June 29, 2021 — Avanti Frozen Foods Pvt. Ltd., a subsidiary of Thai Union, is recalling major branded and private-label shrimp in the United States because of the potential for salmonella contamination.
Affected brands include Safeway’s Waterfront Bistro, Whole Foods’ 365, Censea, Chicken of the Sea, Hannaford, Meijer, Open Acres, Honest Catch, and CWNO.
September 29, 2020 — Atlantic Sapphire completed the first commercial harvest of salmon from its land-based facility in Miami on Monday, marking a major milestone for the company and the large land-based salmon industry.
Atlantic Sapphire Interim CFO Karl-Oystein Oyehauge told IntraFish the harvest “is a proud moment for the Sapphire team.”
The company said it will now be supplying weekly volumes to customers such as Giant Eagle, H-E-B, New Seasons Market, Publix, Safeway, Sobey’s, Sprouts Farmers Market and Wegmans.
The Chef’s Warehouse, a Connecticut-based gourmet food and restaurant supplier, will be among the first buyers to receive the product, Atlantic Sapphire said.
July 31, 2020 — Employers across the country are being sued by the families of workers who contend their loved ones contracted lethal cases of Covid-19 on the job, a new legal front that shows the risks of reopening workplaces.
Walmart Inc., Safeway Inc., Tyson Foods Inc. and some health-care facilities have been sued for gross negligence or wrongful death since the coronavirus pandemic began unfolding in March. Employees’ loved ones contend the companies failed to protect workers from the deadly virus and should compensate their family members as a result. Workers who survived the virus also are suing to have medical bills, future earnings and other damages paid out.
In responding to the lawsuits, employers have said they took steps to combat the virus, including screening workers for signs of illness, requiring they wear masks, sanitizing workspaces and limiting the number of customers inside stores. Some point out that it is impossible to know where or how their workers contracted Covid-19, particularly as it spreads more widely across the country.
The new coronavirus has created a global health and economic crisis, responsible for the death of more than 150,000 people in the U.S. while straining resources and institutions.
February 1, 2018 — The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, known best for its red, yellow and green sustainable seafood-rating scheme, is unveiling its first Seafood Slavery Risk Tool on Thursday. It’s a database designed to help corporate seafood buyers assess the risk of forced labor, human trafficking and hazardous child labor in the seafood they purchase.
The tool’s release comes on the heels of a new report that confirms forced labor and human rights abuses remain embedded in Thailand’s fishing industry, years after global media outlets first documented the practice.
The 134-page report by Human Rights Watch shows horrific conditions continue. That’s despite promises from the Thai government to crack down on abuses suffered by mostly migrants from countries like Myanmar and Cambodia — and despite pressure from the U.S. and European countries that purchase much of Thailand’s seafood exports. (Thailand is the fourth-largest seafood exporter in the world).
For U.S. retailers and seafood importers, ferreting slavery out of the supply chain has proved exceedingly difficult. Fishing occurs far from shore, often out of sight, while exploitation and abuse on vessels stem from very complex social and economic dynamics.
“Companies didn’t know how to navigate solving the problem,” says Sara McDonald, Seafood Watch project manager for the Slavery Risk Tool.
The new Seafood Watch database, which took two years to design, assigns slavery risk ratings to specific fisheries and was developed in collaboration with Liberty Asia and the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership. Like Seafood Watch’s color-coded ratings, the Seafood Slavery Risk Tool aims to keep it simple — a set criteria determines whether a fishery will earn a critical, high, moderate or low risk rating.
A “critical risk” rating, for example, means credible evidence of forced labor or child labor has been found within the fishery itself. Albacore, skipjack and yellowfin tuna caught by the Taiwanese fleet gets a critical risk rating. A “low risk” fishery, like Patagonian toothfish in Chile (also known as Chilean seabass), is one with good regulatory protections and enforcement, with no evidence of abuses in related industries.
Read the full story at National Public Radio
July 19, 2017 — Chuck Bundrant was a college freshman with $80 in his pocket when he drove halfway across the country to Seattle to earn a few bucks fishing. The year was 1961.
He hasn’t stopped fishing since.
And today, Bundrant, the founder and majority owner of Trident Seafoods, is worth at least $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth is due to a fair measure of pluck. Back in the early 1980s, he persuaded Americans to eat pollock, then considered a trash fish, at fast-food restaurants and, to this day, Trident ships it — along with salmon and cod — to chains including Costco and Safeway.
Along the way, Bundrant cultivated politicians who would pass legislation that aided Trident’s business by keeping foreign fisheries at bay. These days, Trident also is benefiting from health-conscious consumers gravitating to seafood.
The Bloomberg index calculates that Bundrant owns 51 percent of privately-held Trident, which had $2.4 billion in revenue last year, based on information compiled from trade groups. It’s valued by the Bloomberg index at about $2.1 billion, using comparisons to five publicly traded peer companies, including Clearwater Seafoods Inc. and Oceana Group Ltd. Trident operates about 16 processing plants and 41 fishing vessels — and remains defiantly independent.
“We don’t answer to investment bankers like some other seafood companies,’’ the company writes on its website. “We only answer to our customers, our fishermen, and our employees.”
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