Blue Food Performance (BFP)

What is it?

Blue Food Performance Ltd (BFP) offers scientifically verified sustainability assessments, including Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), for seafood organizations at any point along the value chain.

This is achieved through a unique collaboration between industry and academia, utilizing the latest knowledge to ensure scientific integrity and commercial relevance. Sustainability is a performance journey, with trade-offs across the sustainability pillars. Therefore, it can only be measured, monitored, and optimized by consistently applying and responding to a comprehensive set of environmental, socio-economic, human health, and fish welfare indicators over time.

This enables BFP to identify hotspots and offer tailor-made solutions, which are key to supporting the decision-making process to optimize economic performance and competitiveness in harmony with society and nature, thereby enhancing corporate image and reputation.

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:

1. The lack of harmonized standards and rules has resulted in a variety of assessment methodologies and interpretations.
2. Many are self-assessed without providing adequate methodological explanation or validation.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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