Fresh fish to your door

Freshcatch is delivering on taste and sustainability.

We live in a country surrounded by ocean but when it comes to eating fish, most of us are scared of cooking it, don’t know how to fillet it and if we do, throw away the best parts.

Chef Al Brown and business partner Graham Ritchie aim to change that way of thinking through fresh fish home delivery service Freshcatch. And their thinking is starting to catch on!

Freshcatch is not only about offering New Zealanders fresh quality seafood, but also expanding their fish eating experience and providing easy-to-follow tutorials by Brown on topics like how to fillet a fish and knowing if fish is fresh.

Sustainability is also at the heart of Freshcatch, though Brown and Ritchie say it begins with “sensibility”. “If we can get people to eat the whole fish, not just the fillets, and buy other fish that are currently undervalued but equally delicious and let us show you how to eat them, we hope we can make a difference,” says Ritchie.

For the most part it’s not our fault that we don’t know how to cook and eat fish, explains Ritchie. “Because the whole industry in New Zealand has been so wholesale and export focused, it hasn’t really taken the time to develop local,” he says. “Also, up until the 1970s you could only buy whole fish in New Zealand and the fishing industry made a decision to try and get people to eat more fish by starting to sell white, boneless fillets.

“A generation has lost the fundamentals and doesn’t know how simple it is to fry a fish in a pan, let alone what to do with the wings and collars.”

Brown agrees that we’ve become a nation scared of bones because we are now so used to buying pearly white fillets. “It’s like if we

find a bone we need to call the media but most countries around the world eat the whole fish. Eating fish on the bone also slows down the eating. There’s more time around the table, more conversation and it’s a more relaxed way to live,” he says. “Most of the time fish doesn’t need much. The one sauce I use for nearly every single piece of seafood that I cook is just a lemon and little lick of butter. It’s healthy and easy to cook.”

Al’s Picks is proving to be a popular order through Freshcatch, where people get what Brown picks for that day. It’s an adventure for people who like fish.

“There’s all these other fish out there that are wonderful to eat so I see it as an opportunity to hold people’s hands or talk them through all these other fish that are equally delicious to eat and if we can start to eat some of those we take the pressure off the stocks of the premium fish like snapper and blue cod,” says Brown.

It’s also a conversation that Brown believes needs to be continually had. “As a country we’ve had it good for a really long time but if we don’t look after it we will lose it… I want people to understand that there are choices out there and to do your little bit for the environment. For me Freshcatch is an opportunity to try and bridge that gap.”

He also has a foot in both camps as a mad-keen recreational fisherman who also deals with the commercial industry because he has restaurants. “If people want to eat fish most of them are commercially caught but there are now some really good stories out there in the commercial fisheries that you don’t get to hear,” he says.

Freshcatch sources its fish from independent partner boats and reputable fisheries across New Zealand, selecting species from the most sustainable aquaculture practices such as Tiaki, a method that replaces traditional trawl nets with Precision Seafood Harvesting (PSH) technology, which is a more sustainable way of fishing. Fish are landed alive and in much better condition, and undersized and unintended catch returned to the sea.

“A big part of what we are trying to say to the bigger suppliers is that we believe that people will pay a premium for freshness and knowing where it comes from and how it’s caught,” says Ritchie. “If we can all start from this position that this kai moana is so precious and let’s do everything we can to look after it – from how you catch it, store it, fillet it and cook it. Each of those steps we can improve the supply chain and everybody benefits.”

“Most of the time fish doesn’t need much. It’s healthy and easy to cook.”