Sustainability

A Family Tradition

Santa Monica Seafood’s owners have been catching and selling fish for generations. It’s why their fishermen forefathers moved to Southern California; in order to continue the family’s reliance on fishing to feed their families. Thus, if anyone comprehends the need to ensure the long-term viability of seafood resources, it’s this Company.

Our procurement staff travels the world investigating each supplier’s harvesting techniques. This is part and parcel of our on-going efforts to ensure the seafood we supply our customers is strictly purchased from vendors who are not only reputable, but committed to seafood sustainability through best practices. Prioritizing conservation efforts and responsible fishing practices is not just the right thing to do. It assures the consistent flow of delicious seafood to our customers far into the future.

However, our commitment to sustainability goes much further. We strive to educate our customers in order to increase community understanding of our environmental responsibility and being an agent of change in the seafood industry.

• We were the first seafood distributor to enter into a formal partnership with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch Program; working with them to apply their rankings to our inventory.  We are actively participating in helping develop their research prioritization and scope of assessments and work closely with them on events and educational opportunities.
• We created the first and only Responsible Sourcing Vendor Program wherein we apply a percentage of our annual seafood purchases towards financially supporting fishery, food safety and education programs around the world and towards qualifying and verifying suppliers who share our commitment to food safety, supply integrity and sustainable practices.
• We are the first and only seafood distributor to include a sustainability ranking on all customer invoices based on the level of sustainability of each product purchased, along with a weighted average GPA for all the products purchased to help you monitor the level of sustainability in your seafood purchases.

Santa Monica Seafood relies on a number of international certification bodies along with regulations implemented by the United States Government to help guide our purchasing decisions.

We’re proud to be an acting member of the Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative, National Fisheries Institute, the California Restaurant Association, California Fisheries & Seafood Institute, Ocean Trust, Los Angeles Seafood Monitoring Project and also receiving our Best Aquaculture Practices certification for our Rancho Dominguez facility.