Making the case for farmed fish on the menu

March 15, 2010 -- California-based restaurant chain King's Seafood realizes it's in a long-term battle for the hearts and minds of its customers regarding the use of farm-raised fish and shellfish - and is making use of the everyday items found on its tables to advance its message.

The company publishes its menus twice a day – more than 2.5 million people see them annually – and each menu distinguishes between whether a particular seafood was wild-caught or farm-raised.

Along with that, the menus each feature various farmed items, all part of an effort to educate people about the truth surrounding aquaculture-raised fish, and the important role they play and will play in preserving wild stocks, said Matt Stein, the chain’s chief seafood officer.

'We really believe there is a resistance to these products in the marketplace; it’s not overt most of the time, but there is some pushback on it,' Stein said at the World Aquaculture Society conference last week in San Diego, Calif.

To show people how their perception of farm-raised fish differs from that of other farmed items, the restaurant makes a point of also labeling the carrots, spinach and other vegetables on its side dishes menus are farmed, as well.

'We see this as a tongue-in-cheek way of telling our guests, yeah, this is farmed, too,' said Stein. 'We love it.'

The next thing in the table campaign was to launch a series of placemats. The chain produced a series of three, showing the past, present and future of aquaculture. In the one about the past, Stein said they showed fish farming is not modern, science fiction-type of thing, and generated what he called 'a really good response from that, people were really very interested in what we had to say.

'These placemats were a huge success. Several million people got to see them, and we think that’s a very important thing. Not all read it top to bottom, but we see this as a long-time battle really, and this is part of that saturation process.'

The company, during a discussion a few years ago about the public’s perception of seafood and the role NGOs play in this, came to a conclusion if a negative message is repeated often enough, and the public becomes saturated with an idea, they no longer consider both sides of the argument.

'They simply take for granted this information they’ve heard a thousand times is true,' said Stein. 'We decided the only way we would ever be able to affect change in this would be to have an equally repetitive strategy.

'So we put these out month after month after month in the hope we will have an effect on how people feel about it, about how they feel about farm-raised product.'