Marine Stewardship Council on sustainable fisheries
This is how we're making sure our oceans are filled with fish for generations to come
The Marine Stewardship Council is kind of a big deal in the world of fish. They are the organization that sets the standards for sustainable fisheries worldwide. If a fishery meets MSC’s standards, their products are awarded with a blue ecolabel. Many global organizations like IKEA and McDonald’s exclusively purchase MSC certified fish. For them, its a standard that denotes quality and sustainability. This also means that who and what gets certified matters a lot in the global market. In this episode, I sit down with Linnéa Engström, the Director of the Baltic Sea Region & Scandinavia at Marine Stewardship Council. We discuss how the organization is working to stop overfishing and ensure that our oceans are filled with fish for generations to come.
A big thank you to Djuce wines for sponsoring this episode. The next time you decide to buy seafood for dinner, consider pairing it with a sustainable wine from Djuce. They collaborate with the best sustainable winemakers throughout Europe to serve top wines in beautifully designed cans. They’re also hiring. Djuce is looking for a Head of Operations and a Head of Sales. Both roles have the potential for Co-Founder status. If this could be you, check out the openings here.
News
This month I’ve been working with 11 Nordics companies as part of the Nordic-US Food Summit preparing them to pitch the US market including VCs, potential customers, and partners. If you’re fundraising, thinking about entering a new market, or just experiencing pitch fatigue having edited your deck 100,000 times then I would love to work with you. I run a 1:1 coaching program helping founders simplify their decks, draw out the emotion of their pitch (people remember how you make them feel!), and hone what makes your company amazing. If you’re interested, send me an email back for more details and pricing.
Related Links
🌊 More episodes on the future of the ocean
🏡 The global rise of community ocean gardens
🐠 How Iceland is creating a circular economy for fish
🎣 Why Bergen, Hawaii, and Singapore are hubs for ocean startups
Episode Transcript
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 2:34
Hi, Linnéa, welcome to the Nordic FoodTech Podcast. We're sitting here at your offices in Stockholm. And we're going to talk a lot about the Marine Stewardship Council today and sustainable fisheries. But I want to go back in time to the beginning of your career because you actually started in politics before you ended up here in this world. So can you just take us to the beginning of how you kind of found your way into fisheries and through politics?
Linnéa Engström, Marine Stewardship Council 2:57
Yeah, thanks. Pleasure to be here, Analisa. I will. Yes, I started off as a member of the Green Party here in Sweden. I worked for several years there with gender equality, so supporting our women politicians in particular. And then when the election in 2014 came, I gained a really good seat at that party's list. So be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. I got into the European Parliament. It was an amazing journey.
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 3:32
Did you just get a phone call and from one day to the next year in the parliament?
Linnéa Engström, Marine Stewardship Council 3:36
Yes, definitely. I was sitting at the hairdresser's, I was doing my hair and my party colleague called me. Because everything–when you form a government, which the Green Party did at that time, for the first time ever in history, everything has to be very secretive. So you don't know who's going to be Minister before that's announced publicly. And yeah, I just got the call when I was at my hairdresser, “Are you willing to step in now? Because our first name will be a minister for foreign aid.”
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 4:06
And part of this was that you were one of the first vice chairs of the fishery committee, from what I understand. So how did it go from you getting that call at the hairdresser to then ending up in the position of working with Fisheries?