Partnerships ‘driving up seafood standards’

MIKE Mitchell, the man tasked with keeping a close watch on environmental and sustainability issues for Young’s Seafood, told the World Seafood Conference in Grimsby that great strides had been made in these areas, thanks to industry collaboration.
Mitchell, who is technical and corporate social responsibility director of Young’s, said he welcomed this progress, adding that it was helping to drive up the seafood integrity agenda.
Grimsby based Young’s is the main platinum sponsor of the World Seafood Congress this year.
Mitchell outlined the company’s industry leading business intelligence tools, in particular its sophisticated ‘decision tree’ models which characterise food integrity risk in specific scenarios.
And he highlighted how these models, along with the methodologies used by the company to handle product screening, help to ensure that the quality, specification, provenance and legality of the fish brought to market meets Young’s high standards.
‘During 2015, the industry has been considering how to best develop intelligence hubs and how to produce new business intelligence products which give strategic and tactical direction for enforcement agencies and for industry’s own targeted due diligence programmes,’ he said.
He also explained how a new collaborative stakeholder group of 22 major retailers, food service providers and food manufacturers has recently been formed, calling themselves the Food Industry Intelligence Network (FIIN).
‘At Young’s Seafood we welcome this development and the moves being made to ensure there is more industry wide collaboration on tackling seafood integrity issues in future.’