The Fish4Ever Unique Quality Charter

Canned fish is a global industry with intense price competition. It means there is a huge pressure to find the cheapest possible fish and the cheapest possible production. We will always buy quality first, looking for small producers with a strong history and expertise, based in long established fishing communities. We shop for the story not the price.  We visit all our suppliers in person.

By buying on quality before price we do not constantly go to the cheapest possible producer, playing one off against the other, but search for producers who have strong quality and sourcing ethics. We aim to establish long term supply relationships to help provide stability to our producers. By valuing quality, the message we send is simple but powerful – do things well and don’t cut any corners for us. For example we know of many canned sardines which still have scales in them or have not been well gutted. This will be to speed the process up and gain yield – but at the cost of quality and care. Sardines and mackerel can be fished at the wrong time when they have just eaten and their stomach is full so it is distended and will tear. We buy from the skippers that know when to fish. We select by size and buy in the season when the fat levels are higher and the fish more succulent. In tuna it is possible to scrape lesser parts of the fish off the bone and add that back into “chunks”, it is possible to dye the red parts of the meat and water can be injected into the chunks to expand the weight. All of these savings are routinely used in the highly competitive tuna industry. If your message as a buyer is “give me the cheapest price possible”, even if you separately have a quality control system, you are incentivising your suppliers to do things as cheaply as possible.

Read the full article on the Fish4Ever website here