists Rangan said ecolabels were not a silver bullet, because they are one dimensional and address only one or two issues of concern.
The panel thought it would be too complex in terms of standards and data for an ecolabel to represent the entire lifecycle of a product – including things such as carbon, waste, and ecological impact.
Overall, given the speakers and the program, it appears that the Aquarium and Julie Packard are looking at broader issues of food production on land, waste streams, carbon footprints, and a range of issues that go far beyond the basic sustainability of the seafood industry. This is a recognition that there are real improvements going on in fisheries, and that the types of efforts needed to create a sustainable food system go far beyond fisheries, where the industry has largely moved ahead of land based agriculture and meat and poultry production in terms of adopting sustainability.
This article is re-published with permission from Seafood.com News, a subscription news service.