This article was featured in Eurofish Magazine 6 2025.
While seafood represents one of the most widely traded food commodities globally, it remains among the most misunderstood by consumers. The VeriFish project is introducing card games, infographics, posters and calendars to highlight key sustainability indicators, helping players—ahem—consumers understand what makes a fishery more (or less) sustainable.
When we began the VeriFish project in May 2024, together with colleagues from eight institutes across eight different countries, we didn’t know each other yet—but we knew we were facing a very challenging task: to make the complexity behind fish sustainability understandable to stakeholders in the seafood value chain by introducing an approach that was as transparent, verifiable, and widely accepted as possible among all involved actors.
The VeriFish Indicator Framework was therefore conceived as an “impartial” tool, based on data collected by scientists, researchers, and industry experts in Europe and around the world, organized into databases (FAO Global Record of Stocks and Fisheries (GRSF), EuroFIR’s FoodExplorer database, Fishsource, SeafoodWatch, to cite a few), and analysed according to FAIR scientific practices. The VeriFish indicator framework has become our reference matrix bringing together all the variables that should be taken into consideration when discussing a sustainable seafood supply chain.
Within the VeriFish indicator framework (released in April 2025), information about sustainability, provenance, and nutrition is available in one place. We needed to demonstrate that this wealth of data, made available for the first time in its entirety, could be used to explain the complexity of sustainable fishing.
Media products targeting European families, citizens and younger generations
Among the VeriFish project’s targets are families, young people, and, more generally, all of us as consumers. This includes environmental and ethical consumers who are motivated by environmental sustainability and ethical consideration. There are familiarity-driven consumers who stick to familiar fish types due to a lack of knowledge about selecting and preparing different species. There are also health-conscious consumers who look for nutritional benefits of food, and seafood.
To help disseminate this information to all these types of consumers—both adults and children—VeriFish is releasing card games, infographics, posters and calendars and a recipe book that translate complex sustainability, nutrition, and provenance data into accessible and engaging formats. These products aim to promote informed seafood choices, increase visibility of under-communicated fisheries and aquaculture products and foster awareness about the environmental and socio-economic dimensions of seafood.
Scientific based, focusing on specific species
VeriFish media products address sustainability challenges by relying on verifiable information and scientifically accurate data sources, as presented in the VeriFish indicator framework. To make the materials appealing, the media products focus on some specific species, offering real life examples that consumers and consumer associations, parents and educators recognise in their everyday lives.
For this purpose, the most consumed species in the EU-27 countries according to the EU FISH MARKET 2024 -report have been analysed. As VeriFish needs to address several objectives, further considerations were made in order to come up with species variety to reflect these different objectives. Namely:
• Sustainability aspects can be clearly explained with the species (invasive species, cephalopods)
• The species group has a very high nutritional value in relation to the environmental footprint (small pelagics, bivalves)
• The species is consumed in high volumes in the EU and has both sustainable and less sustainable choices (salmon and tunas)
• The species are important in EU aquaculture (trout, seabass, and seabream)
• The species are caught in the EU and can be promoted as alternative for imported products (saithe, hake, whiting, northern prawn)
• The species is less known but is very responsibly farmed (carp, Arctic char).
• The species group is relevant for European fisheries, but some species are less well known (flatfishes)
Considering all the above, in the VeriFish media products consumers will learn about 25 species from 10 categories: bivalves, crustaceans, flatfish, whitefish, small pelagics, freshwater fish, salmon, tunas, cephalopods, and species popular in Mediterranean aquaculture.
Overfished! Explore nutrient values, origin of species, and fishing gear types while having fun
The first media product released by the VeriFish project is “Overfished!”. Hidden behind a funny card game, it is a first step toward understanding the complexity behind sustainable fishing by learning more about environmental and nutritional aspects of species with a “Least Concern” conservation status.
VeriFish species cards provide scientific information about five different species, along with tips and interesting facts. While challenging family and friends, players will play with small pelagics or bivalves, which have very high nutritional value. They’ll encounter some of the species consumed in high volumes in the EU, such as tuna. But they’ll also learn more about other species that are less well known such as flatfishes. Users will learn about five different types of gears and their impact on marine habitats, such as bottom trawling, that significantly disrupt marine habitats, whilst others have smaller ecological footprints. Nutritional tips about mussels, skipjacks, sardines, plaices and northern prawns are also included.
Posters about ecological impact of different gear types
Different fishing gears interact with the environment in different ways—some are selective and cause little disturbance, while others may damage habitats like seafloors, catch non-target species (bycatch), or threaten endangered marine life.
The next media product to come is a poster to improve understanding of the potential environmental impacts associated with capture fisheries, with a focus on gear-specific ecological considerations such as biology, habitat interactions, gear-related effects, and gear loss. The poster illustrates seven common types of fishing gears, along with their potential environmental impacts and targeted fish species: 1) Trawls and dredgers; 2) Hooks and lines; 3) Gillnets and entangling nets; 4) Traps and pots; 5) Lift nets; 6) Seine nets; 7) Surrounding nets. Conceived for schools and associations, the poster combines textual and quantitative information with visuals and catchy sentences focusing on data from the capture fishery of the VeriFish indicator framework, namely, impact of that gear type on marine ecosystems, concept of “bycatch” and examples of amount of discard typical for gear type and landed catch, gear used to fish, considered per seabed type proxy, and the impact of gear loss. The poster will be available from December 2025.
VeriFish children’s recipe book
In 2026 VeriFish will also publish a children’s recipe book to promote healthy, sustainable seafood consumption among children and families. Developed in collaboration with EUROFIR nutritionists and culinary educators, the eBook will feature seafood species chosen for their sustainability and health benefits (e.g., shrimp, sardine, trout). It will combine simple, family-friendly recipes with educational content including sustainability tips, nutritional facts, and cultural food stories, via storytelling elements to engage young readers. Are you ready to order yours?
Sara Pittonet Gaiarin
Trust-IT Services, VeriFish Coordinator
