Creating Pacific Island Tuna, a public-private sustainable fishing partnership
Creating Pacific Island Tuna, a public-private sustainable fishing partnership
Tuna is the world’s most-caught seafood and its supply chain is full of environmental waste and labor abuse. The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a global conservation nonprofit, partnered with Bain to support sustainable tuna fishing in the Pacific.
These teams helped design and stand up the joint venture
Through three cases over several years, many Bain teams helped TNC develop the idea for Pacific Island Tuna. They helped design the entity and stand it up as a joint venture with the Republic of the Marshall Islands. They also helped it partner with Walmart to sell sustainably caught tuna around the world.
These teams helped design and stand up the joint venture
Through three cases over several years, many Bain teams helped TNC develop the idea for Pacific Island Tuna. They helped design the entity and stand it up as a joint venture with the Republic of the Marshall Islands. They also helped it partner with Walmart to sell sustainably caught tuna around the world.
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AI, Insights, & Solutions (AIS)
Data scientists built an automated web scraping tool to gather product and pricing information from retailers across the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. This helped the Bain and TNC teams identify retailers who might want to partner on this program.
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Bain Capability Network (BCN)
The BCN team helped AAG clean the datasets that came from AAG’s web scraping system. They used that data to rank and size potential markets for commercial expansion.
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Executive/Manager Assistant
The EA/MA team helped coordinate a complex slate of meetings within Bain and across all external teams, such as TNC, Pacific Island Tuna, and more, across continents.
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General Consulting
Consultants led the case and worked with TNC leadership, officials from the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Walmart, and others. They followed an Agile business planning and development process that allowed the initiative to rapidly improve its commercial targets, product, and negotiating position.
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Research & Data Services (RDS)
RDS researchers helped the consulting team discover secondary research reports and data so they could size the market, understand industry trends, and benchmark production costs.
Background
Most of this planet’s future crises are interconnected: food supply, climate migration, ecological degradation, marine resources, and unethical labor practices. Bain leadership believes that if they can help a few companies solve these challenges, they can demonstrate that sustainability is good business and inspire others to copy those models. Furthermore, if those programs are set up as public-private partnerships between developing nations and businesses, it can help those nations fund climate resilience projects.
Many of the aforementioned issues—climate, marine resources, and labor—come together in tuna fisheries. Tuna is the most-caught seafood and yet the industry is rife with environmental and social issues: illegal fishing, wasted fish (known as “bycatch”), and illegal working conditions. Beyond that, the practice of transhipping, whereby fish are transferred between boats and never touch land, makes it difficult for local economies to participate.
The plan
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Bain focused their efforts on partnering with The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). There, a disparate and complex supply chain limited fishery managers’ visibility into on-the-water activities and allowed unsustainable tuna fishing to flourish. Fleet operators were incentivized to misreport their catch and some treated workers poorly. However, without adequate monitoring, these dynamics were difficult to prove.
In partnership with RMI, TNC and Bain decided to create a public-private joint venture—a for-profit business—to help the islands catalyze sustainable fishing and capture more value from their tuna resources. That organization could then reinvest profits back into the islands’ climate resilience projects. They named the joint venture Pacific Island Tuna and devised a charter where profits could be distributed back to vulnerable coastal communities in the form of grants.
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How would Pacific Island Tuna be structured?
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What products would it offer?
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Which retailers would they work with?
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How could it optimize its business and expand into new opportunities?
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How should it prioritize these opportunities?
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Which stakeholders would the teams need to engage?
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How could Pacific Island Tuna transform the wider industry?
The approach
To support the design and launch of Pacific Island Tuna, the Bain team divided into two workstreams to handle production and commercial matters. Both groups engaged stakeholders from TNC, RMI, retail partners, existing suppliers and the newly formed entity. Over three cases, they designed the business, including the brand identity and packaging, and helped stand it up.
To understand what tuna products Pacific Island Tuna should offer, and which retail partners to target, Bain’s data science and capability network teams scraped online data to prioritize opportunities. Meanwhile, Bain consultants applied almost every piece of their consulting toolkit, from pricing and supply chain to retail buying and commercial excellence. They met with dockside operators in RMI, developed a model of fishery economics, and helped implement the findings.
To address illegal and unsustainable fishing activities at sea, Pacific Island Tuna used 100% electronic video monitoring in addition to human observers. These monitoring systems allow supply chain participants to ensure that fishers are adhering to best practices for minimizing bycatch and ensuring workforce safety. And, all participating vessels are required to offload their catch on docks in RMI, which provides an extra safeguard and creates local economic multipliers.
And with Bain’s help, Pacific Island Tuna partnered with Walmart to sell sustainably caught tuna under its Great Value house brand. Walmart’s commitment to sustainability and its immense scale made it an ideal partner.
The results
Pacific Island Tuna is now a successful tuna company with industry-leading environmental, labor, and traceability practices. Its net profits flow back into Pacific islands in the form of climate resiliency grants, and it helps RMI to participate in the full tuna value chain.
The project has created a model for countries and supply chain competitors to copy and adapt, which is inspiring action at scale. Walmart recently committed to only selling tuna caught with 100% on-the-water monitoring. “If everybody does exactly what we're doing with Pacific Island Tuna, and it becomes an industry standard, we would be ecstatic,” says Sasha Duchnowski, Bain partner and executive sponsor of this case.
of Pacific Island Tuna profits go to community improvement, marine conservation, and climate change resilience projects
on-the-water monitoring
