Saving Seafood

New England waters are teeming with fish species. The problem is we eat too few of them.

June 22, 2022 — Jared Auerbach stands with a box of monkfish livers at his feet. They are pale pink and streaked with blood, each one packed in plastic and nestled on ice.

Behind him on the processing floor at the Boston Fish Pier, an ice machine releases an avalanche of cubes at two-minute intervals. Dozens of gloved and aproned workers mill about, offloading, packing, and filleting. They work with the usual suspects: blue mesh bags of oysters, live scallops, and lobsters with banded claws in plastic crates.

But plenty of other local species fill the floor. There’s the monkfish, of course, plus a box of conch. There are halibut bellies and skate wings and whole black sea bass.

“On our busiest day, we unloaded 376 different boats,” says Auerbach, who founded fish distributor Red’s Best in 2008 to connect fishermen with wholesalers and retailers. He deals that catch around the world — to buyers as close as the Boston Public Market and as far as South Korea.

The shellfish stand a good chance of staying within New England, he says, finding a home at a local restaurant or fish market. But the finfish may still have a long journey ahead of them.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

MASSACHUSETTS: The future of fish is frozen: How the seafood industry is adapting to COVID-19

May 18, 2020 — Jared Auerbach first saw the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in early January, when seafood orders from Boston’s Chinatown — and Chinatowns across the country — slowly stopped coming in.

At first, the founder of Red’s Best, a Boston-based seafood distributor, wasn’t too worried.

“The second week of March, we were down about 20 percent,” he said. “Things were starting to get a little weird. We got through the weekend and I lost some sleep over the weekend, but I felt good.”

On March 17, restaurants in Mass. were ordered to shutdown, and Auerbach, who founded Red’s Best in 2008, saw his business fall out from under him as he made the difficult decision to furlough the vast majority of his staff. For someone who spent years intently focused on balancing the supply of the sea with the demand of the public — many of them restaurant chefs — he now wondered: “What’s our contingency plan?”

Read the full story at Boston.com

As Coronavirus Disrupts Seafood Supply Chains, Struggling Fishermen Seek Other Markets

April 14, 2020 — Scott MacAllister has mixed feelings about heading out to sea these days. This time of year, the 27-year-old dayboat fisherman primarily catches skate and monkfish from his home port of Chatham, Massachusetts. And while he certainly needs the income, MacAllister worries about exposing himself and his crew to coronavirus on his 40-foot boat, the Carol Marie.

“It’s a pretty small space [for] three or four people. If one of us gets it, we’re all going to get it,” he told Civil Eats. Still, MacAllister (pictured above) is grateful that the regional wholesaler who buys his catch, Red’s Best, still wants to buy his product.

Other fishermen in New England’s billion-dollar industry, which employs some 34,000 people, aren’t as lucky. Markets for lobster, oysters, and shellfish have collapsed along with restaurant closures and a sharp downturn in trade, leaving many fishermen struggling to make ends meet.

“There are certain things there are no markets for,” said Jared Auerbach, founder and CEO of Red’s Best, which buys solely from small, dayboat fishermen. While Red’s Best usually sells seafood fresh, the company is freezing fish in the hopes that international trade will eventually pick back up—or that the product will find new, domestic uses.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

Is That Real Tuna in Your Sushi? Now, a Way to Track That Fish

August 18, 2016 — “Most people don’t think data management is sexy,” says Jared Auerbach, owner of Red’s Best, a seafood distributor in Boston. Most don’t associate it with fishing, either. But Mr. Auerbach and a few other seafood entrepreneurs are using technology to lift the curtain on the murky details surrounding where and how fish are caught in American waters.

Beyond Maine lobster, Maryland crabs and Gulf shrimp, fish has been largely ignored by foodies obsessing over the provenance of their meals, even though seafood travels a complex path. Until recently, diners weren’t asking many questions about where it came from, which meant restaurants and retailers didn’t feel a need to provide the information.

Much of what’s sold has been seen as “just a packaged, nondescript fish fillet with no skin,” says Beth Lowell, who works in the seafood-fraud prevention department at Oceana, an international ocean conservation advocacy group. “Seafood has been behind the curve on both traceability and transparency.”

What’s worse is that many people have no idea what they’re eating even when they think they do. In a recent Oceana investigation of seafood fraud, the organization bought fish sold at restaurants, seafood markets, sushi places and grocery stores, and ran DNA tests. It discovered that 33 percent of the fish was mislabeled per federal guidelines. Fish labeled snapper and tuna were the least likely to be what their purveyors claimed they were.

Several years ago, Red’s Best developed software to track the fish it procures from small local fishermen along the shores of New England. Sea to Table, a family business founded in the mid-1990s with headquarters in Brooklyn that supplies chefs and universities, has also developed its own seafood-tracking software to let customers follow the path of their purchases. Wood’s Fisheries, in Port St. Joe, Fla., specializes in sustainably harvested shrimp and uses software called Trace Register.

And starting this fall, the public will be able to glimpse the international fishing industry’s practices through a partnership of Oceana, Google and SkyTruth, a nonprofit group that uses aerial and satellite images to study changes in the landscape. The initiative, called Global Fishing Watch, uses satellite data to analyze fishing boat practices — including larger trends and information on individual vessels.

Sea to Table hopes to sell fish directly to home chefs starting this year, too.

But local seafood can cost more than many Americans are accustomed to paying, which partly accounts for the rampant seafood fraud in this country.

“U.S. fisheries are very well managed and are actually growing nicely,” said Michael Dimin, the founder of Sea to Table. “But the U.S. consumer’s been trained to buy cheap food, and imported seafood is really cheap because of I.U.U. fishing.” I.U.U. stands for illegal, unreported and unregulated. The result is unsustainably fished, cheap seafood flooding American fish markets and grocery chains.

“To us, the secret is traceability,” Mr. Dimin said. “If you can shine a light on where it came from, you can make informed decisions.”

Read the full story at the New York Times