Sodexo signs eco-certification deal
Firm joins two other food giants in pledging to buy sustainable seafood
By Randy Shore, Vancouver SunNovember 22, 2012
Catering giant Sodexo Canada is more than halfway to its goal of ensuring that all seafood it serves is sustainably caught. The company has enlisted the Vancouver Aquarium's Ocean Wise program to help get the rest of the way there by 2015.
Ocean Wise will work with Sodexo's catering locations at universities, hospitals and businesses to remove products that don't meet the standard and work with suppliers to find alternative products, said Mike McDermid, Ocean Wise's partner relations manager.
Sodexo joins food service giants Compass Group and Aramark Canada as partners of the Vancouver-based eco-certification program.
The food service industry buys more than 70 per cent of the seafood sold in North America. Sodexo serves 300 clients, many of them large institutions with several food outlets. As a result, Sodexo has considerable clout in the market and exerts influence on the practices of its suppliers.
"Adding Sodexo as a partner is like getting a chain like Earls, but seven times as large," said McDermid. "Compass, Aramark and Sodexo, that's the big three in food service and we now work with all of them."
The Canadian arm of the Paris-based Sodexo Group buys about $6 million worth of seafood a year and roughly 60 per cent of that is certified sustainable, according to Chris Roberts, director of corporate citizenship for Sodexo Canada.
"It was about 14 per cent in 2010, so we've come a long way in two years," said Roberts. "But we realized as a company we were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on seafood a year and we wanted to leverage that to actually have an impact on the oceans and the fisheries."
"We told our suppliers we are going to be 100 per cent sustainable by 2015, so you are either on board or you are not," Roberts said. "That pushed them to get sustainable and they went to the fisheries and said 'you guys better be sustainable.' "
Sodexo eliminated species deemed to be at risk from their menus one year ago, but continues to serve seafood from fisheries that are under review by Ocean Wise, the U.K.-based Marine Stewardship Council and others.
Adding Ocean Wise to its list of approved eco-certifications gives Sodexo buyers a longer list of sustainable products to choose from, he said.
"It's great to see companies like Sodexo, their clients and their chefs all wanting to do the right thing with the products that they are selling," said McDermid. "This isn't a trivial thing, it's a lot of work to change ordering, rewrite recipes and work with new products."
Ocean Wise and Sodexo have been operating a pilot sustainable purchasing program at UBC's University Hospital since last spring to develop processes and procedures that can be applied at Sodexo's other locations.
rshore@vancouversun.com© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Here's the list in case your wondering if farmed salmon is Okeedokee
http://www.oceanwise.ca/seafood
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