Started in 1990, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-headquartered wholesale firm Aqua Star sources a variety of seafood from 17 countries, including shrimp, crab, lobster, salmon, haddock, pollock, calamari, scallops, and lobster.
In order to ensure responsibility in its supply chain, the company established its Seafood Forever program, which includes a Supplier Code of Conduct (SCOC) that addresses human rights, carbon accountability, environmental protection, and animal welfare.
SeafoodSource spoke with Aqua Star Vice President of Sustainability Corey Peet about aligning the company’s business and sustainability goals.
SeafoodSource: Aqua Star’s Forever Seafood program focuses on responsibility, traceability, social responsibility, and food safety. What does that look like in practice for your company?
Peet: Our Seafood Forever Program is, always has been, and always will be a work in progress. This is because we have learned over the course of more than two decades that sustainability is a journey.
I realize that sounds corny, but the seafood industry is a complicated space and requires consistent and ongoing engagement with people in the supply chain to better understand and work to improve performance on key sustainability issues. The focus of Aqua Star’s sustainability team is on engagement with our supply chains to understand where they are on their own sustainability compliance journey. In some cases, they are very advanced, and in others, they need more support.
The biggest lesson we have learned is that while there are lots of conversations in Western markets between end buyers and other stakeholders about what requirements should be put in place, there is far less interaction in the places where most seafood is produced with the people that produce it.
That is where Aqua Star focuses our efforts: through conducting internal audits on some of our supply chains, working to build training programs, and learning all we can from experts in the field. We are also members of the Seafood Task Force, which has significantly increased its work on social responsibility and traceability issues in key production countries like India and Vietnam.
SeafoodSource: What tools or programs are missing or where are there gaps in support for more responsible seafood supply chains?
Peet: I appreciate this question a great deal because I don’t think it gets enough attention in sustainability solutions conversations. It’s easy to get caught up in the work of sustainable seafood and forget that adaptation is perpetually needed. There is not enough focus on the evolving nature of sustainability issues.
As an example, perhaps the biggest gap in the fisheries space is that social responsibility has not been included in schemes like the Marine Stewardship Council, yet human rights and social compliance in supply chains remains one of the biggest concerns of end buyers and retailers. It is a gap that needs to be filled, and we are excited about new opportunities that the recently launched Community Catch program offers to respond to this evolution in the sustainability space. Developed by experts, Community Catch expands the sustainability conversation to include community engagement, carbon and environmental accountability, as well as social responsibility.
I think the other major gap we are seeing is the need to support the production community in the implementation of human rights due diligence. This is a complicated subject to say the least, and there is a need for tools to assess, improve, and train the production community to manage this issue in effective and efficient ways. At present, moment-in-time social audits are the primary tool to find and address social and labor issues. These are effective to a certain degree, but better and more consistent monitoring and support would go a long way.
SeafoodSource: Do you find working with a variety of programs allows you to find the right tool for your objective to design more responsible supply chains, or is it easier to focus on the objectives of a single sustainability program?
Peet: It’s always a topic for discussion on how many tools are needed to achieve our sustainability goals. We believe there are no simple narratives in seafood that are effective, and the negative headlines generated never talk about the actual solutions nor the impact that those solutions can have on the ground. In short, sustainability solutions are varied by customer, country, species, harvest/farming method, and many other variables. In addition, they are always evolving, and new issues come into view for our consideration.
I think people forget that our world is a complicated space and ensuring that our food systems are supportive for all involved is challenging work. There is no such thing as one sustainability solution to manage them all. I think it’s about having a variety of tools at our disposal that allow us to mix and match based on customer requirements, desired market claims, and the realities of the production location.
A big part of the challenge is that supply “webs” are highly shared across the seafood industry. Because of that, many sustainability initiatives need to be addressed collaboratively and pre-competitively.
SeafoodSource: How does all this investment in traceability and responsibility help you sell fish or create value for the company?
Peet: This is the million-dollar question. In many ways, traceability should have been part of the conversation from day one, but the reality is that we are dealing with supply webs, not simple supply chains. That complexity makes transparency and oversight challenging. We have finally come to the place where sustainability and responsible sourcing are quickly reaching the same level of importance as food safety and quality assurance. These programs are no longer “nice to have” but are necessary for baseline business requirements.
I would argue that it is less about whether sustainability creates direct competitive advantage but more about whether companies can manage the risks and expectations tied to modern supply chains. Customers, retailers, and regulators increasingly want confidence that suppliers understand where products come from, how they are produced, and what risks exist within those supply networks. Ultimately, investment in sustainability programs creates value by improving supply chain oversight, which helps companies manage and anticipate evolving regulations and customer expectations. At the same time, it reduces operational risk and builds trust with buyers. Our experience is that managing these issues effectively requires dedicated expertise and daily engagement and cannot be handled passively.
