By Atuna.com
Tuna companies boasting eco-label certification could be selling unsustainable products if they don’t have a traceability tool in place to monitor quantity, says Marcelo Hidalgo, coordinator of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) Chain of Custody and product integrity manager of Pacifical, the PNA’s marketing company.
Traceability means the product can be tracked back through the supply chain to its original source. It ensures the product is safe to eat, comes from a legal source, is labeled as the correct species, and meets the sustainability requirements of a company, according to a recent FishWise report about traceability efforts in the seafood industry. FishWise is a non-profit marine conservation group based in California.
In the tuna industry, Hidalgo says traceability is used to control Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), food safety and the quality of the product. Documents and can-codes show details such as where the product was processed and on what day, the product’s temperature, and times of processing and sterilization. The key piece of information that’s missing in traceability and in the FishWise report is accountability, he says.
“Chain of Custody is the only tool that tells you how much. It’s accountability. It’s mass balance,†says Hidalgo. Chain of Custody (CoC) measures the amount of sustainable fish entering the processing line and the expected yield, after the heads, tails, guts, skin, bones, and blood are removed. The estimated volume is then compared to the final weight to minimize the risk of cheating. Without this “mass balance†control, factories could be more likely to boost their output of sustainable product by adding non-certified fish.
“It’s a business. They can get more money for that certified product and they can mix if they don’t have Chain of Custody,†says Hidalgo.
CoC also helps control the packaging and production of eco-labels, he adds. An estimated yield provides an idea of how many labels are needed for the sustainable canned products. Without the volume control, any surplus of labels could be placed on non-certified products to mislead the buyer.
In both scenarios, he says companies can still show their product’s traceability is meeting the international requirements.
While CoC is not fraud-proof, it strives to ensure that factories only package and sell what they are receiving in sustainable fish.
The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), a leading certification and eco-labeling program for sustainable seafood, has its own CoC standard to ensure products with the MSC label only come from MSC certified sustainable fisheries. Once a fishery has been certified, all companies in the supply chain that wish to sell the certified product must meet the CoC standard, and that includes demonstrating mass balance across all elements of their operation.
“For those that don’t require it, the mass balance approach, I don’t know how they manage to ensure that there isn’t non-labeled products getting into the labeled products line,†says David Agnew, MSC director of standards.
While he acknowledges there are not a lot of tuna products with the MSC label, he says they are expecting to see products from two big tuna fisheries fairly soon. The PNA free school skipjack purse seine fishery has already gained MSC certification, but it has not yet received its CoC certification. The Maldivian pole-and-line tuna fishery is also another hopeful contender, even though its fishery is still being assessed.
Tuna processor, Thai Union, has already applied CoC in its factory and Narin Niruttinanon, the company’s deputy general manager, says it is a simple traceability system.
“MSC albacore is just another batch of raw material which does not really force us to do anything differently than normal,†says Niruttinanon.
From receiving thefish to placing it in cold storage, he says the MSC albacore tuna is delivered in containers, the staff do sizing, and then the fish are placed in bins separate from the non-certified fish. Detailed barcode stickers on all the bins clearly indicate the contents to staff, he says.
In the processing area, the staff keep the production lines for the MSC tuna separate and they control this by respecting the identifying tags from start to finish, he says. In the finished goods warehouse, the MSC albacore tuna products are stacked together on separate pallets and again, the products are clearly marked.
“If anything, the whole idea is not to let any non-MSC fish contaminate the MSC-certified fish, so a dedicated processing line with well-trained staff can easily ensure that.â€