February 26, 2020 — There will be a lot of waving going on at Seafood Expo North America in Boston next month. Diversified Communications, the organizers of the Boston Seafood Show, released yet another update for attendees and exhibitors who are concerned about the coronavirus and the upcoming event.
The latest recommendation from Diversified? “No-contact, no-handshake policy.”
February 25, 2020 — Twelve finalists will go head-to-head for the 2020 Seafood Excellence Awards on Sunday, 15 March, at Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America in Boston, Massachusetts, according to event organizer Diversified Communications.
Seventy entries were submitted for this year’s Seafood Excellence Awards, a prestigious competition recognizing the best new seafood products available in the North American market. The remaining 12 finalists will compete before a three-person panel of expert judges in two categories: Best New Foodservice Product and Best New Retail Product.
February 14, 2020 — Citing the importance of seafood as a global source of protein, increasing regulation, and creating greater efficiency in trade, the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) has developed a set of basic technical standards to allow for interoperability across seafood traceability platforms. The effort is intended to make global seafood traceability more reliable and more affordable for companies throughout the supply chain.
Because seafood is the most globalized sector of all food supply chains, it has an increased set of challenges – not just related to the complexity of its supply chains, but the broad array of sustainability obstacles across multiple geographies including labor issues, under-resourced management, and illegal fishing.
January 31, 2020 — Seafood Expo North America organizer Diversified Communications said on 31 January the novel coronavirus outbreak has not affected its plans to host North America’s largest seafood expo, slated to take place 15 to 17 March at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
The coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, has spread rapidly in China and isolated cases have been found in other parts of the world, including eight in North America. “Diversified Communications has been responding to public safety situations for many years and has an effective crisis management protocol in place,” Diversified Communications Seafood Group Vice President Liz Plizga told SeafoodSource. “We have great confidence in our partnerships with the cities and local authorities where our events take place, and we will continue to update our customers on new developments. We look forward to a safe and successful event.”
April 22, 2019 — The following was released by the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership:
The Target 75 initiative launched by Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) is halfway toward the goal of 75 percent of seafood production in key sectors classified as sustainable or improving toward sustainability by the end of 2020. This progress has been driven by increasing collaboration among industry, NGOs, governments, and other stakeholders.
SFP CEO Jim Cannon, in a luncheon presentation last month coinciding with Seafood Expo North America, said that 14 percent of seafood in all T75 sectors is already meeting the sustainable criteria, while 18 percent can be classified as “improving.” Cannon also noted that many industry stakeholders have expressed strong interest in starting new fishery or aquaculture improvement projects (FIPs/AIPs) that will cover a total of 28 percent more.
That leaves a mere 15 percent to go, and with more than 18 months remaining until the 2020 deadline, Cannon said he and SFP are confident that the industry can meet these goals.
Exciting developments include the launch of a Global Mahi Supply Chain Roundtable (SR), with 11 participating companies already onboard. The SR will focus on Eastern Pacific Ocean large pelagic multi-species fisheries and on influencing regional policy and encouraging alignment across the entire fleet at a transboundary level.
Cannon also highlighted very positive news in the squid sector, which at one point had no volume whatsoever meeting the T75 criteria, but now has risen to 14 percent, with a number of projects in the works that promise to push that number even higher. On the aquaculture front, a collaboration of NGOs, IDH, and the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries is launching a pilot to implement new tools to improve regional productivity, investment, profitability, and environmental performance.
Cannon noted that there has been significant improvement progress this past year, with 45 FIPs achieving A or B ratings, which means they made measurable improvements in the past 12 months. Examples of progress include new logbook systems, new harvest control rules, and new research programs.
“A lot of those improvements are not very ‘sexy’ at all,” he said. “But these are the building blocks upon which you ultimately do get stock recovery and better management of fishery and aquaculture practices globally, which will ultimately lead to healthier seas.”
April 15, 2019 — There was a time when many in the seafood industry openly disliked the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And not long ago, the aquarium’s Seafood Watch program didn’t think very highly of much commercially-produced seafood, such as the equivalent of the industry’s bread and butter – farmed salmon. As recently as 2013, Seafood Watch advised its millions of sustainability-conscious adherents to avoid farmed salmon altogether.
But a month ago, at the 2019 Seafood Expo North America event, Jennifer Kemmerly, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s director of global fisheries and aquaculture, stood on stage at a special assembly hosted by the Chilean Salmon Marketing Council and declared that previous era of combativeness to be over.
“There is no ‘us-versus-them’ mentality anymore,” she said. “There’s no time or room for that. The only way to get the job done is to work together.”
April 12, 2019 — When executives at Gloucester-based Intershell Inc. decided to ramp up the company’s presence at the Seafood Expo North America in March, they hoped at the very least to develop new relationships that could slingshot into additional sales.
Intershell did strong business during the three days the vast show ran at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in South Boston, shipping orders to new customers stretching from New York to Texas.
