January 25, 2018 — In a large ballroom at Stanford University’s Arrillaga Alumni Center, jittery entrepreneurs make their way onto a small stage to pitch their sustainable seafood ventures. Out of 184 applications, only 40 have made the cut. Among the finalists are a mail-order oyster startup that will ship the food overnight to your door, a manufacturer of devices that track lost fishing gear, an Alaskan processing facility looking to expand, and training programs that teach Peruvian fishermen how to operate more sustainably.

They’re taking part in the third bi-annual Fish 2.0 competition, and the stakes are high. Many of these entrepreneurs have never made a pitch in front of an audience before. And with some of the largest and most respected investors in the sector, including Rabobank, Aqua-Spark, and Obvious Ventures, eagerly looking on, competitors are anxious to make a good impression. Flanked by projectors and armed only with a microphone and a remote to advance their slides, entrepreneurs from as far away as Italy, Peru, and the Solomon Islands have only a few minutes to make their pitch in front of a four-judge panel and a room full of potentially lucrative connections.

With global demand for sustainable seafood growing rapidly, the industry hasn’t been able to keep pace. Programs like Fish 2.0 hope to meet that demand and support the sector’s growth by connecting investors to emerging businesses. Similar to accelerators like Mixing Bowl, Imagine H2O, and the Chobani Incubator, Fish 2.0 aims to strengthen the sustainable seafood movement by helping ventures become financially sustainable, scalable, and profitable.

Although Fish 2.0 is framed as a competition, networking is what really matters for most participants. The eight competition winners each receive $5,000 in prize money, but for past winner Norah Eddy, whose company Salty Girl Seafood sells sustainable fish in ready-to-cook, pre-marinated packages, the experience and exposure were more important than the actual cash. Eddy says the connections she fostered at Fish 2.0 two years ago have remained fruitful for Salty Girl, which has expanded its line of products since they won a prize at the competition.

“We’ve subsequently raised money and our connection to Fish 2.0 has only served us well in business following the competition,” Eddy adds.

A Forum for Changemakers

Fish 2.0 is the brainchild of Monica Jain, a Wharton MBA graduate and former marine biologist, and it brings her two passions together. “There are a lot of great companies starting up and they need capital to grow effectively,” she says. “It’s the same in every field. We can’t expect innovative business to grow without capital.”

Funded by academic institutions, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, USAID, the U.S. State Department, investment funds, and others, the Fish 2.0 process starts a year before the actual event, with businesses applying to the competition online. Each applicant is put through a series of assessments that examine their business plans, potential for impact, risks, and opportunities for investment. While some businesses are well-established and looking to expand, others are looking for their initial seed money.

No matter the size of their business, each of the top 40 entrepreneurs is paired with an impact advisor and an investment advisor who offer feedback on both the science and the business sense of their model. The contestants span the broad and diverse seafood supply chain, with offerings ranging from an oyster co-op in Florida looking for investors to help fund construction of a hatchery, to Seafood IQ, an Icelandic company that uses radio frequency identification (RFID) labels so consumers can be sure they know where their fish is coming from.

Seafood provides a unique challenge because the industry is global, fractured, and full of middlemen. Salmon, for example, may be caught in Alaska, processed in China, and then shipped back to the U.S. for sale. As with other meats, it’s often difficult to tell where seafood is coming from or whether it’s sustainable. And the problem is getting more pronounced as global demand increases. In 2016, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that global per capita fish consumption had hit more than 44 pounds a year, an all-time high.

Earlier this year the World Bank reported that, “about 90 percent of marine fisheries monitored by the FAO are fully fished or overfished, up from about 75 percent in 2005.” In addition to increased consumption, the report also points to the fact that “fish stocks are also under pressure from pollution, coastal development, and the impacts of climate change.”

Rather than focusing on improving consumer education or tightening governmental regulations, Fish 2.0 hopes to protect the oceans by showing sustainability makes good business sense. Because the seafood industry relies on natural resources, Jain believes that sustainable ventures, which are able to preserve those resources for years to come, are more “likely to do better in the long run.” Sustainable, she says, is simply “better business.”

Tim Fitzgerald of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)—and a judge at this year’s Fish 2.0 contest—agrees that this investment is vital to the long-term health of the oceans. “To have large-scale change, you have to engage business,” he says.

Read the full story at Civil Eats