Fishing Policy

Seafood is a major global commodity bringing nutritional, social and economic benefits to many communities.

However, the marine eco-system is incredibly fragile so while fishing and farming will always have some impact on the marine environment we aim to source seafood which is caught or farmed using methods which are the least detrimental.

We have a comprehensive, well established sourcing programme in place and work closely with our suppliers and a range of NGOs to ensure care is taken of sensitive environmental and social issues. We also support a range of formal fishery improvement projects, such as Project UK, which helps fisheries work towards third party certification demonstrating their sustainable practices. 

We ensure each species we sell meets an important set of criteria before entering our stores. These criteria include stock levels, fisheries management practices, location of catch and method of catch. Species sourced from aquaculture must be certified at farm, hatchery, feed mill and processing stage by an approved third party scheme we accept.

We are transparent about what we’re doing and where we source from - Since 2015 we've published details of all of the wild capture species we sold and the fisheries, catch methods, problems we identified and improvements we were supporting with our suppliers as part of our support for the Ocean Disclosure Project.

We support sourcing of UK caught and landed seafood from Responsible Fishing Scheme (RFS) certified vessels and are working to establish the use of third party vessel standards in our international supply chains as well. We operate additional requirements for species such as Tuna used in our own brand products. This must be caught by pole and line or fishing methods that do not use Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs).

We want customers to be able to make informed choices about the fish they buy, and have led the market by labelling our fresh fish with information on where and how it was caught.