Now it can add the bustling burg of Spotsylvania, Virginia, to the list of new out-of-state clients.
Intershell has entered into an agreement with the Spotsylvania-based Van Cleve Seafood Co. to fully source Gloucester-landed haddock for a new line of ultra-healthy frozen seafood the all-female-owned company is developing for national distribution from its facility near the Chesapeake Bay.
“We think this could evolve into a very good revenue stream for local fishermen,” said Frank Ragusa of Intershell. “We’ve also talked with them about sourcing North Atlantic pollock, as well, which would really help build up the market for pollock and help our guys out even more. And it all started with a conversation at the seafood show.”
In that conversation, the women from Van Cleve — mother Shelly Van Cleve and her daughters Monica Van Cleve-Talbert and Alexandra Cushing — explained to the Intershell executives that they were looking for the cleanest, freshest seafood they could find for the new line.
April 8, 2019 — Last month, more than 21,500 seafood industry professionals from around the world arrived in Boston, Massachusetts for the 2019 edition of Seafood Expo North America/Seafood Processing North America, event organizer Diversified Communications revealed on 8 April.
With 1,329 exhibitors from 49 countries, this year’s expo – the largest of its kind in North America – covered 256,690 net square feet of exhibit space, Diversified confirmed. The atmosphere for SENA19 was lively and productive, with 600 key buyers perusing the show floor and conducting deals with suppliers, according to Wynter Courmont, event director for Diversified.
“The exhibitors and industry professionals at this year’s event were noticeably energized,” Courmont said in a press release. “There was no shortage of excitement around individual companies’ innovative products, preparation and packaging concepts; and we also saw a lot of enthusiasm for industry-wide initiatives around sustainable sourcing, aquaculture and more.”
For Moises del Rio, general manager of Verlasso Salmon, the time spent in Boston for SENA19 served to reinforce and amplify his company’s promotional and networking success.
“Verlasso has always been involved in the event, as it’s one of the main platforms in this industry where we can tell our story to a broader audience,” he said. “From the very inception of Verlasso, Seafood Expo North America has allowed us to build relationships that today, 8 years later, still remain very strong.”
The chief supply chain officer for U.S. restaurant chain Captain D’s, who brought a team of key buyers to the expo, remarked on the convenience and efficiencies the Boston-based event offers.
April 3, 2019 — BOSTON — While most of the thousands of attendees to the Boston seafood show were there to buy and sell fish or otherwise drum up business for their companies, Ryan Mulvey was on a “fact-finding mission” of sorts.
Mulvey, an attorney, along with a team of others from the Cause of Action Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, spent the show speaking to fishermen about what it refers to as “overregulation” in the fishing industry. This can include issues such as requirements that fishermen bear the cost of having observers on board, the development of offshore wind farms curtailing fishing areas, cuts to quota and problems with the “reliability” of federally conducted stock assessments, he told Undercurrent News.
“We want to hear stories and we had a huge number of fishermen come up to us and tell us ‘Oh, we’re struggling so much. Every year we’re allowed to catch fewer and fewer fish and we’re making less and less money and new and heavier regulatory costs get imposed on us’,” Mulvey said.
The institute advocates for what he called “reasonable regulation that still preserves economic freedom” and has been active in litigating on behalf of fishermen suing the federal government in cases of “government overreach”, Mulvey said. It does this through legal action as well as by launching investigations through the aggressive use of public records laws like the Freedom of Information Act.
Read the full story at Undercurrent News
March 21, 2019 — Sustainable seafood consultancy and non-profit FishWise launched the Roadmap for Improving Seafood Ethics (RISE) website during Seafood Expo North America 2019, with the goal of creating a resource to streamline guidance and actionable steps seafood companies can take to understand the labor conditions throughout their supply chains.
The platform, which was developed in partnership with the seafood industry and leading conservation and human rights experts, also aids companies in making improvements to protect workers and to mitigate their own regulatory and reputational risks, according to FishWise.
“Seafood companies understand that their success depends on the well-being of the people who catch, raise, process, and transport the fish they sell, and they want to do the right thing,” Aurora Alifano, director of the social responsibility division at FishWise, said in a press release. “RISE offers the help many need to turn concern into action on labor rights.”
Conversations with seafood industry leaders revealed the high-priority status of labor rights and social issues for many companies, however, “capacity constraints and an abundance of information served as obstacles to getting started,” FishWise said.
“FishWise has worked on social issues in seafood for many years, even prior to revelations of forced labor in shrimp supply chains,” FishWise CEO Tobias Aguirre told SeafoodSource. “So, we pulled together and shared relevant information, allowing seafood companies and NGOs to better understand the issues. In 2017, we heard from companies that this was a hot-button issue, there were too many resources, they felt paralyzed, and didn’t know where to start. Last year, we set out to solve that problem by building RISE.”