Premier Catch is selective about what we carry. Sustainability isn’t a label we add at the end — it’s part of the buying decision, and it’s the reason some species are on our site and others aren’t.
What we ask before we carry a species
We want to know what specific fishery it comes from, how it’s harvested, how that fishery is managed, what measures are in place to protect the resource and the ecosystem around it, and — the question that usually settles it — why this fishery rather than another one.
A gear name on its own answers none of those. Two fleets using the same kind of net can be run entirely differently, with entirely different consequences for the sea floor and for everything that isn’t the target species. So we don’t work from a list of approved and forbidden gear. We look at the fishery.
How our seafood is harvested
Our Wild Alaska Cod is hook-and-line caught. That’s worth saying plainly, because Alaska Pacific cod is harvested several different ways — hook-and-line, pots and trawl gear, depending on the fishery. When you buy Alaska cod, the gear was a choice somebody made. We choose hook and line.
Our Wild Pacific Halibut is longline caught, with baited hooks spaced along a ground line and hooks chosen to target halibut so that unintended catch can be released. Our Sablefish comes in on both longline and pot gear.
Our Wild Alaska Spot Prawns are caught in small baited pots that sit on the sea floor rather than being dragged across it — little disturbance to the bottom compared with large trawl nets, and far less bycatch, because most of what isn’t a prawn simply doesn’t enter the trap. Our Dungeness Crab, Red King Crab and Snow Crab are pot caught for the same reasons, and undersized crab is sorted on deck and returned to the water.
Our King Salmon is troll caught in Southeast Alaska — baited lines pulled slowly behind the boat, which is inherently low-volume and selective. It’s an actively managed fishery: allocations are set each year and adjusted on the science, and they move significantly from season to season. Our Sockeye is harvested by gillnet and purse seine in the same waters. Our canned Albacore Tuna is troll and pole-and-line caught off Washington and Oregon and hand-packed in Westport, Washington.
Our Alaska Weathervane Scallops are dredge caught, in a specifically managed Alaska fishery with harvest limits set by area, defined fishing seasons, open and closed areas, bycatch limits, observer requirements and restrictions on the gear itself. We say dredge caught rather than talking around it, because the management is the part that matters.
None of our finfish are trawl caught. Our salmon, halibut, sablefish, cod and albacore all come in on hook, line, pot or troll gear.
Oregon Pink Shrimp — why we look at the fishery, not the gear
Our Wild Oregon Pink Shrimp is trawl caught, and it’s the clearest example we have of why the name of the gear is the wrong place to stop reading.
The Oregon pink shrimp fishery has been certified by the Marine Stewardship Council since 2007 — the first shrimp fishery anywhere in the world to earn that certification. It’s fished by small trawl boats. Bycatch reduction devices are required, and so are LED fishing lights, which together cut bycatch of non-target species substantially without reducing the shrimp catch. The fishery also runs on limited entry, season and size controls, harvest control rules, logbooks, observer coverage and electronic reporting.
We carry that shrimp because of how that fishery is run, not in spite of what its gear is called.
Where we draw the line
None of which is an argument that trawling is broadly fine. A small shrimp fleet running required bycatch reduction devices and LED lights under an MSC certificate has very little in common with an industrial fishery towing large nets at volume. Large trawl nets can produce substantial bycatch, and dragged near the bottom they can damage habitat that takes a long time to recover. Bottom trawling remains one of the principal habitat concerns in global fisheries, and high-volume trawl fisheries are not where we source.
Which brings it back to how we buy. A fishery has to be judged as a fishery — its stock, its management, its gear, its bycatch record, and whether any of it is actually enforced. That’s the work, and it’s why our list of species looks the way it does.
Wild Gulf Shrimp — choosing a supplier as well as a fishery
Our Wild Gulf Shrimp is wild caught in U.S. Gulf waters, and it’s trawl caught. It’s also our one product from outside Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.
Because we can’t evaluate that fishery the way we can an Alaska or an Oregon one, we made the decision at the supplier level. We chose Paul Piazza & Son, a New Orleans shrimp house of more than 125 years, specifically for their documented sustainability and traceability practices: a sustainability covenant with their supplying fishermen covering the permits required by state and federal authorities, work with state and federal agencies and with NGOs including the World Wildlife Fund, membership of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership’s Gulf of Mexico Shrimp Supply Chain Roundtable, founding-member and primary-stakeholder status in Fishery Improvement Projects in Texas and Louisiana coordinated by the Audubon Nature Institute’s Gulf United for Lasting Fisheries, and SQF-certified processing facilities.
Those are their programmes, at company level, and we describe them as exactly that. We chose them because that record is the best assurance available to us in that fishery.
Our sourcing standards
Everything we sell is wild-caught. We don’t sell farmed seafood. We buy from independent fishermen and fishing families, many of them for decades. And for every species, we look at how the fishery is managed, how the seafood is harvested, and what measures are in place to protect the resource and the surrounding ecosystem.
We source primarily from Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, choosing each species and fishery intentionally based on how it is harvested and managed.
Shop our wild seafood and see the difference intentional sourcing makes.