Leagues ahead on sustainable fish

We’re top of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) league table on sustainable fish – with over 220 MSC-certified products, more than twice as many as any other British supermarket.

More and more customers want to know that the fish they buy is sustainable, to protect our oceans for future generations. So we’re proud that the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), a charity that seeks to preserve seafood supplies for the future, has placed us top of its 2017 league table of supermarkets.

Our total of over 220 MSC-certified products is twice as many as the next biggest UK supermarket – and the largest total of any supermarket in the world.

When customers see the MSC’s blue logo on our products, they know the fish they’re buying is certified as sustainable. Those products include not just fresh fish, but also prepared foods such as the 19 MSC-labelled products we recently added to our ‘On the Go’ range of sandwiches and snacks.

220+

MSC-certified products in 2016 – twice as many as any other UK supermarket

All in all, it means that we’re the UK’s biggest retailer of MSC-certified seafood – for the seventh year running.

And the award goes to…

As well as topping the MSC league table, we’ve also landed several other honours from the council. We won its ‘Supermarket of the Year’ award for three consecutive years – in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

And, in 2016, we won the MSC’s ‘fish counter of the year’ award – because we now have the greatest range of MSC-labelled products at the fish counter, too.

Sainsbury tuna steak in spring water, caught with pole and line

MSC isn’t the only organisation that has lauded our work on sustainable fish. We were in the top tier of Greenpeace’s tuna league table in 2015, with the charity citing our own-brand tinned tuna, caught with 100% pole and line.

And Sainsbury’s aquaculture and fisheries manager, Ally Dingwall, won the Seafood Champion Award for Leadership at the Seafood Summit in 2016 – recognising our leadership role on sustainable fish.

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