The Two Oceans Aquarium is an official training partner of the WWF's Southern African Sustainable Seafood Initiative (SASSI), offering guidance to the staff of Cape Town restaurants and retailers seeking to improve their offerings by selling only sustainably sourced, Green-listed seafood species. A group of waitrons and managers from several Ocean Basket branches attended a WWF SASSI workshop at the Aquarium recently, and these are the lessons learned.
When asked why they thought they should attend a workshop like this, responses included the desire to increase knowledge and awareness about what is affecting the marine environment, and that a decline in seafood would affect their business and ultimately their jobs.
The workshop content involved lots of group work and hands-on activities to unpack concepts like sustainability and the impacts of different fishing methods and aquaculture.
This was followed by discussions around which group would be able to continue “fishing” for longer and which method was more effective in removing the popcorn and relating this back to actual methods of fishing and their environmental impacts which include habitat damage and bycatch.
The second part of the workshop focused on the SASSI programme and what Ocean Basket's participation and public commitment is, as well as what their roles and responsibilities as waitrons were.
The delegates were also shown how to use the various SASSI tools particularly the SASSI app and encouraged to ensure that they could answer the three important questions about the seafood on their menu viz. What is it? Where does it come from? How was it caught or farmed? This knowledge would enable staff to assist customers to make sustainable seafood choices.
Arrange a workshop for your team
If you are a restaurateur, retailer or work in the seafood industry and would like to be part of the next WWF SASSI please contact Two Oceans Aquarium Deputy Head of Education Bianca Engel on education@aquarium.co.za.
