What the Soil Association’s withdrawal means for organic salmon labels
The charity is phasing out its own standards and logo for farmed salmon. Producers can still qualify under the baseline organic regulations.
Some packs of farmed salmon carry both the word organic and the Soil Association’s logo. The charity is preparing to withdraw its logo and stop setting its own standards for the fish, following a review of farm conditions and environmental impacts. The organic designation can still be used by producers who qualify under the applicable regulations. For shoppers, the change will show up gradually as processors replace packaging and existing stock sells through.
The decision was reported on 9 November by The Grocer and returned to prominence with a Guardian follow-up on Saturday 14 November. The Soil Association says its certification arm will honour existing business contracts by certifying to the regulations while the next steps are worked out. It is discussing the timing with the industry. Products with a long shelf life, including tinned fish, help explain why a logo can remain on a shelf after a decision to remove it has been made.
What the review found
The Soil Association says its work helped spread practices such as stunning fish before slaughter and net-cleaning methods that avoid chemical antifoulants. Its review also found high mortality on organic farms and insufficient evidence that the standards were delivering good enough results for fish welfare or the environment. The charity pointed to rising sea temperatures as one pressure that can be difficult for individual producers to control.
Feed was another problem the review considered. The association wanted to see greater use of processing trimmings and other marine by-products, in part because it was concerned about dependence on wild fish. It said difficulties tracing those ingredients made it less confident it could improve the standard quickly. Industry body Salmon Scotland told The Guardian that it had been assured farms would continue to be assessed against organic standards and defended the sector’s record on investment and fish health.
Analysis — What a label can tell shoppers
The review draws a distinction between how a farm operates and what happens to the fish. A standard can set requirements for stocking density, feed or treatments, and an inspector can check whether those rules are followed. It takes separate evidence to establish how much difference those measures make to survival or welfare across farms facing different conditions. Those results are what the Soil Association judged insufficient to keep its higher standard in place.
As the packaging changes, the most meaningful question is what evidence remains available to assess those results. Published figures on survival or treatment use would tell readers more if they were comparable across sites and showed change over time. The phase-out will make the difference between the baseline regulations and the charity’s own requirements more visible. How much consumers can learn about conditions on farms will depend on the information that accompanies the remaining labels.