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Wild Sprats (Sardines) In Spring Water 105g

£2.55
Availability: Translation missing: en.general.icons.icon_check_circle icon 40 in stock, ready to be shipped

Allergen Information Free from: Dairy, Gluten, Wheat

Scottish Brisling Sardines in Spring Water - also known as wild sprats are a smaller species of sardine fished and packed locally on the North Coast of Scotland where they are most common. The fish is very delicate, mid-size between an anchovy and a sardine. Packed in nothing but local Scottish spring water adding only a little salt.


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Fish4Now

Fish4Ever believe in delivering not only the highest quality and most sustainably sourced fish, but also fantastically creative homemade style recipes using the finest organic ingredients.

Fish4Health

Oily fish such as tuna, mackerel, sardines, salmon and anchovies are high in long-chain omega-3 fatty acids and a great source of vitamin D.

Fish4Quality

Thanks to their Unique Quality Charter you can be certain that Fish4Ever products are fished locally, landed fresh, and prepared to the highest quality standards. Working from the whole fish, they add only the finest organic ingredients such as first cold pressed extra virgin oil, local volcanic spring waterand distinctive flavoursome sauces.

Fish4Ever

Fish4Ever was founded on the idea of bringing Organic values to sustainability in fish. Their holistic, all-encompassing approach, is both real and comprehensive, focusing on land, sea and people, supporting not only the best possible fishing practices, but also the communities and small boats that enact them.

From the Land

Fish4Ever is the only canned fish brand in the UK which insists on organic land ingredients. Organic farming standards address the issues of intensive farming and the use of harmful chemicals, that not only damage the land but through river systems can result in the pollution of coastal waters.

From the Sea

Fish4Ever choose small boats first, local fishing and good methods. Sustainable choices allow fishing that doesnt create damage to sea life. All their fish are caught with very selective equipment in precise parts of the sea.

For the People

Fish4Ever support local boats fishing carefully, not far from their port of origin, paying and treating their workers well. They prefer small-scale artisan boats and local packing whenever possible and believe in fair pay and workers rights.

The Details:

1. Fish4Ever will always buy the best.

Canned fish is a global industry with intense price competition. It means there is a huge pressure to find the cheapest possible fish and the cheapest possible production. They will always buy quality first, looking for small producers with a strong history and expertise, based in long established fishing communities. They shop for the story not the price. Fish4Ever visit all our suppliers in person.

By buying on quality before price they do not constantly go to the cheapest possible producer, playing one off against the other, but search for producers who have strong quality and sourcing ethics.

Fish4Ever aim to establish long term supply relationships to help provide stability to their producers. By valuing quality, the message thry send is simple but powerful do things well and dont cut any corners. For example there are many canned sardines which still have scales in them or have not been well gutted. This will be to speed the process up and gain yield but at the cost of quality and care. Sardines and mackerel can be fished at the wrong time when they have just eaten and their stomach is full so it is distended and will tear. Fish4Ever buy from the skippers that know when to fish. They select by size and buy in the season when the fat levels are higher and the fish more succulent.

In tuna it is possible to scrape lesser parts of the fish off the bone and add that back into chunks, it is possible to dye the red parts of the meat and water can be injected into the chunks to expand the weight. All of these savings are routinely used in the highly competitive tuna industry. If your message as a buyer is give me the cheapest price possible, even if you separately have a quality control system, you are incentivising your suppliers to do things as cheaply as possible.

2. Fish4Ever will always use the shortest possible supply chain.

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.

3. Fish4Ever always fish locally and pack locally whenever possible.

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.

4. Fish4Ever always work from the whole fish.

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.

5. Fish4Ever only ever add natural and organic ingredients.

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.