(Photo Credit: James Ahlberg, Unsplash)Ahold Delhaize USA grocery store chain Food Lion joined a global platform where it voluntarily shares information about seafood sourcing methods to help ensure sustainability. The company’s executives expect that adding this level of transparency will increase customer confidence in the store’s seafood products.
Food Lion joined the Ocean Disclosure Project (ODP), a platform for voluntary disclosure of seafood sourcing first started in 2015 by the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership. The project gives seafood-buying companies a template for reporting on the fisheries and fish farms they source from as well as the provenance, stock status, management, and environmental factors like species status, bycatch, and feed.
All this information then gets used to create annual profiles that reflect the company’s sourcing from the previous year, which go up on the project’s website, ODP explained.
Salisbury, North Carolina-based Food Lion has more than 1,000 stores around the southeastern and mid-Atlantic United States. According to information posted on ODP, the chain sells fresh, frozen, and canned wild-caught seafood. Of the 84 fisheries that it uses, 26 are certified fisheries, 17 are involved in a fishery improvement project (FIP), and 41 have been assessed as low risk by a nonprofit science partner.
Greenpeace’s 2018 Supermarket Sustainable Seafood Scorecard, the most recent one published, gave Food Lion parent company Ahold Delhaize an overall score of 64.1 out of 100, placing the company ninth on the list of 22 retailers.
Food Lion works with Trace Register to conduct internal inventory audits in real time, the scorecard noted. However, Greenpeace called inventory the parent company’s weakest category overall at the time. “Ahold Delhaize needs to swiftly turn a corner and invest in sourcing improvements like many other top 10 retailers.”
This week Food Lion president Meg Ham explained why seafood traceability matters to the company: “It’s important to us that our customers know where their seafood comes from, so it only makes sense to join the ODP and make public the origin of wild-caught seafood sold in our stores.”
