Whole Foods Market launched its Quality Standards for Aquaculture in 2008 (Photo: Whole Foods Market)

Get To Know Your Tilapia

Unlike conventional grocers who may source tilapia from any old place as long as the price is right, Whole Foods Market (Public, NASDAQ:WFMI) sources all seafood, including tilapia, according to the company’s Quality Standards.

In the case of tilapia, Whole Foods Market sources from just three supplier partners, all of whom have passed a third-party audit to ensure that they meet the company’s rigorous quality standards.

Whole Foods Market Seafood Guide For Shoppers

Whole Foods Market‘s primary supplier partner, Tropical Aquaculture Inc., sources tilapia from Santa Priscila, located in beautiful Ecuador. Santa Priscila practices poly-culture by raising shrimp and tilapia together in the same ponds. This helps reduce waste and water pollution, as tilapia consume feed that the shrimp leave behind and help get rid of organic matter that otherwise could end up in the environment. The farm also re-circulates the water from the ponds, which further helps to protect water quality surrounding the farm.

Whole Foods Market’s Quality Standards for Aquaculture prohibits the common industry practice of using the hormone methyl testosterone to reverse the sex of tilapia. Conventional tilapia producers prefer to raise only male fish so that the fish put their energy into growth rather than reproduction and grow to a larger, more marketable size. Whole Foods Market’s farmer partners, however, grow fish the old fashioned way: they let the fish reproduce naturally. Then they separate the males and females by hand and raise them in separate ponds.

Whole Foods Market Seafood Guide at seafood counter

Moreover, Whole Foods Market prohibits slaughterhouse by-products from avian or mammalian species in feed. Fortunately, tilapia are naturally omnivorous fish that don’t require a lot of fishmeal in their feed, which helps the tilapia suppliers meet the company’s goal of reducing pressure on wild populations of fish that are used to produce animal feed, but are also important species in marine food webs. In fact, Santa Priscilla’s feed (as well as other supplier partners’ feed), uses trimmings from other fish species processed for seafood, which also reduces wastes.

Whole Foods Market launched its Quality Standards for Aquaculture in 2008 and these principles still remain one of the toughest quality standards for farmed seafood in the industry. Fish farmers who want to partner with Whole Foods must complete a lengthy application detailing all of their farming practices. Third-party auditors verify that the farm is meeting these standards before any of their fish makes its way to Whole Foods stores. In addition, suppliers must continue to pass annual inspections for as long as they partner with the company.

To know that you are purchasing farmed seafood that meets Whole Foods Market’s strict standards, you simply have to look for the aquaculture logo — Responsibly Farmed — at Whole Foods Market stores. That symbol means that the fish has been third-party verified to meet Whole Foods Market’s standards.

Whole Foods Market Responsibly Farmed logo

About Whole Foods Market Inc.

Whole Foods Market is a natural and organic foods supermarket. The Company has one operating segment, natural and organic foods supermarkets.

As of September 26, 2010, the Company operated 299 stores, of which 288 stores operated in 38 United States, states and the District of Columbia; six stores in Canada, and five stores in the United Kingdom. It owns 11 stores, two distribution facilities and land for one store in development, including the adjacent property.

Whole Foods Market operates in the natural and organic foods supermarket segment

Its stores average 37,600 square feet in size and nine years in age, and are supported by its Austin headquarters, regional offices, distribution centers, bake house facilities, commissary kitchens, seafood-processing facilities, meat and produce procurement centers, and a specialty coffee, tea procurement and brewing operation.

Source: Whole Foods Market Inc. /Carrie Brownstein

Margaret E.L. Stacey
Editor Companies and Products
[email protected]
www.seafood.media

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City:	Austin
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Country:	United States
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