Foodservice giants Sodexo USA, Compass Group USA, and Aramark earned top scores in the Greenpeace report, “Sea of Distress,” which graded 15 major contract-management companies and distributors on their policies around sustainable seafood.
“The worst-performing companies profiled included AVI Foodsystems, Elior North America and Reinhart Foodservice, which were dinged for offenses like lagging public information on sustainability guidelines or continuing to stock heavily over-fished species like bluefin tuna,” says GreenBiz.
Sysco was fourth on the list, taking a hit for purchasing tuna from the Thai Union Group, the maker of “Chicken of the Sea” and a longtime Greenpeace target.
The top-scoring three companies were also the only ones to respond to Greenpeace’s seven-page sustainability survey, which has led some in the seafood industry to claim that the results are biased.
“Greenpeace refuses to join the grown-ups at the table to discuss real sustainability studies,” Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, said in an interview with SeafoodSource. “This would clearly take too much time away from hitting donors up for cash.”
“Sea of Distress” notes that “one-third of global fish stocks are overfished” and calls on clients of the profiled companies to advocate for a more sustainable supply. A similar 2008 study by Greenpeace of seafood in grocery stores (“Carting Away the Oceans”) saw all 20 retailers receive failing scores. However, in a 2015 followup study, 20 out of 25 grocery retailers earned passing grades for making sustainable seafood more available to customers and four earned green ratings (the highest mark)—as a sign, according to Greenpeace, that these kinds of reports can force progress.