ALFA and Alaskans Own, its CSF program, have been involved with a research study testing consumer's preferences for "fresh" vs frozen fish, all in an effort to answer the question, "is fresh seafood really higher quality than flash frozen?
One of our partner organizations, Ecotrust, has recently published a blog post about this study and its fascinating results:
"This pervasive preference, along with the desire to build more stable markets for community fishermen, prompted a recent study we conducted in partnership with Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center, and Michigan-based seafood certification company, Seafood Analytics. The partners set out to address two key assumptions: That frozen fish is less fresh and less tasty than its unfrozen counterpart.
Conducted using samples of salmon and cod harvested by community fishermen from Port Orford Sustainable Seafood in Oregon and Alaskan’s Own out of Sitka Alaska, the study compared their flash-frozen fish with fresh-from-the-grocery-store samples."