Estimating the scope, scale, and contribution of direct seafood marketing to the United States seafood sector

Different seafood supply chain pathways contribute to or conversely detract from the resilience and adaptive capacity of the fishing sector. Direct seafood marketing strategies shorten the link between seafood harvesters and consumers. These strategies appear to be relatively resistant to systemic food system disruptions, making them a potentially important segment of a resilient food system providing benefits to consumers and harvesters. However, little is known about the scale and diversity of the direct seafood marketing sector in the United States. This paper outlines the advantages of collecting data on direct seafood marketing in the US. Additionally, we describe our methodology for creating a sampling frame of direct seafood marketers. We provide initial results from the first national assessment of direct seafood marketing practices, including results from a questionnaire distributed to 39,511 commercial seafood harvesters engaging in wild capture fisheries. Direct seafood marketing was a common strategy among respondents, and the most popular strategy involved selling to a source-identified distributor, i.e. intermediaries who identify the harvester at the point of sale. When combined with data on direct seafood marketing permits, it is estimated that 12% of US seafood harvesters engage in direct seafood sales. These findings suggest that direct marketing is a ubiquitous practice in the commercial fishing sector in the US. Understanding scale and diversity of direct seafood marketing in the US can provide information needed for targeted investments in policies, funding, and technical assistance programs that build diverse, resilient seafood supply chains, and benefit the fishing sector and food security of the nation.