Grabbing a grouper fillet from a fish market or a grouper sandwich from a dockside restaurant is a staple of life along the Gulf Coast. The problem, though, is there's a very good chance that white fillet being enjoyed is not really grouper. It could be cod, Nile perch, or, heaven forbid, Vietnamese catfish!

 

Since real grouper fillets wholesale for $7 or $8 a pound, while the imposters can cost as little as $2 a pound, it's not hard to see why the grouper bait-and-switch has been so common for so long.  In 2007, Florida's attorney general analyzed samples from Tampa Bay restaurants and found that 17 of the 24 restaurants that were advertising grouper on their menus were actually serving something else.

 

 News like that has long been a sore point for Gulf fishermen. They have struggled to stay afloat as regulation after new regulation have reduced their grouper catches by almost half over the past seven years to less than 4,000 metric tons a year.  But a group of Gulf fishermen, who acknowledge they are "mad as hell," have finally decided they are not going to take it anymore. About two years ago, a group of reef fish fishermen from Texas to Florida formed a trade association, The Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholder's Alliance, applied for a few grants and laid plans to launch the Gulf Wild brand. While the primary goal behind Gulf Wild is to reduce fraud through a robust fish tagging and tracking system, the Alliance fishermen also committed to some strong conservation actions.

"Gulf Wild" fishermen believe even more can be done in the reef fish fishery to improve accountability and data collection, reduce discards, and meet stock rebuilding timelines in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico," explains T.J. Tate, executive director of the Alliance. Tate says the brand was scheduled to be launched last March, but the catastrophic BP oil spill, delayed the launch until this spring.

Since its launch, the Alliance fleet has grown to some 185 boats that catch about half of the Gulf reef fish. Fishermen who fish for Gulf Wild must adhere to a number of conservation covenants including a zero discard policy on targeted fish, which means they cannot throw back lower value fish to retain higher value fish. Gulf Wild fishermen are also putting video cameras on board their boats to ensure compliance with the covenants.

The heart of the system, though, is the TransparenSea tracking that allows a buyer or consumer to enter data from a gill tag on each fish to find out where and when and which fishermen caught the fish. "You should know where your fish is caught. And you should know some basic things about me, too," says Texas fishermen Buddy Guindon. The Alliance calls its program "trackable" since it doesn't cover each step in the distribution chain.  The Alliance also has a testing program to ensure buyers their fish are not contaminated in any way. "I think Gulf Wild is brilliant," says celebrity chef Rick Moonen, who serves on the Alliance's advisory board. "I'm all about consumer confidence."

While the Alliance itself doesn't sell Gulf Wild fish, Tate says she works with fish houses throughout the Gulf and matches buyers with the best fish houses that buy fish from Alliance fishermen. "You can trace fish until the cows come home, but it doesn't help anybody if someone ends up with a lousy piece of fish," she says. The Alliance has also initiated a testing program to ensure buyers and consumers that last spring's BP oil spill has had no impact on the fish they catch. So far, all the tests for hydrocarbons ad dispersants have come up negative.  

The Gulf Wild program would not have been possible, Tate says, without the support of various groups in both the public and non-profit sectors. Among the program's partners are Florida's Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Defense Fund, Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, Community Seafood Initiative and the Walton Family Foundation. The Gulf grouper fishery has been managed under an individual quota system since 2010. The success of this new management system, which helps prevent overfishing and excessive by-catch, is one of the main reasons Gulf red and black grouper have been upgraded from "Avoid" to "Good Alternative" by the Seafood Watch program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.   

 

Click here to view products by the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholder's Alliance and remember to tell them you found them on FishChoice when you contact them.