Seafood Carbon Emissions Profiling Tool making an impact | Seafish

Seafood Carbon Emissions Profiling Tool making an impact

Seafish welcomes early results as platform ‘transforms’ businesses.



Seafood businesses have been embracing a new tool developed to help them measure and reduce their carbon footprints. 

Earlier this year we launched the Seafood Carbon Emissions Profiling Tool which works by generating carbon footprints for wild capture and aquaculture seafood products to build an understanding of emissions hotspots in supply chains, allowing positive improvements to be made in line with the UK’s 2050 net zero targets. 

The tool is now being used by prominent seafood businesses including Hilton Foods, New England Seafood International (NESI) and Arctic Traders. 

At Hilton Foods, who work with leading international retailers and food-service brands, the tool is being used to understand the carbon footprint of seafood products, such as basa fillets, at retail. 

We are proud to have collaborated with Seafish to develop the Seafood Carbon Emissions Profiling Tool which has transformed how we at Hilton Foods assess and manage our seafood environmental impact.

This tool empowers us, our suppliers, and the wider industry to consistently measure carbon emissions calculations across the sector - a vital step toward achieving net zero.

The tool exemplifies the kind of innovative collaboration needed to make real progress on sustainability by supporting a more efficient approach to reporting and creating more time for the actions that concretely reduce carbon emissions.
Emer Fardy, Group Sustainability & Human Rights Director at Hilton Foods
A worker in a white coat arranges frozen seafood in a market display. Another worker and a customer stand nearby amid bright lighting and blue floors.

Last year, NESI committed to setting long-term science-based targets to achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2050.  

To effectively set a target and have it validated with the Science Based Targets Initiative (a corporate climate action organisation that enables companies and financial institutions to play their part in combating the climate crisis), NESI has been working to understand greenhouse gas emission footprint and hotspots across their sites and supply chains.  

We are using the tool in collaboration with our strategic seafood suppliers to help us understand and manage the carbon footprint of our seafood supply chains.

As part of the Seafood Grimsby and Humber Alliance, NESI has played an important collaborative role in the development of the tool and we intend to embed it into our data collection process to support our decarbonisation journey. 

We have found the tool simple to use.  

The layout of the tool guides the user through the information required in a structured way. We look forward to working with our suppliers on the tool and its outputs as it supports our journey to net zero.
Ruth Hoban, NESI’s Head of Sustainability

Arctic Traders, who specialise in the procurement of fresh and frozen seafood for leading European processors, retailers and the food service sector, is using the tool to understand CO₂ emissions associated with transport options, mainly in choosing between road and sea freight of seabass from Turkey.

A row of smiling workers in PPE fillet mackerel on a production line.

Our Head of Responsible Sourcing, Dr Stuart McLanaghan, highlighted the three companies’ use of the SCEPT when he spoke recently at the international Global Seafood Alliance’s Responsible Seafood Summit in St Andrews this month. 

The case studies indicate how UK seafood businesses are using the tool to understand the carbon footprint of their seafood products and to inform transitional decarbonisation activities.

We’ve created a series of short tutorial videos that cover everything users need to know, from requesting tool access and populating data to interpreting carbon footprint results.

The SCEPT is designed to be intuitive, eliminating the need for an instruction manual. We’re confident that users can easily get started without the usual software learning curve and there is no need for prior technical expertise in LCA or carbon-footprinting.

The tool’s integration across UK seafood supply chains is also essential to generate high-quality industry averaged datasets for benchmarking and public disclosure purposes. However, we are only at the end of the beginning. We will continue to evolve the tool to meet industry’s needs and aspirations, and to integrate data reflecting latest scientific advances.
Dr Stuart McLanaghan

The series of short tutorial videos is available on our YouTube channel: