Global hoki heroes take The Post shopping for fish in a New Zealand supermarket
Wednesday, 1 April 2026
Reporter Rob Stock takes a walk through the supermarket aisles with experts from the Marine Stewardship Council, which owns the blue tick sustainable fisheries certification trademark.
New Zealanders use a mental short cut to choosing fish for the table that do not come from fisheries being fished to death: Buy New Zealand-caught fish.
As a strategy, it has something to recommend it.
Ministry for Primary Industries says most of our fish stocks of known status are in good shape, with 130 of the 149 stocks being measured as above the “soft limit” under which their biomass is deemed to be overfished or depleted, and needs to be actively rebuilt.
And fish from those 130 stocks make up 97% of catch by weight.
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That makes walking the aisles of a Woolworths supermarket with Rupert Howes, the head of the global Marine Stewardship Council, a relatively positive experience.
Even where MSC’s blue tick label is not on fish products, a good proportion is locally caught.
Howes is in New Zealand to take part in celebrations in the fishing industry around a hoki milestone.
It’s been 25 years since the $230 million-a-year hoki fishery was certified as sustainable by MSC, making it the longest certification held over any white-fleshed fish anywhere in the world.
MSC is a private, not-for-profit certification scheme set up by the World Wildlife Fund in the late 1990s in a bid to create a market mechanism to help promote sustainability in ocean fishing.
It came shortly after the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery off Newfoundland in Canada, which saw about 30,000 people lose their livelihoods.
The idea of MSC was to create a system that participating commercial interests could communicate to shoppers, giving them confidence they could buy their fish without fearing they were stripping the oceans bare.
Overfishing remains a massive problem, but just over a fifth of the world’s roughly 100 million tonnes of wild catch is now covered by MSC certification, 100% of New Zealand hoki, and 59% of the global tuna catch.
The investors from which many major fishing companies seek capital are often requiring companies have sustainability credentials before they will invest, Howes says.
And Howes hopes to see a major milestone for fisheries in the coming weeks. That the Atlantic cod fishery is bouncing back.
“It's now got the biggest spawning stock biomass of any cod fishery in the world,” says Howes. “I'm hoping maybe even there's a big seafood show in Barcelona in about four weeks that they're going to announce going into full assessment, and I can retire then because it's like a proof of concept. You can fish a fishery down to almost the point of destruction, but with management, it bounces back. Nature's resilient.”
Certification labelling on fish is not as common in New Zealand supermarkets as it is in some European markets.
“I think that all of the Dutch retailers have like a 99% commitment,” says Howes. “Germany is our biggest market. It's funny because Germans don't spend much on food.”
Germans want the cheapest fish, but they want it to come with verified sustainability badging.
Product labelling can be a little confusing.
Labels are packed with information and, confronted with multiple labels per shop, people are unlikely to reach for the magnifying glass to read them all, or seek to understand what each label signifies.
And, confusingly, not all fish products derived from fish caught in MSC certified fisheries can carry them.
There are hoki products in Woolworths that do not bear the blue tick. Instead the packaging bears the phrase “sourced responsibly”, perhaps because some of the processing was done in a non-certified factory.
Would MSC’s experts buy fish that did not have an MSC label?
Yes, says Matt Watson, senior fisheries programme manager at MSC for Asia Pacific, who has accompanied Howes to New Zealand. But he qualifies his answer.
“I've got a degree in marine biology and a master's in sustainability, so I'm well informed as a consumer.”
A key thing to remember about private certification systems is they are user pays and voluntary.
A fishery could be sustainable, but the operators in it simply choose not to pay MSC for certification.
Howes chips in that he had a meal of snapper in Australia while breaking his journey to New Zealand. Snapper is not certified by MSC.
New Zealanders’ preference for New Zealand-caught fish is their expression of a worldwide trend towards people wanting to know about where their food comes from.
“Consumers are very powerful, they should definitely be empowered to ask questions of their supermarkets,” Howes says.
But no ordinary consumer can ask all the right questions.
“The reality is seafood is so complex. It's the most globally traded commodity, so it's moving around the world,” Howes says.
“The prawns that you buy will be from Indonesia, Ecuador, or India. The hoki that is eaten in the UK is coming from New Zealand.”
It’s important to remember what the labels are not.
Importantly, the blue tick is about sustainable catches, not human rights of workers on trawlers.
“We were founded in 1997 to contribute to ending overfishing. All of our expertise and governance is focused on ecological sustainability,” Howes says. “We can't do everything. We're not Interpol. We're not the world's policemen.”