Traceability’s importance to the US foodservice market appears to be strengthening in seafood as the trend remains somewhat unimportant to other products, industry players at the National Restaurant Association (NRA) show in Chicago indicated Tuesday.
For customers of Trident, there is concern for traceability, but that comes equally with a host of concerns, and their goals in exactly how to achieve them are not necessarily very clearly defined, Randy Eronimous, communications direfctor for Trident Seafoods, told Undercurrent.
“I think that operators are interested in making sure the food they use is sourced properly. Properly sourced may mean local, or traceable, or sustainable but the bottom line is that they want to do the ‘right thing’ when stocking the kitchen for their guests,” Eronimous said. “There’s a lot of confusion about these topics and plenty of opinions on what is the ‘right thing’ to do.”
Echoing his sentiments, Alaska seafood supplier Simon Zhang, sales manager for International Seafoods of Alaska, said that in seafood, interest in traceability is complicated.
Although Zhang contends “the majority of US consumers don’t really care” whether fish is MSC certified, he also said foodservice operators’ interest in traceability is increasing.
“Last year, almost nobody asked” about traceability at the NRA show, he said, while this year many more inquiries came in on the topic; and he estimates about 50% of foodservice customers care while the other 50% do not.
Sysco, present at the show, had a sustainability booklet on hand that was in hot demand, a company representative told Undercurrent.
According to the company’s sustainability policy, by 2015, it commits to source 100% of its top 10 Sysco brand wild caught seafood species from fisheries that are Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certified, under assessment by the MSC or involved in fishery improvement projects within the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
This is a similar policy to Walmart’s original sustainability policy, although Walmart has since revised its policy to include the Alaska Responsible Fisheries Management (RFM) program.