The Quiet Change Costco Made To Its Atlantic Cod

It can be hard to decipher which seafood items at the grocery store actually qualify as sustainable. As a consumer, you might want to buy products from a company that has overfishing precautions in place, but brands and retailers don't always make it easy. Costco, however, has made an effort to offer more sustainable options. This is one reason its seafood selection is so limited. Yet the chain currently sells 2-pound bags of Kirkland brand frozen, wild-caught, Atlantic cod. This is despite the store promising to avoid that kind of fish in 2011 after a Greenpeace campaign and customer pressure. Notably, this policy was only supposed to change if the seafood could be sustainably sourced.

Seeing the product could be off-putting, considering what the warehouse retailer had previously promised. According to the IUCN Red List, Atlantic Cod is a vulnerable species, a category behind endangered. The "wild-caught" label might appeal to customers who want fish straight from the ocean and not a farm, but that's exactly where others could take issue. So what's the catch? If you look closer at the packaging, you'll see that the cod is sourced from Norway.

The number of Atlantic cod off the East coast of the U.S., particularly around Maine and the New England area, has been greatly depleted due to years of overfishing. However, the Barents Sea off the Norwegian coast is home to one of the largest cod reserves in the world. Norway and Russia are the only two countries that fish for cod in that body of water, and the stocks are well-managed. So technically, Costco is sourcing the seafood from a better location.

Interestingly, despite its previous promises and changes, Costco still gets a low sustainability rating from Greenpeace with respect to seafood. Its overall score is 53%. This is particularly due to lack of transparency about the source of its fish and the fact that it sells varieties that are on the IUCN Red List, like Atlantic cod. It's better to obtain them from a region where the stocks are less depleted. But even in those places, there can be challenges to catching cod. For instance, fishing quotas have been lowered in the Barents Sea multiple times over the years due to persisting sustainability concerns.

The Barents Sea still has a healthier Atlantic cod population than the United States. Nevertheless, according to the European Commission, scientists have warned for years that the fishing quota should be dropped considerably to protect the health of the cod stock. So when you're trying to determine the best and worst of frozen seafood options at Costco, should you throw that bag of Atlantic cod into the cart? It's likely better than what the retailer used to sell before the Greenpeace campaign, but you might be able to find ecologically friendlier alternatives at this store or elsewhere. Consider looking for Pacific cod (which has abundant and well-managed stocks off the coast of Alaska) or Atlantic cod from the thriving stocks off the coast of Iceland or Canada.