Look at MSC, ASC and Ocean Wise seafood certifications and you will probably conclude they are the wild one, the farmed one and the Canadian one. That is the picture most people have. It is tidy, it is what almost every guide says, and it is wrong in two ways that matter.
One of the three is not a certification at all. And the two that are do not cover the same ground. A farmed product carrying one label has been checked against things a wild product carrying the other has not.
Here is what each one actually does, what each deliberately leaves out, and how to check any claim yourself in about two minutes.
MSC certifies a fishery, and only for environmental impact
The Marine Stewardship Council assesses wild capture fisheries. Its blue label is the one you are most likely to see on frozen fish in Canada.
The three principles
A fishery is assessed against three principles: fishing at a level that keeps the population healthy into the future, protection of the wider marine environment and other species, and effective management. Where a stock is already depleted, there must be clear evidence of a rebuilding plan that is working. There are precautionary rules for forage species at the base of the food web. Take too many of those and everything above them starves.
Some things are simply excluded. Fisheries targeting marine mammals, birds, amphibians or reptiles cannot be certified. Neither can operations using explosives or poison.
How the scoring works
Underneath the three principles sit 28 performance indicators, each scored out of 100. The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation summarises the arithmetic. 80 and above is certification, 60 to 79 is conditional with improvements required, and 59 or below is a fail. Some indicators carry more weight than others, so one bad score in the wrong place can sink an otherwise strong fishery.
Assessments take up to eighteen months. They are carried out by independent bodies that visit the fishery, consult stakeholders and have their conclusions peer reviewed. The current Fisheries Standard is version 3.1, published in 2024.
What MSC says it does not cover
And here is what MSC itself says the label does not cover. It does not certify social or economic conditions. It does not cover packaging or the carbon footprint of the finished product. It is an environmental assessment of fishing, deliberately and explicitly. That is a great deal. It is not everything.
One more piece, because it explains a great many confusing situations: the blue label can only appear on a product if every company that handled it holds a Chain of Custody certificate. Fishery certification alone is not enough. What that means for how you read a label is covered in our piece on the Ocean Wise floor.
ASC certifies a farm, and covers more ground than MSC does
This is the part most guides get wrong by omission.
The Aquaculture Stewardship Council certifies farmed seafood. Its Farm Standard was consolidated from twelve separate species standards into one. It is built on four principles covering the fish, the farm, the people and the planet: animal welfare, farm management, human rights and environmental stewardship.
Read that list again and compare it with MSC’s. MSC states that it does not certify social or economic conditions. ASC has an entire principle devoted to human rights. Its criteria cover forced labour, child labour, discrimination and harassment, and rights awareness among workers.
So the two are not the wild and farmed versions of one standard. ASC’s scope is wider. That is not a criticism of MSC, which is transparent about its boundaries and was built to do one job well. But “certified” means something different depending on which logo you are looking at.
ASC also reaches into the supply chain in ways people do not expect. Since the end of October 2025, certified farms must use feed from mills complying with the ASC Feed Standard. The audit follows the food the fish eat. And ASC uses MSC’s Chain of Custody Standard, plus a module of its own. That is why a company handling both can run a combined audit.
Ocean Wise recommends, and does not certify
Ocean Wise is Canadian, it is widely trusted here, and it is not a certification. It is a recommendation programme, and the difference is real rather than pedantic.
Its assessments rate three things in combination: the species targeted, the harvest method used, and the geographic region. Ten criteria feed the scoring, and third-party certification audits are among the evidence considered.
So an Ocean Wise recommendation describes a category. This species, caught this way, in this place is a reasonable thing to buy. It is not an audit of one named operation, and it does not travel with the fish.
Ocean Wise also runs a Rapid Assessment Standard, built specifically to lower the barrier to entry for small and Indigenous fisheries. That is a useful signal about what the programme thinks the conventional route was doing to operators who could not afford it.
The three, side by side
| MSC | ASC | Ocean Wise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Certification | Certification | Recommendation programme |
| What it assesses | A named wild fishery | A named farm | A species, method and region combination |
| Environmental scope | Stocks, ecosystem, management | Environment, plus animal welfare | Ten criteria |
| Human rights and labour | Not covered | Covered, its own principle | Not the focus |
| Carbon and packaging | Not covered | Not the focus | Not covered |
| Travels with the product | Yes, via chain of custody | Yes, via chain of custody | No |
| Where you see it | Packaged seafood, counters | Farmed seafood | Menus, counters, shops |
The row that surprises people is human rights, and the row that matters most in practice is whether the label travels with the product.
How to check any of this yourself
This is the part no guide includes, and it takes about two minutes.
MSC publishes a searchable database of every certified fishery. You can search by species, gear type, ocean area, certifier and status, and see whether a certificate is valid, suspended or withdrawn. If a seller says their haddock comes from a certified fishery, that fishery is in there or it is not.
ASC publishes equivalents: find a farm, find a supplier, find a product, find a feed mill. Same idea, same two minutes.
Ocean Wise publishes its recommendations by species and region. Check the combination before you buy, rather than hoping the symbol on the shelf is current.
Certificates expire, get suspended and get withdrawn. A logo printed on packaging is a claim about the moment the packaging was printed. The databases are live and the packaging is not, which is the single most useful thing in this article.
The other labels you will see
Less common in Atlantic Canada, worth recognising.
- Best Aquaculture Practices, a farmed seafood standard covering environmental and social responsibility, common in global supply chains
- Friend of the Sea, an international certification covering both wild and farmed
- SeaChoice, a Canadian programme that assesses seafood sustainability and pushes retailers on sourcing policy
- Seafood Watch, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s rating programme, behind the green, yellow and red guides sometimes used in Canada
Seafood Watch and Ocean Wise are both recommendation programmes rather than certifications, so the same distinction applies to them.
What this means in Atlantic Canada
Several Atlantic Canadian fisheries hold MSC certification, and it is more common here than most people assume. Rather than list them from memory, use the MSC database. It is current in a way any list we print will not be.
ASC certification is less visible in this region than MSC, though the aquaculture sector is moving in that direction.
What we can say about our own shelves. Our Sustainable Blue salmon is Ocean Wise recommended. It is raised in a closed land-based system that recycles its water and cannot allow escapes into the wild, so the recommendation and the underlying story point the same way. For the rest, where our haddock comes from sets out two fisheries and a deliberate choice. Why we only carry one kind of salmon explains a refusal rather than a range.
We are not going to imply more than we can show. If you want to know the specific source behind a specific product, ask us. Where we know, we will tell you. Where we do not, we will say so instead. That is the subject of the Ocean Wise floor.
MSC, ASC and Ocean Wise seafood certifications, in short
MSC, ASC and Ocean Wise seafood certifications are two certifications and one recommendation programme, doing three different jobs. MSC audits a named wild fishery on environmental grounds and says openly that labour is outside its scope. ASC audits a named farm and puts human rights in its own principle. Ocean Wise rates a species, a method and a region, and does not travel with the fish.
All three are worth having. None is the whole answer. Look for the label, then check the database, then ask the seller. The market is stocked on that basis.
