Wholesale & Retail
Wholesalers and retailers play an important role in our seafood supply chains. They channel seafood from the docks where it is landed to the seafood case where consumers choose what they want to take home for dinner. Each business has a unique opportunity to educate their customers about our local seafood and help promote a diversity of local species. Eating with the Ecosystem partners with wholesale and retail businesses on research projects and education and outreach.
If you are a wholesaler or retail market interested in collaborating with Eating with the Ecosystem, here are a few ways you can get involved:
Participate in a research project with us. Our research focuses on a number of different topics from piloting new supply chains for local species, to the availability of local seafood in the New England marketplace, to marketing species that are becoming more abundant as ecosystems change. We are always looking for markets and wholesale businesses who are interested in collaborating.
Suggest a research or project idea. Keep us informed by letting us know what is happening and what’s important to you. Your insight may spark a project idea!
Host an event at your market. Eating with the Ecosystem loves collaborating with markets educate consumers, provide cooking demos, and tell a story about our local marine ecosystems. These are fun opportunities to bring people into your market and engage on a deeper level.
Hire us to educate your staff about local seafood. Eating with the Ecosystem is happy to train fishmongers and staff on the winning qualities of many local seafood species. Schedule a consultation with us to learn how you can diversify your market’s local seafood offerings.
Join our Advisory NETwork. Join our inside circle of mentors by signing up for an ongoing advising role.
If you are interested in getting involved in any of these ways, contact kate@eatingwiththeecosystem.org
Examples of our work
EAT LIKE A FISH CITIZEN SCIENCE RESEARCH PROJECT
This one-of-a-kind research project included weekly shopping expeditions, home cooking experiments, and adventurous dinner table taste tests. Eighty six citizen scientists journeyed to seafood markets, supermarkets, farmers’ markets, and seaside fishing piers, hunting for 52 New England seafood species for 26 weeks (at a rate of four randomly assigned species per person per week), making note of where they found them and where they didn’t. When they found them, they took them home for dinner.
The Eat Like a Fish citizen science project produced first-of-its-kind data to help seafood eaters, sellers, and promoters plot a course for achieving greater symmetry between the wild creatures in New England’s ocean ecosystem and those found in its markets. Diversifying seafood supply chains and balancing harvests with ecological rhythms are necessary steps to reduce disruption of marine food webs and adapt to climate change.
Annual Seafood market Blitz
Using the concept of a Bio Blitz, (an intense period of biological surveying conducted by groups of scientists, naturalists, and volunteers in an attempt to record all living species within a given area over a continuous period of time), we set out to apply this concept to the seafood marketplace to help us gain a greater understanding of the composition of seafood in our New England retail markets. The Seafood Market Blitz utilizes a group of citizen science volunteers to collect data about New England retail seafood markets such as species availability, product form, price, origin, and sustainability labels present. Our goal is to have volunteers visit as many New England retail markets that sell seafood as possible. The data collected through the Seafood Market Blitz will go into a database that can be used to help understand the composition of the New England seafood marketplace and track changes over time.
Seafood For All
Eating with the Ecosystem's Seafood For All project partnered with the Rhode Island Community Food Bank and two seafood distributers - Tony's Seafood and Town Dock - to pilot new supply chains to bring local seafood to low-income neighborhoods and food pantries in the Ocean State, ensuring that all Rhode Islanders have access to healthy, local seafood.