This year is was lucky enough to sponsor me to participate in the National Fisheries Institute’s (NFI) Future Leader Program. Newport International is proud to have an extensive lineage in the program and I have heard great things from my coworkers over the years. For those wondering, “What is NFI?”, here is quote from their website (www.aboutseafood.com);
“The National Fisheries Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to education about seafood safety, sustainability, and nutrition. From vessels at sea to your favorite seafood restaurant, our diverse member companies bring delicious fish and shellfish to American families. NFI promotes the US Dietary Guidelines that suggest Americans include fish and shellfish in their diets twice per week for longer, healthier lives.
NFI and its members are committed to sustainable management of our oceans and being stewards of our environment by endorsing the United Nations Principles for Responsible Fisheries. Our investment in our oceans today will provide our children and future generations the health benefits of a plentiful supply of fish and seafood tomorrow.
From responsible aquaculture, to a marketplace supporting free trade, to ensuring the media and consumers have the facts about the health benefits of fish and shellfish, NFI and its members support and promote sound public policy based on ground truth science”.
My class consisted of about 40 people from all aspects of the seafood business including producers, importers, end users, distributors transportation and cold storage. Within each of these industries, there were representatives from nearly every department including sales, marketing, purchasing, management and logistics. The program involved travel to four “seafood driven” destinations across the US with insights into almost all facets of our business.
I will follow up with a detailed overview of the cities visited (Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Portland, OR and Portland, ME) and the activities we participated in, from a trip on a lobster boat to Ocean survival training. Lots of very interesting and educational stuff!
We divided into two groups for our “class project(s)”, supporting SeaShare (www.seashare.org) “a non-profit founded in 1994 to help the seafood industry donate to hunger-relief efforts in the United States” or developing the following within our industry for NFI’s culinary education website “Dish On Fish” (dishonfish.com). I of course chose “Dish On Fish” as it is very much inline with my daily activities as Corporate Chef for Newport International. If you follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn you have seen a plethora of post over the past months sharing the wonderful seafood recipes from the talented chefs and dieticians on the websites roster. There were even a few that were about crab! these were shared not only on our personal pages, but also on our corporate pages for both Jack’s Catch and Pacific Cove brands.
As we continue to grow the use of crab with our mantra of “it’s not just for crab cakes” we also hope to be growing the overall consumption of seafood. If you haven’t already, I recommend spending some time on both sites, there is allot of really great and exciting information supported by a vast industry that covers the globe with its reach.
