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By Crystal Sanders Most Hawaiian vacations involve cocktails and beach time, but being a serious fish nerd I spent three early mornings at the Honolulu Fish Auction. I was there to meet a shipper who sent me tuna that a fishermen friend of mine had caught in Hawaii. I also wanted to see what happens when the buyer sets the price for individual fish based on quality instead of wholesalers setting the price that fishermen receive. The seafood supply chain has been notoriously opaque,…

SeafoodSource hosted an engaging chat on Twitter focused on seafood traceability and origin labeling today. Editors James Wright, Michelle McNickle, and Sean Murphy led the #SfSchat. Attendees included FishWise, ThisFish, Dustin Cranor from Oceana, Inga from Marel Fish, Steve Vilnit, and Dana Biscotti Myskowski from the forthcoming documentary film Fish & Men. Future of Fish's Marah Hardt and Alyssa Danigelis participated as well. In case you missed the lively and informative chat, the Storified version is below.

Come explore innovative ecosystem service management opportunities and tools with us at the world’s premier conference on seafood sustainability. On February 11, Future of Fish and F.L.O.W. Collaborative will host an interactive workshop at the SeaWeb Seafood Summit in New Orleans. Participants can explore ecosystem service valuation as a mechanism for financing sustainable fisheries. Ecosystem service is a nascent field that enables businesses to incorporate natural capital into their bottom line. By accounting for what nature does, ecosystems services take corporate social responsibility to the next level. The…

This article was originally posted as an op-ed on Triple Pundit as part of their ongoing Sustainable Seafood channel. In the last 10 years we’ve seen 25 of the top U.S. retailers make commitments to purchasing sustainable seafood. We’ve seen a lot less traction and follow-through on those commitments. The fact remains that there is not enough responsible fish—whether you define that as Marine Stewardship Council certified, Monterey Bay Aquarium green-listed, or some other eco-label—to satisfy current demand for fish. As a result, many companies are defaulting on their promised timelines, or…

This is a preview. See the full infographic here. The Seafood Expo North America (SENA) is probably the only event in the country where you can walk down one aisle of booths and shake hands with a refrigerated boxcar expert, an oyster shucking champion, a sculpture artist, a high-efficiency pump engineer, and a technician specializing in shrink wrap. The largest seafood trade show on the continent, SENA offers the unique opportunity to meet and mingle with people from every possible facet of the seafood industry: fishers, distributors,…

This article was originally posted as an op-ed on Triple Pundit as part of their ongoing Sustainable Seafood channel. Exposés of deception and abuse in food supply chains have become disturbingly routine. Whether we’re hearing about pink slime or horsemeat passed off as beef, the news is consistently unsettling: We can’t trust what we’re eating. Seafood is no exception to this pattern. More than one-third of our seafood is mislabeled in North America. And upwards of 24 million tons of seafood is caught and sold illegally every year. A just-published report from University of British Columbia…

Image credit: Jess Reeder Talking trash on the docks is nothing new. But talking how to turn “trash fish”— fish that comes up in the net that is in less demand—into treasured bounty is a different story. And the idea offers hope for creating new markets that can benefit both fishers and fish. The opportunity rests on the fact that there’s a lot of fish going to waste in the world. According to a recent Oceana report, US fisheries discard an astounding two billion pounds per…

Graphic taken from FishWise's report entitled Trafficked II: An Updated Summary of Human Rights Abuses in the Seafood Industry Sometimes, what you don’t see is what matters. Walking the floor of Seafood Expo North America, the fabulous displays of fish from around the world are pure eye candy for any seafood lover. What those colorful fillets don’t reveal, however, are the human rights abuses that currently mar the global seafood trade. Co-led by Steve Trent with the Environmental Justice Foundation and Myriah Boyle, Program Director at…

At almost every step of the seafood supply chain, the modern slams into the archaic.  Nowhere is this more apparent than on the tradeshow floor of Seafood Expo North America. Located near the historic waterfront of one of the nation’s oldest cities, the vast interior of the Boston Convention Center is transformed into a labyrinth of glistening glass cases displaying local catch and exotic curiosities; sleek booths that look more like nightclubs than seafood shops; and industrial displays of the high-tech equipment for processing,…

This week, sustainable seafood got its own channel. The triple-bottom-line online news and journalism powerhouse, Triple Pundit, launched Sustainable Seafood: the Business of a Healthier Catch as their most recent topic in which to explore the business and social wins of sustainability. The global seafood industry is an enormous, complex tangle of businesses, biology, economics, policy, and deep-rooted cultural practices—it’s not an easy ocean to navigate. But, Triple Pundit is expert at proving the business case for sustainability in complex systems, including fashion and forestry.  And if the first article in the series…

There’s a new opportunity to learn how to design to save the world: a $10K scholarship from MFA Design for Social Innovation. Just announced, the scholarship honors the three decades of innovative and inspiring work by Paul Polak to transform traditional approaches to poverty alleviation. Polak, CEO and Founder of Windhorse International, has helped design and launch extremely low-cost products that can generate income, offering millions of people a pathway out of poverty. He is an expert in how to use business as a positive disruptive force, a strategy…

Eat your hearts out Shark Tank fans. This week, twenty-one entrepreneurs will be pitching their innovative ideas in a competition that actually has to do with marine life—and after months of top-notch business coaching, odds are, these opportunities would drive even Mark Cuban and Co into a funding frenzy. Today is the last day for the two-day finale of Fish 2.0, the first-ever business plan competition for the seafood industry. Three winners will be selected to receive cash prizes, but the value of Fish 2.0 for most entrants…