Fresh Seafood From Catch to Cart

Tasha Sutcliffe, Brenda Reid-Kuecks, Ecotrust Canada | BCBusiness
Tasha Sutcliffe (left) and Brenda Reid-Kuecks of Ecotrust Canada, at Fisherman’s Wharf beside Granville Island

A new tracking program introduces shoppers to the fishermen who caught their dinner.

Seafood purchases used to frustrate Kathryn Moore – and not just because she lives far from an ocean. The Peterborough, Ontario, dentist wanted to buy responsibly, but the staff at fish counters could never answer her questions: Where was this fish caught, how and when?

Then she saw a Thisfish label at her local Sobey’s grocery store that promised the full story of her filet’s journey. “I wondered if it really worked,” she recalls. “So I checked and found out everything I’d always wanted to know – it even had a cute picture of the fisherman and his boat.”

Thisfish began in 2008, after representatives of the B.C. Dogfish Hook and Line Industry Association and the West Coast Trollers Association asked conservation outfit Ecotrust Canada to help develop a tracking system for their catch. New government regulations to control food-borne illness provided the initial impetus, but the enterprising fishermen recognized a market opportunity: consumers are an increasingly discerning lot who want to better understand how food gets to their plate.

After catching the fish, the fisherman labels it with a unique code. He uploads the particulars of the catch to a database, then details about its processing and distribution are added as it moves through the supply chain. The consumer enters the code via their smartphone or computer to get the full story of their meal.

Thisfish has expanded from six to 16 species, and now covers fisheries on the east and west coasts, with over 330 participating vessels. In 2011, participants landed almost five million pounds of traceable seafood, and retail partner Sobey’s unveiled Thisfish in 1,300 stores across Canada. Thisfish is also piloting a Dutch project its founders hope will expand throughout the North Sea.

Peter De Greef is a Sidney-based sablefish and halibut fisherman whose wife was once happily surprised to trace the halibut she bought back to her husband. For De Greef, the additional paperwork associated with Thisfish is negligible, given the exhaustive auditing and monitoring he already endures. “These accountability measures have helped us maintain our markets and open up new ones by differentiating ourselves from producers who can’t make the same claims about their fish,” he says.

Thisfish founders point to lingcod as a success story. Previously listed as “not recommended” by the Vancouver Aquarium’s Ocean Wise conservation program, Thisfish began tagging lingcod to prove it was caught using the hook-and-line method, rather than by trawlers, and Ocean Wise changed its categorization. Thisfish now reports that more restaurants in Vancouver are offering lingcod, and fishermen are receiving better prices.

Thisfish is currently run by Ecotrust Canada, but Ecotrust president Brenda Reid-Kuecks hopes to spin it off as a self-sustaining entity. She says Thisfish differs from other food-tracking programs because participants at every level in the supply chain were involved in its conception and development. Thisfish’s technology is also versatile, she says, and has the potential to help small-scale producers beyond the seafood industry to differentiate their product without having to develop and market their own brand.

“Think of the benefit,” Reid-Kuecks enthuses, “to meat producers who spend so much time loving their grain-fed beef to death, only to lose their advantage because it goes into the slaughterhouse and gets blended in with everything else.”

Which isn’t to say that Ecotrust has announced plans to launch Thiscow – or Thispig, Thiscarrot or Thismilk – just yet. But it may not be far off.

Image: Thisfish
An illustration of how fishermen user Thisfish to track the path of seafood from their
boats into grocery stores.