New benchmark exposes material environmental and social risks across global seafood sector. FAIRR launches new investor tool challenging overly positive assumptions about seafood sustainability – revealing weak company preparedness on pollution, implementation and future‑proofing, alongside missed growth opportunities.
- Global seafood companies address social risks more than environmental impacts, with worst performance on pollution (19/100) leaving investors exposed to mounting litigation risks.
- Companies are struggling to identify commercially viable pathways for more sustainable products, scoring just 11/100 for future-facing opportunities, focusing instead on existing fisheries as well as salmon and shrimp farming.
- The Coller FAIRR Seafood Index provides investors with a new lens on whether seafood companies have strategies in place to address financially material environmental and social risks across operations and supply chains.
The $95tn FAIRR Initiative is launching the Coller FAIRR Seafood Index, a new benchmark assessing the approach of the world’s biggest seafood companies to the social, health and environmental consequences of their operations. Often considered a lower‑impact alternative to other animal proteins, the seafood sector may have enjoyed overly positive perceptions due to the lack of an industry-specific benchmark – until now.
The Coller FAIRR Seafood Index scores the world’s 20 largest listed seafood companies* – suppliers to supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Lawson JP, Casino and Ahold Delhaize – on areas that are most important to drive a seafood sector that is sustainable for nature, people and long-term investors. These topics include modern slavery, pollution and food safety, among others**. The Coller FAIRR Seafood Index benchmarks the maturity of a company’s response to environmental and social risks and opportunities, rather than identifying how sustainable the company’s operations are***. Of the companies, 40% are headquartered in APAC, 40% are in Europe and 20% are in North and Latin America.
The Coller FAIRR Seafood Index finds:
- Companies score better on social risks than environmental topics: The Index tracks how companies are addressing modern slavery and child labour, worker representation and workforce wellbeing. It finds that the companies score better on social issues, with an average score of 39/100, than for environmental topics, where they score 25/100. Mowi scores the highest of the companies for its approach to social risks, at 69/100.
- Of nature and climate topics, companies are least prepared to tackle the risks linked to pollution: FAIRR assesses topics such as greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, pollution and ecosystem impacts. Companies score particularly low on pollution (19/100), which includes effluent discharge from salmon farms, marine litter from pens and fishing gear chemical contamination. Global wholesale company Sysco, the parent company of Brakes, ranks worst across nature and climate topics, scoring 6/100.
- Uneven considerations for food quality and health risks: The Index tracks the extent to which companies are addressing food safety risks such as pathogens, histamines, and heavy metals. The scores for food safety are among the highest of the Index, averaging 43/100. But the data reveals far less sophisticated approaches to antibiotic stewardship (27/100) and animal welfare (26/100), which significantly undermine food quality and increase risks to consumer health.
- Untapped opportunities for more sustainable seafood products: On average, companies score 11/100 for their approach to more sustainable products. This includes protein diversification – meaning the expansion of portfolios into plant-based and alternative proteins – and unfed aquaculture – referring to the farming of species such as mussels and macroalgae that require no external feed input and are among the most ecologically efficient forms of seafood production. Asian companies are more cognisant of these opportunities, with three of the top five businesses in the ranking for opportunities based in Asia (Umios, Nissui, Thai Union). However, some companies in Norway and Chile are investing in aquaculture of mussels and seaweed, which are unfed.
- Poor scoring on evidence of implementation and outcomes: When assessed on the execution of the environmental and social strategies and progress on key performance indicators, companies score just 25/100 and 23/100, respectively. This underlines the urgent need for companies to go further than paper commitments and demonstrate transparently and concretely how they are monitoring and progressing on outcomes.
- Traceability remains problematic across wild-caught and farmed fish: The 20 companies score 27/100 on average on this topic, leaving consumers globally exposed to mislabelling provenance, species and even potentially illegally caught seafood.
Max Boucher, Head of Nature Programmes at FAIRR, said:
“Whether it’s IUU fishing, overfishing or issues of disease and pollution management in farmed seafood, it’s clear that there’s a lot of work to do to ensure seafood contributes sustainably to global food security and resilience. The companies that sit at the bottleneck of these complex supply chains can contribute to this now by acknowledging the materiality of these risks to their businesses and working to identify high-risk practices at sea, rather than being content with opaque sourcing.
