A third generation family business, Calkins & Burke is one of Canada's largest and most venerable seafood importers. Established in 1914, the Vancouver-based company has long cast a net across the Pacific Ocean to find seafood and a variety of other food commodities for North American customers. In addition to importing, Calkins & Burke operates a number of primary processing plants in British Columbia that produce salmon, albacore tuna and Dungeness crab.

Like many seafood suppliers, Calkins & Burke has become much more active in trying to source seafood that is produced sustainably as its customers align themselves with various NGOs. "We have had to do it," says Fraser Rieche, the company's seafood sustainability specialist. The challenge for large suppliers like Calkins & Burke, though, says Rieche, is that different NGOs have different standards and definitions of what fisheries and fish farms are considered sustainable and which are not. "It's not so much that it's frustrating, but it does mean more work."

The largest retailers in Canada, for example, have different standards, programs and partners. Loblaw's, for example, works with WWF and the Marine Stewardship Council, Sobeys works with MSC, the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership and Global Aquaculture Alliance, and Safeway and Overwaitea work with Vancouver-based SeaChoice. Meanwhile, on the foodservice side OceanWise, a program run by the Vancouver Aquarium, has a strong following among chefs. The fact that one NGO says one fishery is sustainable while another one says the same fishery is not, poses an added challenge to suppliers, says Rieche.

"We have to treat each customer as a silo," he says. "What's acceptable to one customer may not be acceptable to another customer. So you have to keep them separate." Rieche says the current demand for sustainable seafood is subject to "ebbs and flows. In some cases, customers are becoming more stringent, some are pulling back and some are not responding because of price issues."

He also notes in Canada he is finding getting buyers to move from a red-rated product to one that's yellow can be a hard sell. Farm-raised shrimp, he says, is a good example. "If it's yellow, it doesn't create a lot of additional sales, so some buyers are asking, 'Why bother to go yellow?'  Switching to the stuff in the middle is not a big priority for a lot of buyers because there's no uptick in sales." 

In the meantime, Rieche, whose career stops have included working on salmon farms in Norway, treasure hunting in Uruguay and trying to organize loco divers in Chile, says he'll keep trying to get answers from the various NGOs, even though he still gets "push back" from some of them. "Who knows who's right and who's wrong? All you can do is ask the questions."  

 

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