Category: Vision
TJ Tate, Gulf Wild
TJ is the Sustainability Director for Gulf Wild, a brand of genuine, responsibly caught seafood from the Gulf of Mexico that provides traceability and accountability to each reef fish landed. Gulf Wild was created by forward thinking commercial fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico in immediate response to declining sales of seafood due to seafood fraud and the Deep Horizon Gulf Oil Spill. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, TJ worked with red snapper fishermen to pioneer an innovative traceability program tracking fish back to the boat and the area they were caught. Through Gulf Wild, TJ pioneered one of the first video monitoring camera programs in the Gulf, established strict standards on bycatch and discarding, and helped design the first of its kind hybrid research project combining the knowledge of commercial fishermen with the expertise of scientists. Gulf Wild places numbered gill tags on every fish so consumers can track information about the catch on any web-enabled device to identify the fisherman who made the catch, the location and time of catch, and the port where fish was landed. Since the program’s inception in 2010, more than a half million unique ID tags for 3.5 million pounds of fish have been tracked to 48 states. TJ also created the Bycatch of the Day Program