“Capital has the power to accelerate the shift towards more sustainable practices if investors have the tools to understand the true impact of harmful practices and their financial materiality. The Seafood Index is a leap towards the more sophisticated identification of the sector’s social and environmental risks and opportunities with a forward-looking view on whether companies are really taking action. It seeks to drive urgent change to improve the long-term viability of fishing and aquaculture, whilst minimising harm to nature and communities.”
Karl Høgtun, Director Governance and Biodiversity, DNB Asset Management, added:
“The Seafood Index is a much-needed tool to capture the nuance of the seafood sector’s operations. The Index is vital to bring colour to financially material topics to seafood sustainability – from deforestation to modern slavery.”
Looking below the surface of corporate disclosures
The Coller FAIRR Seafood Index offers a thorough assessment of complex, sector-specific, qualitative corporate disclosures, including policies and supplier codes of conduct as well as credible third‑party data sources, such as CDP. The in-depth assessment aims to provide both a forward-looking benchmark of whether companies have a mature approach to risks, with credible strategies in place to drive positive progress in coming years, as well as a reflection of on-the-ground performance, revealed by the outcome metrics in the Index.
While this provides a robust basis for comparison, the findings rely on transparency from the companies assessed. The Index shows regional gaps, such as lower scores among Asian companies that are partly explained by the relatively lower adoption of global reporting standards as well as weaker practices. Yet, even in Europe, disclosures for many metrics on issues such as farmed fish mortality and water pollution remain unregulated and relatively undefined, which can make comparisons across companies difficult and create discrepancies between what is reported and real-world impacts.
Investors can use the Coller FAIRR Seafood Index for:
- Investment integration: Investors can integrate data from the Index into their decision-making models and processes to drive capital allocation to the best-performing companies.
- Stewardship: Investors can leverage the findings from the Index in their stewardship activities, such as engaging with companies to adopt specific practices like new policies, targets and risk mitigation initiatives.
Companies can use the Coller FAIRR Seafood Index as a benchmark to help identify and prioritise areas for improvement as well as leading practice examples from global industry peers.
*Companies in the analysis: Bakkafrost P/F, BioMar Group A/S, Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL (CP Foods), Grieg Seafood ASA, Hilton Food Group PLC, Kyokuyo Co., Ltd, Lerøy Seafood Group ASA, Marubeni Corporation, Mitsubishi Corporation, Mowi ASA, Multiexport Foods SA, Nissui Corporation, Nichirei Corporation, Nomad Foods Ltd, Premium Brands Holdings Corporation, SalMar ASA, Salmones Camanchaca SA, Sysco Corporation, Thai Union Group PCL, and Umios Corporation (formerly Maruha Nichiro Corporation).
** Topics evaluated: The companies are scored against 16 topics:
- animal welfare
- antibiotic stewardship
- deforestation and conversion
- ecosystem impact
- food safety
- governance
- greenhouse gas emissions
- marine raw material sustainability – including inputs such as feed for farmed seafood
- modern slavery and child labour
- pollution
- protein diversification
- seafood traceability
- unfed aquaculture – referring to the farming of species such as mussels, oysters and macroalgae that require no external feed inputs, obtaining nutrients directly from their surrounding environment, making them among the most ecologically efficient forms of seafood production.
- water scarcity
- worker representation
- workforce wellbeing
*** Methodology
- Select company universe: Publicly listed seafood companies are chosen based on revenue exposure to seafood and market capitalisation.
- Define assessment framework: Companies are assessed across 16 financially material topics (listed above) covering environmental, social and governance risks and opportunities.
- Apply maturity indicators: Each topic is evaluated by analysts through five indicators: risk assessment, policies, targets, implementation and outcome metrics.
- Score questions: The assessments are normalised to 0–100 through FAIRR’s standardised scoring methodology to create a maturity indicator score.
- Topic aggregate scores & net maturity scores: Maturity indicator scores are aggregated to topic level, which are in turn averaged into a single net maturity score per company.
- Quality control and feedback: Companies can review the information and flag areas for reconsideration before final scores are validated and approved by FAIRR senior management.
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