How to accelerate seafood sustainability? 10 key insights from NASF 2022

For the second year, ASC was delighted to sponsor the sustainability seminar at the North Atlantic Seafood Forum (NASF) in Bergen, Norway, alongside NASF, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the Global Seafood Alliance (GSA).

This year’s seminar was a hybrid event with speakers both on-site and joining remotely, as well as an in-person and online audience, which was welcome after last year’s conference which was entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The overall topic this year was on how to accelerate towards a more sustainable seafood sector. The seminar was made up of two sessions considering tangible ways to achieve this goal – the first looking at the power of data and the second at marketing sustainable seafood online. 

Here are 10 key insights from the seminar:  

• To harness the full potential value of all our data and create a data-sharing economy, we need to consider what incentivises industry, governments and science to exchange their data (Elisabeth Haugsbø, Hub Ocean) 
• The ‘biggest pitfalls’ of data can be data outputs only being as good as data inputs, the challenges of public misunderstanding of data and human biases at play in data analysis (Clarus Chu, WWF-UK) 
• Collaboration for data sharing is key. The biggest potential might lie in exchanging data between certification and ratings organisations given the breadth of data they collect, and tech companies. Young companies are more willing to exchange (Mike Velings, Aqua-Spark) 
• Data sharing requires investment in building relationships, trust, and clarity on how data will be used and for what purpose. Memorandums of Understanding and Non-Disclosure Agreements are a helpful underpinning for these relationships (Paul Bulcock, Sustainable Fisheries Partnership) 
• The standardisation of data is critical, and legislation needs to keep up with data demand which it is currently failing to do (Cameron Moffat, Youngs) 
• To motivate a customer to purchase your product, marketeers need to activate the ‘reward’ system in the brain. The more a brand overlaps with and shares the consumer’s goals, the higher the brain’s reward activation (Marc Heimeier, Decode) 
• E-commerce platforms are more influential than social media channels for consumers in China when seeking seafood. More than half of consumers shop online for imported seafood (Andreas Thorud, Norwegian Seafood Council) 
• Seafood is one of JD’s, one of China’s leading e-commerce companies, most rapidly growing categories; and Chinese consumers buying online have increasingly high expectations around the quality and sustainability of the products they buy (Feng Yu, JD) 
• Each process in the journey of a product needs to connect back to the brand and the story you are trying to tell – if you can get this right, it will all ‘ladder up’ into sales (Jennifer Bushman, Kvaroy Arctic) 
• Any ecological mission needs transparency, no matter whether you are an NGO or a business. Transparency is also key in helping consumer understand why it is worth to pay more for a sustainable production. (Julius Palm, followfood)