Sustainable Seafood Certification and Accreditation
Sustainable products and their origins are audited on-site by accredited independent certification bodies against Friend of the Sea seafood standards.
Friend of the Sea’s Technical and Scientific Department supports Conformity Assessment Bodies (CABs) with training, technical help and interpretation of our seafood standards. In this section, you will find the Friend of the Sea programme documents and links to CAB resources.
International Accreditation
Friend of the Sea is the only seafood certification programme for both fishery and aquaculture products to have gained accreditation from a member of the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and of the network of EU national accreditation body, Accredia.
Become a Friend of the Sea Certifier
If you are a certification body and want to get accredited to conduct Friend of the Sea assessments, please, contact: quality@friendofthesea.org To ensure the complete independence from the certification process, Friend of the Sea assessment is carried out by only accredited CABs. To obtain accreditation, a CAB must meet the requirements set out in the Certification Procedure.
This guarantees certification remains robust, credible and follows the best practice guidelines for standard-setting organisations as set out by the FAO.
Training
Friend of the Sea’s training modules support and teach certification bodies how to undertake assessments based on the Friend of the Sea Seafood Standards.
Certification Bodies which requested accreditation from National Accreditation Bodies
For Auditors and Certification Bodies
Friend of the Sea has two active versions of the Wild standard (version 3.1 and version 4) and for this reason even two versions of the Audit Guidance. For more info on the transition from one version to the other, please consult the “Guideline transition from FOS Wild v.3.1 to FOS Wild v.4” document or write to quality@friendofthesea.org