Ocean Basket, one of the Aquarium’s partner sponsors, has made a public commitment to sourcing sustainable seafood by changing its procurement policies to ensure that it has more sustainably harvested and farmed seafood products on its menu by 2017 and 2020 respectively.
This has exciting implications in terms of transforming the seafood industry but also in terms of ensuring that the various Ocean Basket franchises and front-of-house staff:
- Are aware of the commitment that the company has made
- Understand why they have made the commitment
- Are given the tools to respond to questions asked of them about SASSI, the Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative
In response to this, the Two Oceans Aquarium Environmental Education Centre ran a SASSI course specifically for Ocean Basket staff on 17 June 2014, and a second one on 12 November 2014.
The workshop was attended by waitrons, managers and chefs from various branches of Ocean Basket in Cape Town, including the airport, Plumstead, Paddocks, Kloof Street, Edgemead, Glengarry, Strand, Kenilworth, Camps Bay and head office.
These are the staff who attended these courses in front of the Ocean Basket Kelp Forest Exhibit. Look out for these faces when you next visit Ocean Basket and ask them to tell you more about SASSI and what Ocean Basket is doing.
The content of the course looked at:
- What SASSI is, and what the word sustainable means
- The SASSI listing categories – green, orange and red – and what each category stands for
- MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) and ASC (Aquaculture Stewardship Council) as the gold standards for wild-caught, or harvested seafood and farmed seafood respectively
The staff were then given pictures of items on the Ocean Basket menu and were asked to separate the pictures into the green, orange or red list, using the SASSI pocket guide provided and other SASSI tools.
The SASSI tools available for consumers and restaurants to use to make informed decisions about seafood products are the SASSI pocket guide (each participant was given one), SASSI poster that should be in the stores, the FishMS number – 079 4998795, the WWF-SASSI mobi site and website, and the various smartphone apps that you can download for free.
This activity highlighted the fact that as a SASSI restaurant supporter, no product sold in store should be on the SASSI red list, but that a few seafood products were on the SASSI orange list.
The activity was then extended by looking at the four questions customers are encouraged to ask about seafood products to make informed decisions for a healthy ocean:
- What is it? Common name including scientific name
- Where does it come from? Country or region of origin
- How was it caught (fishing method) or farmed (farming method)?
- What are the associated concerns of each fishing or farming method? This would include environmental damage, bycatch (unwanted animals caught during fishing) and overfishing
So next time you visit Ocean Basket or any other seafood restaurant, we encourage you to ask these four questions and choose sustainably managed seafood.
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