Local + Sustainable Seafood: The Competitive Advantage
Team: Indranil Chaterjee, Kelly Colleen, Jessica Newsome/Spring 2014
This project involved two primary stakeholders: 1) Grocery retailer, an NCGT project partner who is seeking to source NC seafood; and 2) Seafood suppliers, mid-scale fish houses with relationships with small and mid-scale fishermen located along the central coast of North Carolina. The central coast was chosen because this area has been the worst economically affected due to large scale closure of its fish handling facilities. One team output was the creation of a “seafood portfolio” that contained a set of recommended local wild-caught and aquacultured species for the grocer to carry, and which was based on the following three principals: utilizes the biodiversity of fish species in NC; avoids supply disruptions due to regulatory shifts; addresses growing consumer demand for local. The approach allows the grocery retailer to vary its local seafood offerings by season, based on the assumption that this will build shopper interest in discovering new and novel seafood and aquacultured offerings.