Looking Back – 40 Years in Whitefish
“Sustainability was not part of the agenda at all.”
Looking back over your 40 years in whitefish production, what did ‘responsibility’ or ‘sustainability’ mean when you first started — and when did you first realise it was becoming something structurally different?
In seafood, at least in fisheries as we knew them in Europe, sustainability was not part of the agenda at all.
Back then when I started with Espersen in the 1980s, there were not even quotas on the major fisheries. Every year, the fisheries department in Denmark set a bi-weekly quota for the boats on how much fish you could catch that week. There was no combined quota on how much could be caught in the North Sea, for example.
There was too much exploration of the fisheries. The science was not good enough. The fishermen were not thinking long-term and had invested a lot of money in very nice vessels.
I attended an annual fish meeting in Toronto organised by McDonalds, where they had also invited Jim Cannon from Conservation International. Jim introduced the broader concept of sustainability and explained the concept of third-party fishery sustainability certification.
At that time, McDonalds wanted to create their own sustainability standards covering all their proteins and ingredients and fish was a high priority for them. At the end of that meeting, they asked Jim Cannon and I and another industry expert, Helgi Eiriksson, to develop a seafood standard that was at least as good as MSC. For branding and logo reasoning the company had determined that they could not use the MSC brand, but they committed to developing their own sustainable seafood standard.
That work took us to countries with major whitefish fisheries — Iceland, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and the United States — and eventually resulted in the McDonalds Sustainable Fisheries Program and the very first sustainability standard for the company which began to be implemented in 2001.
One major difference compared to MSC, was that their independent standard incorporated fish from “responsibly managed fisheries” if there was a Fishery Improvement Project (FIP) underway. FIP to me is still the model that I think is key to answer ‘how do we deal with this?’ when it comes to fishery management.
I don’t know if Jim Cannon invented the term FIP, but he certainly saw the business model in it, and this has now become a widely accepted tool for engaging policy making process and management of fisheries with the aim of certification.
It was through this work with McDonalds that Jim Cannon developed what would eventually become the non-profit Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP), an organisation (where I later acted as vice Chair), that now uses the power of retailers and seafood buyers to leverage their supply chains to improve fisheries.
When the Industry Started to Listen
How was this received by the industry? Did people recognise the commercial benefits?
Not really at first. There were many skeptics who dismissed it and who said it was simply a waste of money. But after a few years something changed.
Espersen started securing important customers and markets, not only in continental Europe, but also in the UK and Ireland, because we had developed that mentality in the company. We changed the culture and committed ourselves to the sustainability agenda.
This cultural turning point began when we started winning contracts and tenders because we could supply products in line with those sustainability standards.
That was when people began to realise that sustainability was not just theory - it could also shape the market. Then the whole momentum changed around 2005-6 when MSC became highly recognised, not so much by the consumer but by the retailers and the food service operators – suddenly everyone wanted to have the MSC logo on their packs.
The early days of MSC
The first whitefish fishery to get MSC approval was the New Zealand Hoki Fishery. Back then, you’d see the big players trying to oversell it and, in the beginning, they could charge a high premium for MSC whitefish, but as more fisheries got certified, that premium became less.
Were there limits to certification?
Take the NZ Hoki, for example: it had a quota of 250–275,000 metric tons when it got certified. But five or six years in, the biomass dropped by 50%. Maybe it was just nature doing its thing, since it was a young fishery, only 20-30 years old. They launched with MSC, then suddenly they didn’t have enough fish. Now, Hoki isn’t a big volume species in Europe; it’s mostly sold in Southeast Asia and Japan.
Or look at the Baltic Sea cod: after hitting 40,000 metric tons, it bounced back to 200,000 and there was actually a FIP in place which went so well that we got MSC approved, and now that fishery is completely gone. Recreational fishermen can barely catch one cod. The Barents Sea is another example. The quota was 1 million tonnes seven or eight years ago, now it’s down to 230,000, and it was MSC certified the whole time. So it does show that certification when it comes to a widely used resource is not a guarantee that it will be at a high level forever.
Picture: Klaus Beyer Nielsen (right) and Rasmus Grønborg Bak,
CEO of Kangamiut Seafood A/S (left), visiting the ice fisheries with our friends and partners from Halibut Greenland ApS
Who was pushing this agenda? Was it consumers?
No, it was not really the consumers that were driving the agenda. The drive for sustainability in seafood came from retail and food service, not shoppers. Even now, if you ask consumers why they pick sustainability certified fish with a label, most say they believe that the label is about quality, not sustainability.
A recent survey in the UK with 12,000 consumers asked if they would buy fish with a newly introduced sustainability certification label, even though this label is not really in the market yet. Turns out, they trust this new label just as much as the MSC label that has been there a long time.
What was the role of retail and food service?
The push for sustainability progress came largely from retailers and food service providers, not consumers. MSC was smart - they went straight to the retailers. Once they got them on board, it was inevitable that the initiative would become adopted in the industry. This wasn’t about ideology at first; it was about securing supply and keeping business resilient. Maybe later it became part of the sustainability story, but that wasn’t the original driver.
