Seafood distributors have a daunting task when it comes to selling sustainability to their customers. Just ask Logan Kock, Vice President of Strategic Purchasing & Responsible Sourcing for Santa Monica Seafood. With over 1,500 foodservice customers and sales of more than $100 million, the California-based company is the largest seafood distributor in the southwest.

"The distribution business is highly competitive, as is the foodservice business, which is why our customers are often more concerned with quality, availability and price than with sustainability issues," he says. But that hasn't stopped the company, which was founded more than 70 years ago on the fabled Santa Monica Pier, from rolling out what may well be the most ambitious seafood sustainability effort in the country.

"As a fourth generation, family-owned business, we realize the future of our business is dependent on the ecological health of our oceans and planet," says Anthony Cigliano, the company president. One of the company's first challenges was to figure out what sustainability means. "Sustainability is an ill-defined term associated with an end point," says Kock. "We see it as a process of improvements and in the years we have been involved in responsible sourcing we have seen a great amount of improvement and see abundant opportunities for more ahead."

In an effort to quantify the sustainability of the seafood it was buying, Santa Monica Seafood partnered with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and did a baseline assessment of its purchases with a commitment to reducing its purchases of red-listed, or "Avoid" seafoods. When you buy 15 million pounds of seafood a year from fisheries around the world and have almost 2,500 separate product codes, rating all your seafood items on their sustainably is no small task. But an even bigger challenge was to find ways to educate and motivate customers to source more sustainably.

One tool Santa Monica came up with was a way to allow customers to score the sustainability of their seafood purchases. Each item on every customer’s invoice is automatically given a numerical value based on whether it is rated red, yellow or green by Monterey. Santa Monica also designates a fourth color, blue, to cover items from a fishery such as South Georgia toothfish that might be MSC-certified, but is rated red by Monterey.  A blue rating is also used to acknowledge improvements being made by individual fisheries and farms.

“There are many fisheries and fish farms that are trying to do a better job, but they are rated red. But as a distributor we are not in a position, given our business model, to disengage, discourage or abandon any currently red-ranked species.  Instead, we make every attempt to qualify and identify producers, in the case of high volume, red-listed species, that are making sincere and substantial efforts towards best practices and identify these to our customers as better than red-listed options,” Kock explains.

Santa Monica also started an initiative it calls RSVP, or Responsible Sourcing Vendor Program. The company’s suppliers voluntarily fund this effort, which allows  Santa Monica to support a variety of sustainable seafood initiatives, including helping fisheries achieve MSC certification and supporting various fisheries and aquaculture improvement projects. The company has also contributed to research efforts in Alaska and California to replenish fish stocks. “Getting your customers to source seafood more sustainably requires a significant commitment in time and resources if you’re serious about it. And we’re very serious about it,” Kock says. Others would seem to agree. Kock was recently told he will be honored by the Monterey Bay Aquarium as a “Seafood Champion” at the Aquarium’s annual Cooking for Solutions event in May.

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