I’m a fan of Trader Joe’s. I appreciate their business model. Every time you go, you always feel compelled to buy something. Did you really need that box of organic gluten-free low sodium goat cheese cereal? No. But that’s not the point. It’s different and reasonably priced, so you buy it anyway. However, after recently stumbling upon Greenpeace’s Seafood Sustainability Scorecard for national grocery chains, there were some surprising findings about this usually eco-friendly chain…
This past June Greenpeace published its annual “Carting Away the Oceans” scorecard and by far one of the biggest surprises were the very low scores of Trader Joe’s. The point of the rating was to encourage customers to stop shopping for seafood at the lowest ranked stores, which have made little or no effort to support ocean ecosystems by selling sustainble seafood. The scorecard ranked 20 supermarket companies by assessing their seafood policies and checked to see whether they sold fish off the red list – fish that are over fished and need to be conserved in order to survive, giving top marks to Wegmans, Ahold USA, and Whole Foods.
Trader Joe’s, however, was ranked at the bottom. Even retail chains Target and Wal-Mart beat out Trader Joe’s (and when’s the last time you bought a fish at Wal-Mart?) The Greenpeace report found that Trader Joe’s sells 15 of the 22 red list seafoods and have no connections with top rated sustainable fisheries.
Regardless of whether or not this changes your views on Trader Joe’s, its still something to think about. But next time you’re in the seafood section at Trader Joe’s, you might just want to ask yourself if its really worth it.
Keep It Blue!
