To help retailers and other seafood-buying companies ensure the products they are buying are coming from credible fishery improvement projects (FIPs), the Global Seafood Alliance (GSA) and FishChoice have launched a new collaborative project to use GSA’s Seafood Processing Standard (SPS) to provide greater assurances and traceability for FIPs reporting on FisheryProgress.org.
FishChoice provides accurate, consistent and credible information about sustainable seafood products and FIPs via its two platforms, FishChoice.com and FisheryProgress.org. Using GSA’s SPS, the two organisations will conduct a pilot to bring clarity and value to wild seafood supply chains currently operating outside of third-party fishery certification programmes.
SPS addresses environmental responsibility, social accountability, and food safety for farm-raised and wild-caught seafood processors and includes traceability components that provide additional insight into the sourcing of FIP products. GSA is developing additional guidance and SPS audit materials for processors to report verified landings from FIPs reporting on FisheryProgress, as well as for auditors to verify these linkages.
“As GSA continues to engage in the wild seafood space, we’re working with our marketplace partners to identify where our organisation can provide the most value,” GSA CEO Wally Stevens said. “It’s exciting to start a project like this with FishChoice where we’ll leverage our longstanding and proven expertise in the auditing of seafood processing facilities to address current gaps in the assurance of credible FIP traceability in the marketplace.”
“As the most widely traded food commodity in the world, seafood brings a unique set of challenges in traceability and assurance,” FishChoice CEO Richard Boot said. “Finding practical ways to use technology to address these challenges is essential to continue moving toward an environmentally and socially responsible seafood industry.”
