AUSTRIA, FRIDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2013: Pacifical, a partnership between the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) which manages the world’s largest sustainable tuna purse seine fishery and Sustunable, a EU based sustainable marketing enterprise, will put PNA tuna on the shelves of SPAR supermarkets, under their home brand in Austria today.

The Pacifical tuna is skipjack tuna caught from wild schools (rather than using Fish Aggregating Devices or FADs) and carries the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) ecolabel.

“We are thrilled to be delivering  PNA MSC-certified skipjack tuna to SPAR and into the European market,” said Maurice Brownjohn, PNA Commercial Manager.  “It means a lot to our developing nations to finally achieve  delivery  of  MSC canned skipjack into the  market and  see the benefits of sustainability.”

The PNA was independently certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) for its sustainable free school skipjack tuna fishery in December 2011. The sophisticated MSC chain of custody was certified May 2013, this  means customers  can have absolute and unprecedented confidence  in the traceability of their tuna from the net to the plate.  

“The MSC eco-label is the main label  globally that demonstrates to consumers the product is caught sustainably, as the MSC process assesses the fishery, management and also considers the protections for other species in the ecosystem. It has taken a lot of hard work by the eight Pacific nations of the PNA and the PNA office in Majuro to get to where we are today, managing the world’s largest sustainably certified tuna purse seine fishery. So we are proud of this latest achievement and to mark the introduction of Pacifical products into the European markets,” said Mr Brownjohn. 

With the introduction of the Pacifical tuna into Austria, PNA and Pacifical are now looking to  expand production to  other retailers to follow suit and offer sustainable Pacific tuna to  the global markets. 

 Information for  consumers about the product and its unique tracking of tuna from net to plate can be found here: 

http://www.spar.at/de_AT/index/sparmarken/SPARQualitaetsmarken/spar_thunfisch.html

go to Zum thunfisch – tracking  and add demo can code FSSFD 3093