Afishianado™, our periodic bulletin of news and announcements, provides insights into the latest industry trends, news, market research and sustainable seafood efforts.
Founder of Organico Real Foods, which includes the Fish4Ever range of canned fish, Charles Redfern strives for his company to be an example of how things should be, a small part of a broader movement. Sustainability, including social considerations, is inherent to Charles’ business and 70% of Fish4Ever product lines will be certified to the Marine Stewardship Council standard by the end of 2009.
What is your favorite seafood? I don’t really have favorites like that! It depends on the sauce; it depends on the mood. I’m a bit of a flavor junky. I had a gorgeous cuttlefish in a devilled sauce in the Maldives, and ordered it twice in a row, but I like king prawns and delicate soles, proper fish and chips, peppered mackerel, vinegary Baltic style herring on a rye bread with sour cream and a big family favorite at home after the girls come home from karate(!) is a delicious sweet/hot/sour concoction I make with our Fish4Ever sardines. Something few people in the UK “get” is that you can do lots of great dishes with canned food – and its economic and long-life so no waste. We also make a great Fish4Ever paté either with mackerel and pepper or with our smoked kippers.
What’s the most popular seafood item you offer? It’s a range of canned fish I offer. The idea is to do as many lines as possible. We have fish in sauces, all land ingredients are organic, and we have more simple products – either in brine or organic oil. We do sardines, tuna (yellowfin, albacore and skipjack), anchovy, mackerel, salmon and herring. It’s definitely the more plain products that are popular in the UK. Some people ask for spring water but from an environmental point of view unless the factory has it’s own spring water, analysed and approved, carting water around makes no sense. Later this year, we plan to re-launch part of the sauce range into a quick and convenient “meal solution” concept with a different communication: 6 products from Scottish seas, all Marine Stewardship Council certified.
How did you get interested in the issue of sustainable seafood? My company is called Organico; my core customers, suppliers, competitors are all in the organic sector, pioneer organic people from years back, even my bank is a sustainable/ethical bank - it would have been inconceivable for me to do a product that was not sustainable. So we didn’t come to sustainability through being a fish company, it was the other way round. But the big discovery has been trying to understand the issues – it’s the sort of area where the more you learn, the less you know! Fish sustainability is extremely complex. We’ve delved into it using NGO reports, fish experts, FAO papers and other authoritative sources; a lot of research work and yet we only need to cover a handful species. We see ourselves as a standard setter, for example we insist on the land element and the people element of sustainability, because for us that is part and parcel of the same value system.
How would you describe your philosophy on ocean conservation? We do what we can as a company or ‘product pusher’. For that we need pro-active consumers ready to pay a premium for sustainability. There’s no two ways about it; doing things right will and does cost more. In fact that’s in large part why things become unsustainable in the first place – because a product does not have to “price in” any external damage or consequences, to people or the planet. Well as a company we reject entirely that type of thinking. There should not be a sustainable message to sell because all products should be sustainable anyhow. In economic terms externalities should be internalized – the polluter pays, etc. This brings us to the obvious point - ultimately it’s up to the governments to make things rights. That’s where I admire so much the work NGO’s do, tirelessly campaigning for so many issues. I totally support the marine parks idea that Greenpeace and the UK’s Marine Conservation Society are promoting, but I’m not personally doing anything about it because trying to sell my products gives me enough of a headache! So all we can hope to be is a little example of how things should be, a small part of a broader movement. We basically offer consumers a sustainable option but also we offer them the best tasting quality possible in a can, and that’s another of our passions - good foods properly made – so we are close to the slow food movement and work with more artisan suppliers.
How has your philosophy changed what fish you serve? We’ve more recently become engaged with the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) to have an outside authentication of our sustainability. 70% of our product lines by the end of 2009 will be MSC certified, though it might take longer for the logo to trickle through to the pack. In large part this is through existing fisheries that we are buying from which have been, or are becoming, certified but we are also adding new lines from fisheries with existing MSC certification, like our new Alaskan salmon. At present all our fish is wild fish but if we did start using farmed fish, we would want it to be organic.
Have your customers noticed? Our core customers buying in organic and provenance specialist shops will tend to be more knowledgeable and concerned, and even information-hungry in some cases. They’re the sort of customers that keep you on your toes – with questions about the varnish on the inside of tins, and so forth. In the wider market, which we are breaking into, there’s a lot less knowledge and probably a lot less interest. If you want a historic parallel it might be like animal testing on cosmetics, it’s become now a very much more generalised concern than when the Body Shop first started talking about it in the 1980’s. Well fish sustainability probably has a long way to go to get to that sort of level of acknowledgement – even and in spite of the fact that there have been many, many major headlines about sea sustainability.
Do you feel it limits what you can offer? Yes. For example, the social sustainability concerns we have - where we want to support local fishermen, local packers, against the industrial boats, where we avoid areas with a high probability of illegal or unfair fishing, where we avoid sweat-shop type factories - that adds a lot of additional issues. Then we want our land ingredients to be organically grown, not only because we are an organic company but also because industrial farming through pollution run-off has damaging consequences on rivers and coastal waters. That’s a fact – and 90% of the world’s marine life is in these coastal waters - but not many people in seafood sustainability seem to have picked that one up. So our three sets of sustainability criteria: “land, sea and people” can make it really complicated to source, and more expensive – which makes it more complicated to sell!
Have your seafood purveyors worked with you on getting sustainably caught seafood? It’s a mixture really of our suppliers and ourselves – what I would say is that just by bringing the sustainability question up, insisting on the issue, doing the questionnaires, asking for justifications or recommending Marine Stewardship Council certification, all of this helps contribute - a drop in the ocean (sorry) to making the question of sustainability important. Fishermen might care or might not, but they need to be supported into sustainability, a knee-jerk reaction is to blame them but they’re just responding to the market forces in operation. All together we need to change those forces.
What trends have you noticed in seafood in the past 10 years? A lot of articles are appearing now on health and seafood, especially of course omega 3 oils where there is more and more quite dramatic research on its benefits. Next of course the issues of sustainability and the continued globalization of the fishing business. Finally the growth of aquaculture, which is maybe the biggest of the big trends and needs to be addressed from a sustainability angle too.
What does Seafood Choices Alliance and the work they do mean to you/ your business? I think the whole idea of the Seafood Choices Alliance is brilliant. I have a lot of time for the little team they have in the UK, what I like is Seafood Choices’ role as a forum, as a kind of meeting place of opinions. I wrote a short piece in our organic trade magazine recommending the Seafood Choices Alliance model to the organic community and even to the wider sustainability community. I think it’s critically important to promote the bigger picture, to say everybody in sustainability agrees on such and such a point and then engaging with the wider world. In the end we have so many different groups, sometimes doing the same thing or agreeing on most things but looking as if they don’t; it would be good to have a united voice bringing all the agreed points together under one roof.
Tuna, probably the most popular but also problematic of canned fish, is a key part of the Fish4Ever range. The below video gives insight into the Maldivian tuna fishery that Fish4Ever source their skipjack tuna from and this document illustrates some of the best practice tuna considerations that Charles makes in his own business and that he would advocate other companies also consider.
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