Vague Reassurance

Responsibly Sourced

A moral promise with no rules, no receipts, and no consequences.

The Claim

They Say…

All our seafood must meet our standards for sourcing fish responsibly.

— Co-op¹

They Say…

Responsibly sourcing our seafood is important to us which is why Tesco fish experts work with responsibly managed farms to continually improve their high standards of quality and welfare.

— Tesco²

We Say…

If chemical discharges into fragile marine ecosystems, mass mortality, severe sea lice infestations, and the shooting of seals counts as “responsible”…

…then responsibility simply means whatever the industry can get away with.

The Reality

“Responsibly sourced” is a term widely used by retailers to market farmed salmon and other seafood products in the UK. And, as you might expect, there is no legal definition for what it actually means. And that makes it an extremely clever, and very manipulative, piece of marketing.

Retailers such as Tesco publish their own carefully worded “responsible sourcing” policies, setting internal standards with no mandatory independent enforcement and no legal definition to meet. And they tend to get away with it until investigators intervene and uncover the truth.

All “responsibly sourced” Scottish salmon sold in UK supermarkets is factory farmed using intensive open-net operations. An estimated 75 million salmon are produced every year³ in 200-plus sites but in 2023 alone more than 17 million farmed salmon died prematurely in Scottish farms.⁴ We say “farms” but they are factories and they are very far from “responsible”.

Scottish salmon swim in a filthy soup of diseased, dead and dying fish, sea lice, and toxic chemicals. All the major salmon farming giants, including Mowi, Bakkafrost, Scottish Sea Farms, and Cooke Aquaculture have been linked to the chemical pollution of fragile marine ecosystems, shockingly high mortality rates, and severe sea lice infestations.

There is a certification scheme that is supposed to ensure these companies stick to basic environmental laws and welfare standards. It’s a despairingly weak scheme but in 2024, Scottish Sea Farms withdrew from even that, saying the Aquaculture Stewardship Certification conflicted with their own in-house veterinary advice, which, we have to say, is rather convenient.

The term “responsibly sourced” works well for the salmon-farming industry because it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. No fixed legal benchmark. No mandatory independent enforcement. Just reassurance printed on plastic. And all the while, genuinely irresponsible practices continue unchecked. We are being sold comfort instead of truth. Marketing instead of meaning.

It’s time we stopped buying it.