Blue Food Performance (BFP)
Global
What is it?
Blue Food Performance Ltd (BFP) provides independent, transparent, and scientifically verified blue food sustainability assessments through a unique collaboration between academia and industry, utilising the latest knowledge to ensure scientific integrity and commercial relevance.
Services
BFP offers environmental (including Life Cycle Assessment), socio-economic, nutritional, and fish welfare assessments and tools for seafood companies at any point along the value chain. Additionally, they provide guidance and support to enhance sustainability performance. They expect to add more tools in the future.
They offer the following bespoke services to validate the sustainability claims of any organisation.
- Validate and Enhance Sustainability: This often results in operational, reputational, and financial benefits and highlights sustainability properties that surpass certification requirements.
- Decarbonisation Strategies: Pinpointing emission hotspots and recommending effective strategies to reduce your carbon footprint—making it easier for your organisation to meet regulatory standards.
- Benchmarking Innovations: Supporting novel feed ingredient producers and technology companies (e.g., sensors, aeration devices) to measure impact of their innovation throughout the supply chain.
- Training and Mentorship: Tailored training and personalised mentorship programs designed to support your employees at various levels, ensuring a smooth transition and long-term growth.
How it works
Blue Food Performance has a data-driven value chain approach. It aims to tackle the following identified problems with conventional sustainability assessments, which could negatively impact decision-making processes, corporate image, and reputation:
- The lack of harmonized standards and rules has resulted in a variety of assessment methodologies and interpretations.
- Many are self-assessed without providing adequate methodological explanation or validation.
- Some assessments have a general LCA/ESG approach, or a narrow focus on a few (environmental) indicators and don’t consider the nutrient content of seafood, therefore overlooking important seafood industry-specific trade-offs. For example, concerns around “ocean health” have resulted in less marine and more plant ingredients in fish feeds, shifting impacts from the oceans to terrestrial ecosystems, and also affecting fish health, welfare, and the nutritional value of the final aquaculture product. While seafood is considered low-impact and highly nutritious, this relationship is often ignored in standard LCAs because these assessments are conducted based on harvested weight rather than supplied nutrients.
- Some assessments focus on a single part of the value chain, which results in blind spots.
BFP’s approach is unique because its assessments are scientifically verified by an interdisciplinary team from industry and academia with a deep understanding of the global seafood industry, along with extensive expertise in both quantitative and qualitative research methods, data analysis, and stakeholder engagement.
They focus on the whole seafood value chain (including the production of aquaculture feed and the sourcing of the ingredients it contains) to avoid sustainability blindspots. Through this, it allows users to gain a complete sustainability overview, identify hotspots, and respond to them. BFP can offer a variety of assessment packages based on four main pillars encompassing a range of indicators:
- Environmental; standardized LCAs aligned with the European Commission’s Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) method – comprehensively accounting for the impacts throughout the entire production cycle, and potentially “avoided emissions (scope 4)” as well.
- Socio-Economic; more detailed socio-economic performance assessments, such as gender and salary distribution.
- Human Nutrition & Health; Or broader assessments, including nutritional Life Cycle Assessments – where the provision of nutrients and the impact on human health and the environment is considered as well. Such assessments could benefit seafood considering its unique nutrient composition and relatively low impact compared with terrestrial animal-source foods.
- Fish Welfare; health, well-being, and natural behaviors.