The U.K. Seafish Authority is including details of aquaculture species in its online Risk Assessment for Sourcing Seafood (RASS) to help U.K. seafood buyers and processors be more confident in their purchasing decisions.
Seafish launched the free tool last year to help reduce the confusion in the seafood supply chain caused by varying and conflicting advice contained within the many “fish to eat” and “fish to avoid” lists.
Speaking at the Shellfish Association of Great Britain’s (SAGB’s) 46th Annual Conference, Lee Cocker, Seafish’s new aquaculture manager, said, “Phase One was to deliver a tool to help buyers make more informed choices on sourcing products. Phase Two is to include aquaculture profiles. Again, there will be no buying advice, just recommendations. The objective is to support evidence-based decision making through these profiles.”
Seafish will engage with stakeholders over the summer months to move the project forward. But Cocker told SeafoodSource that before any details on aquaculture species are published, RASS will be expanded to provide information on social factors such as welfare and ethics.
Unlike traditional seafood guides, RASS does not provide any overall rating or score, nor does it advise “to buy” or “don’t buy.” Instead it provides seafood buyers and processors with information on the biological status of stocks for species that are either landed or imported into the United Kingdom, and the environmental impacts of fisheries catching these stocks. It provides risk scores, justified by evidence, using a five-tier grading system: very low, low, moderate, high and very high.
There are currently more than 210 fishery profiles contained on the system.
The tool is aimed at two different audiences: First, for businesses that already have seafood procurement rules in place and will utilize the evidence to generate risk scores to determine whether the seafood in question meets their business requirements; second, for businesses that do not have an internal seafood procurement system and will use the risk scores directly – either case-by-case or to develop their own internal guidelines.
The rationale behind the scoring system is that many seafood buyers who use RASS will not have either the knowledge or the time to make sense of the qualitative fisheries and environmental information currently available.
