The UK’s most sustainable fish fingers

Industrial fishing is well recognised as one of the major drivers of the ocean crisis. Shaped by habitat destruction, high levels of by-catch and a large carbon footprint caused by worldwide shipping, industrial fishing is also helping to drive the climate crisis.

Small-scale fishers, on the other hand, generally use low-impact fishing practices, which don’t indiscriminately harm ocean life. They also catch smaller numbers of a wider variety of species, allowing fish stocks to remain healthy and sustainable. For small-scale fishers it is imperative that they look after their small patch of sea. Their livelihoods demand it.

Recognising the sharp contrast between these two parts of the sector, we created Cormacks Seafood back in 2018. Launching with our (more sustainable) version of a can of tuna, we created a range of line-caught mackerel marinated in sauces and oils such as Korean BBQ, miso ginger and puttanesca.

We now have an independent fish shop based in Totnes, where we exclusively sell locally landed species. Here we encourage our customers to eat seasonally, using the species that are landed in abundance close by. This means omitting the top five most consumed seafood species (haddock, cod, tuna, salmon and warm water prawns).

In house we make several seafood products, most notably our handmade fish fingers. Our fingers use fresh fish, line-caught by small-scale, artisan boats from Devon. This makes our product the only packaged fish finger to exclusively use wild, British fish.

Our fish – pollack – is delicious and comes from healthy stocks, and is less commonly consumed than cod and haddock, which are two of the most fished species on the planet.

Our products are processed and packed close to the port in Devon. We omit the use of heavy processing plants and instead we choose to employ local people to hand fillet and process each individual finger. We believe that our frozen seafood products have comparatively the lowest carbon footprint on the marketplace.

They also taste delicious. Our thickly cut fingers are made using 100% of the fillet, whilst our crumb, made with a blend of panko breadcrumbs, dill and spices, has zero preservatives.