To help promote its "While Stocks Last - Supermarkets and the Future of Seafood" report, Greenpeace on Wednesday announced it opened a seafood café in Auckland, New Zealand.
The menu for Jellyfish de Jour Café features three jellyfish dishes for NZD 499 (USD 295, EUR 220) and lists unsustainably caught New Zealand fish such as orange roughy, snapper and bluefin tuna as "out of stock." The prices are a campaign gimmick and the menu also includes the text, "Please note all prices include an exorbitant surcharge based on rapidly dwindling supplies."
The group invited the heads of Progressive Enterprises and Foodstuffs, two major New Zealand supermarket chains, to eat at the café.
"We thought the two would be interested in what we're saying because of the very real potential of a backlash from concerned customers if the supermarkets they head don't stop selling unsustainably caught fish," Greenpeace said. "New Zealand-caught species such as orange roughy have already been taken off the shelves of supermarkets in Europe and the United States in response to sustainability concerns and customer pressure."
The café and report are the latest action of Greenpeace's global retail seafood campaign. In December 2008, the organization released a second draft of its report ranking U.S. retailers according to their sustainable seafood purchasing policies. In the first addition, originally released in June, all 20 retailers surveyed failed. The second time around, Whole Foods, Ahold USA, Target and Harris Teeter passed.