Big players in food service and retail adopted certified seafood to secure resilient supply chains, not necessarily due to ideology. MSC’s early success stemmed from its deliberate engagement with retailers and getting certification into procurement policies.
Since then, sustainability may have evolved to include an ideological view, but its roots were firmly practical and business - oriented.
The industry is still evolving
The whole momentum increased in the mid - 2000s, but the reality is, sustainability in seafood can’t be guaranteed. You can have all the certifications in the world, but if the fish aren’t there, whether it’s nature, overfishing, or something else, you’re stuck. The industry is still learning, still adapting.
The Most Urgent Issues Today
“Geopolitics is overshadowing everything.”
What are the most serious sustainability risks facing the seafood industry today — especially in wild catch and whitefish?
Things are moving very fast right now so unfortunately right now the biggest risk is geopolitics, which is overshadowing everything. But when you look further ahead, climate change may be even more serious.
If you look at how climate change could affect fisheries in the next 50 years, it could be devastating.
Take the debates around the North Sea and Barents Sea. If what scientists say about ocean acidification is correct, it could become a major issue. If shellfish cannot build their shells, that’s a huge problem - because they sit at the bottom of the food chain for many fish species.
In that scenario, we are not talking about individual fisheries anymore. We are talking about ecosystem collapse. So, I think that is the most worrying thing for me.
I’m not overly worried about management systems in major whitefish fisheries today. Most of them have reasonable or even good management systems. What worries me more are the environmental conditions.
Scientists and fisheries managers cannot create a growing biomass if the conditions are not right. I’m concerned that within the next decade or two we could reach a tipping point that will be very difficult to reverse.
Market Expectations & ESG Pressure
“The sustainability pages in annual reports
now outnumber the rest.”
Who is currently driving the sustainability agenda in seafood — regulators, retailers, consumers, or finance?
Two or three years ago, human rights and sustainability were the clear path to attracting capital. Most of that is still in place, but there’s been some easing like the pushback we’re seeing globally, from the US administration anti-woke stance to Europe’s Omnibus regulation cutting down on bureaucracy. The pendulum has shifted a bit, but you can’t just ignore this sustainability agenda if you want to supply big brands and retailers.
The business case still exists but the pendulum is swinging
In my former company we had a major multinational customer who used to demand a lot on sustainability and ESG standards. At Espersen we delivered on our sustainability agenda before most, and it won us more orders so there was a real business case for it. I even got a special note from the customer’s CEO, thanking us while he was at a UN meeting, and we won an award for it. But last year, this same company said this was no longer a priority for them. So, there has been a shift in the pendulum.
But here’s the thing: a fishery without a strong sustainability agenda is bad for the whole industry. We’re the only ones still relying on wild caught ‘hunted’ resources and if we don’t manage them properly, they’ll be gone. A hunter kills what he can today because he doesn’t know about tomorrow. We all have to make sure we don’t take more than we should.
For a global supplier of seafood like Kangamiut – where should we be proactive?
For a company like Kangamiut Seafood, the sourcing strategy is the key. Making sure the companies that we source from, the suppliers, processors and so on are aligned with our standards on sustainability and human rights. Traceability is also critical - knowing exactly where our products come from and how they’re handled.
Logistics: the missing piece in sustainability.
Right now, logistics is all about price and delivery time never sustainability. But there’s an opportunity here. In Espersen we had a group looking into more sustainable logistics: Can we use rail instead of trucks? Can we ship containers by boat instead of driving them through the Channel? This is an area where we can lead instead of just follow.
Selling the story – not just the product
At the end of the day, consumers aren’t always asking about sustainability - they care about price, quantity, and delivery. But that doesn’t mean the story has no value. The challenge is training our sales teams to sell the whole picture: Why buy from us? Because we’re family-owned, because we care about the environment and people, because we do things the right way.
It’s not easy to change a company’s culture, but the story does matter and to some customers, it’s everything. We have to keep working on it.
Global Supply Chains & Higher-Risk Regions
“Certification alone is not enough.”
Many seafood companies work with suppliers in regions with higher ESG risks. What is the right balance between controlling risk and building long-term partnerships?
We can’t just rely on third-party certification or signed codes of conduct. We have to go deeper, maybe even get involved in capacity building with suppliers. But that leads to a tough question: When do we say, “This practice crosses the line”? Is it always better to engage rather than exit? No, there can be extreme cases where walking away is the only option.
But what if the improvement process is just too much for us? Kangamiut Seafood is not a massive international company with endless resources - we’re around 40 people trying to run a business. There will be cases where the gap is too wide, where we don’t see a realistic chance of progress in the next 10 years. In those situations, we have to be prepared to walk away and there are already examples of where we have done so.
Collaboration towards improvement takes time and resources but with the momentum we’re building now, I can see this happen in the future.
Some places are high-risk. We have to be honest: there will be countries where we say, “This is too far from where we need to be.” But hopefully, there will be others where we see real potential for improvement. If we engage and start seeing results, we’ll keep working. If we don’t? Then maybe it’s time to move on.
