Community supported fisheries aim to promote a positive relationship between fishermen, consumers, and the ocean by providing high-quality, locally caught seafood to members.
Community-supported fishery programs operate on a triple bottom line, which incorporates environmental stewardship, economic stability, and social improvements as goals of their business.
[citation needed] In creating economic and social benefits, fishermen are then able to become stewards of marine ecosystem health, by utilizing practices that better support the fish populations they target.
[5] This led to the design of the nation's first-ever research project on community-supported fisheries and a 2007 pilot CSF for Carteret County shrimp.
[7] The first successful community-supported fishery program began in 2007 as a pilot project out of Port Clyde, when the Mid-Coast Fishermen's Cooperative teamed up with the First Universalist Church in Rockland, Maine, to deliver fresh shrimp.
[citation needed] Dock to Dish is one of the original community-supported fishery programs, and is headquartered in the commercial fishing port of Montauk, NY.
Founded in 2012,[9] Dock to Dish co-founders also established the first restaurant supported fishery program in the world,[10] a model which has since proliferated across North and Central America.
The seafood they source and distribute is traceable back to the vessel, and often the actual fisherman; never travels by air (the highest carbon producing mode of transport), and never leaves a 150-mile radius from the port that it was originally landed in.
This CSF had a unique, integrated supply chain that includes fishermen owners and the company's own fish processing plant in Sitka, Alaska, as well as a large warehouse in Galesburg, Illinois.
[13] The company now offers delivery to the doorstep of is members of an array of seafood species harvested by its network of fishing families from southeast as well as other region's of Alaska.
Each week in the pilot season, a specified amount of fresh fish was delivered to a pickup point in each location for members to collect and take home.