The landscape of aquaculture certification schemes, their varying welfare standards, and how consumers can identify genuinely welfare-positive fish products.
Aquaculture certification is an imperfect but improving tool for guiding consumer choices toward better welfare outcomes. The key challenge is that many certifications prioritize environmental and food safety standards over animal welfare, meaning a certified product may be environmentally sustainable but still produced with significant welfare compromise. Consumers who want to use purchasing decisions to improve fish welfare need to research which certifications actually include animal welfare in their standards, which use outcome-based welfare assessment, and which employ third-party auditing of welfare-specific provisions. This is complex information that most consumers cannot easily access, highlighting the need for clearer welfare-specific labeling.