Our ‘Eat Better’ commitment focuses on helping customers make healthy and sustainable choices, that’s why 100% of our farmed seafood and 75% of our wild caught fish and seafood is independently certified as sustainable.
As well as being sustainable, the UK government advise two servings of fish a week – one of which should be oily. We promote this message via the ‘eat 2’ logo on the packaging of fish products.
At Sainsbury’s, we pride ourselves on sourcing with integrity, working with organisations and our suppliers, to sell fish and shellfish that is independently certified as sustainable.
All our wild caught fish comes from responsible fisheries, MSC where possible, and we work closely with the MSC to ensure these standards are upheld.
- 100% of our farmed seafood is independently certified as sustainable. 75% of our wild caught fish are certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and we are working to increase that figure through fisheries improvement and ongoing supplier engagement.
- 100% of our fresh Scottish Salmon is independently certified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) and is reared exclusively on RSPCA Assured farms on the West Coast and Islands of Scotland. The fish are fed a diet specifically formulated to ensure our fresh salmon is high in healthy long-chain omega 3s.
We never source from fisheries that engage in illegal, unreported, or unregulated activity and only source from fisheries that take due consideration of the environmental impact of fishing and are never involved in whaling or shark finning.
What is MSC?
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is an international non-profit organisation which sets globally recognised standards for sustainable fishing and seafood traceability. The MSC’s mission is to end overfishing, and to ensure seafood supplies are safeguarded for this and future generations. The blue MSC label on Sainsbury’s products means that our fish and seafood is wild, certified as sustainable and can be traced back to its source.
More information on MSC
What is ASC?
The Aquaculture Stewardship Council runs a certification programme for responsibly farmed seafood. ASC’s standards require farmers to reduce environmental impacts, protect wildlife and support local communities. By choosing fish with the ASC logo, consumers can rest assured that they are buying responsibly farmed and traceable seafood.
More information on ASC
Global dialogue on seafood traceability
We are very proud to be Steering Committee members of the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST), which are ‘global standards to bring reliable, affordable, and efficient traceability to the seafood industry’. The GDST is an international, business-to-business platform established to advance a unified framework for interoperable seafood traceability practices.
The Dialogue brings together a broad spectrum of seafood industry stakeholders from across different parts of the supply chain, as well as relevant civil society experts from diverse regions. GDST have developed industry standards (known officially as GDST 1.0) to; improve the reliability of seafood information, reduce the cost of seafood traceability, contribute to supply chain risk reduction, and contribute to securing the long-term social and environmental sustainability of the sector.
Sainsbury’s are engaged in discussions around implementation of GDST aligned digital pilots with some of our suppliers. We are also in conversation with the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) around piloting of the ASC digital Key Data Elements (KDE) system (firstly for Vietnamese warm water prawns).
Our plan is to trial these systems, incorporate key learnings from pilots and progress to roll out across the global seafood supply chain. The ASC system should deliver for the entire farmed seafood supply base. As well as in farmed seafood, conversation is underway with the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) in respect to wild fish traceability, and it is understood that MSC are working on a digital traceability solution.
As a member of the Steering Committee, Sainsbury’s is a part of, “promoting the uptake of the GDST standards, providing technical implementation support, managing multiple partnerships with other industry platforms and associations, addressing relevant policy and regulatory issues, and curating the technical standards themselves”
We work with the GDST to ensure that our sourcing credentials are in line with what our customers expect, sustainable fishing from licenced areas and vessels, with full traceability.
Global Tuna Alliance (GTA)
The Global Tuna Alliance, of which Sainsbury’s are members, was established to deliver pre-competitive collaboration on issues relevant to the delivery of sustainable global tuna fisheries with a particular focus on the delivery of effective harvest controls, capable of delivering and maintaining MSC certifications. The GTA is the main delivery organisation for overarching sustainability related issues in tuna fisheries.
The GTA is an independent group of retailers and tuna supply chain companies, who are committed to:
- The avoidance of illegal, unreported or unregulated products
- Improved traceability
- Environment sustainability
- Pressing work on human rights in tuna fisheries
- Implementing the objectives laid out in World Economic Forum's Tuna 2020 Traceability Declaration as championed by Friends of Ocean Action
The GTA work collaboratively with member and non-member organisations to find industry-wide solutions to efficiently find and implement solutions and make improvements on:
- Tuna traceability
- Socially responsible tuna supply chains
- Environmentally responsible tuna sources
- Government partnerships
More information on our fish and seafood collaborations