As FishWise begins to wrap up our year in preparation for the holidays, we are all looking ahead, planning for the work to come in 2013. But it’s also a great time to look back and reflect on the incredible progress we made during 2012!

Some key achievements we made here at FishWise over the past year include:

• Helping Safeway to maintain their position as number 1 in seafood sustainability on the Greenpeace Retailer Scorecard
• Working with Safeway to develop North America’s first retail owned-brand Responsibly Caught canned tuna, sourced from free-school purse seine skipjack fisheries
• Gaining major retailer support for the protection of key sockeye salmon habitat in Alaska from potentially devastating mining activity
• Signing a new major retail partner, Hy-Vee of Des Moines, Iowa
• Signing a new distributor partner, Sea Delight , based out of Miami, Florida
• Signing a new independent retail partner, Kings Food Markets of Parsippany, New Jersey
• Helping Santa Monica Seafood renew funding for 5 marine conservation and restoration projects as well as fund 5 new projects through their Responsible Sourcing Vendor Partner Program 
• Distributing two white papers summarizing traceability efforts in the seafood industry
• Hiring three new employees to help further our goals: Ashley Greenley, Ethan Lucas and Scott Kennedy 
• To top it off, our Executive Director, Tobias Aguirre is expecting his first child on New Year’s Eve!

It’s been a great year for FishWise and we expect it’ll only get better in 2013.

Happy holidays to all,

The FishWise Team