This article was featured in Eurofish Magazine 3 2026.
Every plate of seafood carries a story. Behind that piece of grilled sea bream or those frozen fillets lies a chain of fishers, farmers, traders, scientists, and retailers stretching across oceans and supply chains. However, that story rarely reaches the dinner table. VeriFish was created to change that.
Funded under Horizon Europe’s Mission Ocean and Waters, VeriFish set out to build a sustainability framework that helps citizens, producers, retailers, and policymakers make better-informed seafood choices, based on verifiable information. The project offers a framework, a toolbox, and a communication bridge, that brings verifiable information to the people who need it. It sits alongside existing labels and certifications without competing with them, thus informing users without confusing them.
A framework that respects complexity
Seafood is complicated. A single species can be nutritionally valuable, ecologically sensitive, and central to coastal livelihoods, all at once. How it performs on any of those dimensions depends heavily on where and how it was caught or farmed. Reducing all that to a simple red-or-green ranking would be convenient but misleading. The VeriFish indicator framework brings together three pillars: environmental performance, socio-economic aspects, and nutrition and health. The final framework integrates 84 indicators across those pillars, linked to transparent, reusable data sources. Where reference points exist, it uses what the project calls a “distance-to-target” approach, measuring performance against relevant benchmarks rather than ranking products against each other.
Citizens, whether standing at a fish counter, picking up a food package, or ordering lunch, increasingly want their food choices to make sense for health, the environment, and the communities that depend on fishing and aquaculture.
The project’s web1 and mobile application2 turns fishery, aquaculture, nutrition, and sustainability data into an interface that does not require an advanced degree to navigate. Species factsheets, multilingual search, nutritional data, provenance information, and sustainability indicators are shaped by expert feedback and based on sources like STECF3 data. For a consumer, it means exploring seafood beyond the label. For a producer, it offers a way to communicate product characteristics. Fishers, aquaculture companies, and retailers can tell their sustainability story as VeriFish gives them the structure to do it. The app was built with different users in mind—shoppers, retailers, and producers—and offers concise summaries and detailed factsheets so information can be explored depending on the user’s requirements.
Making seafood literacy attractive
The project produced a series of media products for people to engage with. Overfished!4 turned fisheries science into a card game for families and classrooms. The Let’s Cook Seafood!5 cookbook brought seasonal and nutritional thinking into the kitchen. A 136-species poster and puzzle6, a seafood calendar7, a fishing methods poster8, and a video series9 rounded out a communication portfolio that reached children, families, educators, chefs, and professionals. These products endeavoured to inject fun into seafood literacy to make it appeal to different age groups and educational backgrounds.
From early on, VeriFish tested its outputs with the people who would need them, producers, researchers, educators, and public institutions. This outreach generated requests from industry bodies, schools, and public authorities to use both the web application and the media products. The project also took its message on the road. Over two years, VeriFish travelled from the Faroe Islands to New Orleans, and from Brussels policy forums to Seafood Expo Global, contributing to the UN Ocean Conference and bringing its framework to FAO-GLOBEFISH seminars and aquaculture events across Europe. This resulted in one of the project’s most durable contributions: a voluntary European standard through the CEN network (VeriFish CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA))10, offering good practice guidance on communicating seafood sustainability to different audiences.
A good story, better told
Seafood has a genuinely good story to tell about nutrition, culture, coastal communities, and the extraordinary diversity of species that feed hundreds of millions of people. Its impact has however been diluted by vague claims, competing labels, and poor communication. By working with producers, researchers and public institutions, VeriFish created source of knowledge about how seafood is caught, farmed, and handled. The tools to communicate this knowledge are a direct bridge to consumers. With the help of the indicators defined by the project they learn that seafood sustainability begins at sea or at the farm and encompasses the entire value chain. The project outputs are designed to contribute to greater awareness about sustainability in the seafood sector and to promote consumption choices that benefit both the individual and the environment. An eminently worthy goal and one that VeriFish has achieved in spades.
One of the media products created by the VeriFish project was a
cookbook aimed at bolstering children’s interest in seafood.
VeriFish consortium: Coordinator: Trust IT Services SRL (Italy), Partners: Eurofish International Organisation (Denmark), COMMpla SRL (Italy), FORTH – Foundation for Research and Technology (Greece), NOFIMA – Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture research (Norway), EuroFIR – European Food Information Resource (Belgium), PMT PL – Premotec (Poland), Clupea (The Netherlands) and Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management (United Kingdom).
Ixai Salvo, Eurofish, ixai@eurofish.dk
1 https://verifish.info/
2 https://verifish.info/verifish-web-app/
3 https://stecf.ec.europa.eu/index_en
4 https://verifish.info/overfished-the-card-game-by-verifish/
5 https://verifish.info/verifish-cookbook/
6 https://verifish.info/discover-the-diversity-of-the-ocean-poster/
7 https://verifish.info/verifish-calendar-seafood-inspiration-all-year-round/
8 https://verifish.info/verifish-fishing-methods-at-a-glance-poster/
9 https://verifish.info/interactive-seafood-insights/#Videos
10 https://verifish.info/verifish-cen-workshop-agreement-cwa/
