Seafood Champions

The Plitt Company - Seafood Champion 2008

The Plitt Company has been in the seafood business since 1916. Plitt was the first seafood wholesaler in Chicago to achieve Marine Stewardship Council Chain of Custody certification and is committed to helping make MSC products more widely available. Currently, the company is working with the Ocean Conservancy to encourage customer involvement in improving Gulf of Mexico red snapper conservation.

What is or is becoming the most popular seafood item Plitt offers?
Our wild Alaskan seafood, especially our halibut, salmon, and black cod continue to grow in popularity. We invest a lot of effort to maintain the highest level of quality on all the Alaskan seafood that we source, and our direct contacts with fishermen around the state are an integral part of that effort. The fact that we also hold MSC Chain of Custody certification on those items adds to our customers faith that they are buying not only a product with impeccable quality, but one that comes from a sustainable source.

And how did you get interested in the issue of sustainable seafood?
Increasing questions from our customers that dovetailed with an internal recognition that we needed to educate our selves on what was going on in our industry in terms of sustainability. This was back in the year 2001 when we invited Michael Sutton to speak at our annual Open House. He really opened our eyes to what was happening, both positively and negatively, in our industry and I think sparked in all of us a desire to learn more and become actively involved in seeking not only answers, but solutions. We have always prided ourselves on our customer service, and education is a key component of that.

How has this interest in sustainability led you to alter your business practices?
We actively market those items that come with some kind of sustainability certification, like MSC certified wild Alaskan salmon and halibut. We definitely focus a lot of marketing effort and money into getting the word out about these great fish. From there we try and steer people towards “green listed” fish, or at least towards yellow listed – according to the Seafood Watch list, which is also the basis for our local Right Bite program at Shedd Aquarium. Our sales team is educated on how to best use these guides, and to help people make a positive choice. When it comes to red listed fish we have been increasingly more appreciative of how we can keep these fish on our inventory but work to improve the conditions under which they are managed or the methods under which they are caught or farmed. Seafood Choices and other groups have been so helpful in working with us to “not turn our back on red-listed fisheries” as Mark Powell put it in his recent summit presentation. We supported recent quota cuts in the Gulf of Mexico red snapper fishery, and will continue to work to help keep this both an environmentally and economically sustainable fishery.

Have your seafood purveyors worked with you on getting sustainably caught seafood?
Our purveyors are always willing to work with us when it comes to either sourcing product, or answering questions. Using the red snapper situation as an example again, we were able to actually head down to the Gulf and meet with fishermen in Florida who were happy to talk with us about their fishing methods, and the fact that they also want to be part of the solution in the Gulf. They were also instrumental in helping us show our customers that there is a way to actively support red listed species in an effort to help rebuild their populations, or to lend support to improving ways to reduce by-catch, etc. Our purveyors are always happy to provide us with information, whether it is listing of ingredients in feed, geographical information, capture methods, and beyond.

Has working with Seafood Choices Alliance helped in this regard?
Seafood Choices is a great clearinghouse for information and a trusted source for ourselves and our customers. In addition, we have been able to connect with so many helpful resources through the Seafood Choices’ Seafood Summits over the years.

What have you done to inform your customers about what you are doing to support sustainable seafood? How have they responded?
We have held a variety of events to draw attention to the sustainable choices that are available from our inventory. Our annual Open House is always a great educational event and we have done things like invite the MSC, The Shedd Aquarium, and Ocean Conservancy to have booths, do presentations, and meet with our customers during that event. We generally always have at least one speaker with an environmental focus as well at that event. We are continuing to develop our relationship with the Shedd Aquarium and our customers are very responsive to that. Our most recent support of their program has been to offer a “welcome basket” of sustainable products to restaurants that complete their Right Bite training program. We like to keep the focus on all the positive choices that people can make from our inventory, and the welcome basket contains a nice variety of items from the Right Bite card’s green list.

Anything we can do to increase sales of our MSC certified items is always a great bonus to us – we hold a yearly wild Alaskan salmon recipe contest, and work to promote these items at regional food shows, educational events, and more year-in and year-out. Customers appreciate the opportunity to carry items with a trusted “stamp of approval” and they tell us that.

How do you determine what products to offer or what seafood to buy?
Customer requests are always a huge motivator and more and more those requests are for items that they have read about or heard about in the context of sustainability. Our sales reps will also pass along info if they have read or heard something about a new product. Our relationships with groups like Seafood Choices Alliance are also good motivators when it comes to sourcing.

On the most basic level, it goes without saying that we would never purchase products that weren’t procured under legal means. This isn’t to say that if it’s legally caught it’s sustainable, but it at least provides us with a basic level of traceability.

What do you find the most exciting or promising about the current seafood marketplace?
The country has been enjoying farmer’s markets, the “localvore” movement, food miles, CSA’s, etc for a while and its nice to see this start to spill over into our industry – our customers love to meet the fishermen and farmers that are providing us with fish and shellfish! We do a fun tour each year to a local rainbow trout farm that always sells out – its one of our closest local sources of seafood in the Midwest and people are really curious about it. We’d love to keep bringing our customers closer to the source of their food – they closer they feel, the more responsibility they want to take in protecting it.

And what is the most challenging?
Keeping our inventory affordable, varied and interesting while making sure we aren’t contributing to problems in the industry. Keeping great choices available to all our customers, even those with a limited budget – economics are always a huge concern.

What does being a Seafood Champion mean to you?
It’s an incredible honor to be recognized for the work that we have been doing to promote sustainable seafood. But, more importantly, it means that as a company we have to stay motivated to remain a leader to other companies, and to stay focused on making the right choices in sourcing, education, and marketing of truly sustainable products. When people look to us to see what makes a Seafood Champion, we hope they will always see a company that keeps sustainability at the core of every decision that we make.

Posted September 2, 2008

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