Wild Sprats (Sardines) In Spring Water 105g

They have a MAXIMUM of 4 steps between the fish they put in a can and the boat that fished it. They do not trust long supply chains. Of course you can have a paperwork trace, in fact you have to, but their belief is simple: they want to be as close to the fish as possible.

Fish4Ever believe the more parties involved the more industrial and large scale your buying process is and the more it becomes a traded commodity rather than a valued food product.2 steps is great when you are able to land the fish straight into the factory from individual fishing boats or a fishing co-operative, but this isnt always possible. Firstly, most fish is fished during a fishing season: it has a life/reproduction/feeding cycle leading to an appropriate fishing period. Secondly, it is not always possible to pack in a factory that is local to the fishing. In such cases freezing becomes a natural additional stage and specialist companies handle the stocking and freezing. This becomes a 3 or 4 step process.BTW Fish4Ever never use airfreight. An example of the 3 step process is Cornish sardines. Once these became plentiful, they wanted to support British boats fishing well, but there isnt a sardine cannery in the whole of the UK, nor sufficient consistent supply. So in season, when they get the appropriate quality in fishing terms and size for canning, Fish4Ever buy Cornish sardines, these are then quick frozen in Cornwall and sent to a partner factory in Northern Spain. The 4 step process is similar to the 3 step process but one where there will be an export/freezer company and an import/freezer company involved.

They think fish should be fished by boats that are based close to the fish that is being fished. Their sustainability philosophy is also a quality of supply chain approach: they buy from local boats, registered in a local port, flying the flag of the country in which they are based, with as wide an ownership base as possible, with skippers who dont sit in distant offices but go out to sea with their crew, legally managed by their local authorities and forming part of a local coastal community.

In production Fish4Ever have developed long terms relationships with key partners who share their quality and sustainability approach. For sustainability reasons they would prefer to support a factory based in the same location as the boats and the fish. This is not always possible for quality control reasons or for relationship reasons, or for scale and volume reasons where a cannery is either too small and/or there is no local option available to them. All their production partners are relatively small scale artisan producers and family owned companies that do not form part of a large international group.

In tuna, working from the whole fish in one movement guarantees a high quality product and supports good verification and traceability.

Tuna is a global industry with industrial fleets fishing in distant seas, often under different flags. The tuna is kept in vast holds out at sea and often transhipment boats that ferry the tuna to a factory are used so the fishing boat can stay fishing. In many cases the tuna is frozen at sea, which is good, but also caught in huge nets and over-stacked in the hold, which is bad. Net-fished tuna has fought hard in the net, leading to stress that changes the flavour of the meat. They will often be twisted and lacerated and then piled high on top of each other. Once landed the tuna is defrosted, butchered in a factory and then frozen and kept as loins. The loins are shipped to a factory thousands of miles away. It is these loins which are then defrosted and packed in a separate cannery. Freezing, defrosting and re-freezing means the nutritional quality of the tuna is reduced. Worse, it is hard to verify the origin of the tuna and a paper trail can be cheated.

Fish4Ever know for a fact that there is over-claiming of fake pole and line tuna. This is why they insist on working directly from the whole tuna even though it is more expensive. They can visually verify the quality of the fish that comes into the factory and corroborate the fishing method claimed in a way that you cannot do with a frozen loin.

They only ever add natural and certified organic land ingredients. The organic system controls not only the inputs allowed on the land, which they believe do have negative health consequences, but also prohibits the use of a whole number of additives, preservatives and artificial or chemical processing aids. So the organic seal is a guarantee of the purity of the ingredients used. In the case of the vegetable oils they only use high quality virgin and first cold pressed oils: this is extremely rare in the canning industry where the cheapest oils are mostly preferred.

Organic agriculture rules ban the vast majority of pesticides (to kill pests), fungicides (to kill fungal growth) and insecticides (to kill insects), which are allowed in normal agriculture. Produce from non-organic agriculture will show higher amounts of toxic residues and although these are below the levels considered dangerous to health, there are often a whole number of different residues found in the same product AND safe level tests are not conducted on the accumulation or cocktail effect of these residues. In addition Glysphosate, one of the most prevalent crop control pesticides, was defined as probably carcinogenic by the World Health Organisation in 2015! Synthetic fertilisers are also disallowed in organic agriculture. Organic methods encourage a healthy and rich soil with good levels of mineral content. There is sparse and contested evidence as to the nutritional difference between organic and conventional crops but in the case of vegetable oils for example the benefits are very clear: non organic methods extract the oil through chemical solvents and high heating, spoiling the structure and nutritional quality of the oil. Beyond this point they believe that there must be further benefits from an agriculture that respects the vitality of the soil and plants and a processing system where at every stage the natural quality of ingredients is preferred.