THAI UNION ON A MISSION FOR A TRULY SUSTAINABLE GLOBAL SEAFOOD INDUSTRY

Thai Union on a mission for a truly sustainable global seafood industry: interview with Fish Focus. Fish Focus talks to Adam Brennan, Chief Sustainability Officer of Thai Union Group, and Ludovic Garnier, CFO, on the Group’s ambitious new $200m sustainability commitment.

Adam Brennan, Chief Sustainability Officer of Thai Union Group, and Ludovic Garnier, CFO, are on a mission to protect ocean biodiversity, sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, whilst also ensuring that those employed in the seafood industry enjoy good, fair and equitable working conditions. Such laudable aspirations will be at the heart of the Group’s new strategic plan, which it is hoped will be mirrored by other key players in the global seafood industry.

Speaking to Fish Focus about the launch of Thai Union’s SeaChange 2030, the next stage of its sustainability plan to help reshape the seafood industry. The company is setting aggressive goals to meet by 2030 that are the broadest reaching in the seafood industry, and Thai Union is committing $200 million – the equivalent of its entire 2022 net profit – to SeaChange through to 2030.

Passionate about sustainability and the need for industry to take its responsibilities seriously, Brennan and Garnier see the SeaChange 2030 plan as an opportunity for the seafood sector to tackle food insecurity whilst ensuring the protection of our precious marine and environmental resources holisitically.

Brennan is quick to point out that this next stage of the strategy is a natural progression from work Thai Union first embarked upon several years previously.

“This is not our first strategy; we actually started our sustainability journey back in 2016 when we first launched SeaChange where we recognised the significant opportunity for both Thai Union and the broader industry in taking a greater role to ensure a more responsible industry,” he says.

“For the last few years, we have focused on two fundamental issues. First, on conditions onboard the fishing vessels we source from, where we acknowledge that we have a responsibility and an accountability to make sure we are safeguarding workers in our supply chain.

“Secondly,  we have been focused on making sure more fisheries adopt responsible and sustainable practices, putting them into Fishery Improvement Projects, and moving many into the path for MSC certification.

“Now, with our 2030 strategy, we are taking a broad holistic look at environmental and social  issues at a group level. The sustainability plan in our 2030 strategy will help reshape the seafood industry and provide solutions for both people and planet.”

For the 2030 plan, five key future outcomes have been identified, two under the people banner, and three focusing on the environment. For people,  providing a safe and decent work, and equitable workplace is seen as crucial.

“This was at the heart of our 2016 strategy and will continue be so for our 2030 strategy,” states Brennan.

“The second area under people is health and wellness and making sure the opportunity exists for seafood to provide a healthy and nutritious protein for a growing population which helps tackle food insecurity.”

On the environmental side, Thai Union intends to take a lead role in tackling climate change by lowering its carbon emissions even further. The Group also aims to focus on the circular economy from a packaging and plastic perspective, helping to drive best in class manufacturing and to ensure optimum recycling and waste reduction.

Biodiversity will also come under the spotlight. Brennan said: “Protecting biodiversity is fundamental to Thai Union. We are reliant on the health of the world’s oceans and it is important that this is safeguarded.  Protecting biodiversity is not new to us, ever since 2016 in our tuna supply chain there has been an element of biodiversity protection by making sure we have biologically sustainable fish stocks. But we are taking things further in our new strategy, looking at the aquaculture supply chain, as well as how to protect biodiversity and by playing a more significant role in restoration as well.”

The ambition of the plan is admirable – but how would it be possible, for example, to ensure good working conditions aboard fishing vessels that supply Thai Union, but which are independently owned and not within direct control of the Group?

“It is down to us to take ownership and accountability for this issue,” says Brennan. “As a starting point, there is traceability and our ability to understand where our tuna is coming from because we don’t own these vessels, and this was one of the biggest priorities in our original SeaChange strategy.

“We’ve introduced a vessel code of conduct where we have set out our expectations for suppliers and vessels. However, it is one thing to create standards and another thing to monitor and meet them, and this is why we have a third-party auditing mechanism where inspectors go on board vessels and identify any gaps between performance and our expectations. If issues are found, then a vessel improvement plan is implemented to help close these gaps over time. It is definitely challenging, but that doesn’t mean we should not be trying to tackle these critical issues in the seafood industry.”

Ludovic Garnier, Thai Union CFO, says the SeaChange 2030 plan is very much seen as a pathway for other seafood players to follow – and by working together, there is a real opportunity to make significant progress.

He states: “We want to be humble and realistic – Thai Union alone cannot change the industry, we are happy to lead the way, but we want the whole industry to move in the right direction, because this is the only way to make sure the whole resource is sustainable. If we are the only one to move, and others do not, there would be more pressure on the resources and it would not work. We have to convince other players to work with us and that we are moving forward in the right direction. Over the past few years, a lot of progress has been made.”

Brennan agrees, and while leadership is important, equally so is the need for all industry to work together to achieve the common goal of sustainability.

“This has always been our intention; we look to go out and experiment in what works and what doesn’t work. We don’t always get it right, and it takes time, effort and resources, and ultimately we would like to pave the way forward and demonstrate what leadership looks like. We’ve been recognised as leaders to date – we are number 1 in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and number 1 on the Seafood Stewardship Index.

“We acknowledge that leadership is constantly evolving, and we need to evolve as new science becomes available and identify new opportunities of doing things better. We work with a number of different stakeholders to try and raise the bar for the entire industry, and we engage heavily with regulators, customers and our competitors to have the correct alignment in the direction we are heading in.”

Positivity seems to be at the heart of the thinking of Thai Union – but what if a certain fishery, for example, did not meet the responsible fishing criteria sought by the Group?

“We are ambitious, for example, we have an Interim target that by 2025, 100% of our tuna will be responsibly sourced,” says Brennan. “We want to make sure that we are working with suppliers that are  aligned with our ambition. Rather than pull away if expectations are not met, we are always proactive in working with suppliers and fisheries to drive improvements in their performance. Pulling away just leaves a void that someone else will step into, and it does not really drive any change on the ground. We always prefer to support continuous improvement that reaches our expectations.”

A new part of the strategy is a focus for the first time at group level is on aquaculture, building-up on work already successfully achieved with wild-caught tuna. Thai Union is the biggest importer of frozen shrimp into the US, representing a significant part of its product portfolio. Aquaculture areas that will be tackled in the new strategy will include environmental and social issues, driving the responsible sourcing of feed, and looking at antibiotics and traceability to ensure all-encompassing sustainability.

Summing up, Brennan says ensuring a greener and brighter future will need to be a collective effort by all stakeholders within the Group, given the large size of the Thai Union supply chain.

“Our own processing footprint has had a significant amount of investment in terms of driving energy efficiency through the implementation of solar panels and other renewable energy sources. But our own footprint is only 10 percent of our total greenhouse gas emissions – the other 90 per cent is actually from within our own supply chain, and with our strategy we are the first global processor to set science-based targets in line with the Paris agreement.

“What this means is an absolute reduction of minus 42 per cent towards 2030 and a long-term commitment towards net zero by 2050. We need to work with all the vessels, all of the farms, and work with the feed supply chain and others and to look at opportunities at how we can all decarbonise.”

The obvious determination and passion of Brennan and Garnier in achieving such goals would indicate that Thai Union is well on the way to becoming a truly sustainable Group, providing a clear path of direction and a blueprint for other players in the global seafood industry to follow.