Inside the System That Makes a Seafood Label Trustworthy

Between a fishing vessel out on the water and a can of tuna in your grocery cart, there is a complex, little-understood system working to verify whether you should trust what is on the label. In this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, host Andrew Lewin breaks down how that system actually works, and why the blue check mark on your seafood means something real.

Andrew starts with the RFMO, a regional fisheries management organization: a treaty-based body where countries with a stake in a fishery legally bind themselves to cooperate on how it is managed. He walks through where these bodies actually meet, and how governance decisions travel from those negotiating rooms toward your dinner table. That includes the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), whose work spans science-based fisheries management, advancing improved fishing practices, transparency and verification tools like annual company audits and public vessel tracking, and policy engagement with RFMOs, and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), whose certification functions as an eco-label with real financial weight behind it, including why MSC pulled its certification of the Maine lobster fishery twice, in August 2020 and again in December 2022.

The throughline is that ISSF and MSC are complementary but distinct approaches to the same goal, not two steps in a single pipeline. ISSF works across science, fishing practice, transparency, and RFMO policy; independent conformity assessment bodies, not ISSF, assess fisheries against the MSC standard. This episode sets up tomorrow's interview with an ISSF representative who has spent decades inside these negotiations and will walk through what that cooperation actually looks like in the room.

Takeaways:

• A regional fisheries management organization (RFMO) is a treaty-based body that turns "we should manage this fishery responsibly" into an enforceable, multi-country agreement.
• Eco-labels like MSC certification carry real financial weight. Losing one can force a fishery to change its practices, even when the science on the underlying risk is still ambiguous.
• ISSF's work spans science-based fisheries management, improved fishing practices, transparency and verification, and RFMO policy engagement, not just company audits and vessel tracking.
• ISSF and MSC are complementary but distinct: independent conformity assessment bodies, not ISSF, assess fisheries against the MSC certification standard.
• Per ISSF's 2025 audit-period report, participating companies achieved 98.8% aggregate conformance across 32 conservation measures (their tenth consecutive year above 90%), and PVR-registered vessels showed 75.6% aggregate compliance on vessel-specific conservation measures. These are two separate transparency metrics covering different populations, not a before-and-after comparison.

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