SACRAMENTO — When shoppers browse the seafood counters at Holiday Quality Foods' 19 grocery stores in rural Northern California today, they will find a new Safe Harbor brand, the nation's first line of low-mercury fresh fish.
The label is part of a market test by the supermarket chain and Pacific Seafood Group, one of the nation's largest fish wholesalers, to see whether customers would buy more fish if they had more information about its mercury content. Holiday is using a new technology, developed by a high-tech company in San Rafael, Calif., that takes just minutes to measure the mercury concentration in fish rather than days.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday February 28, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 50 words Type of Material: Correction
Mercury in fish -- An article in Monday's Business section about low-mercury fish said the material used to calibrate a mercury-testing machine came from the National Standards Bureau. The agency involved, the former National Bureau of Standards, has been known since 1988 as the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
"This is a way to regain the confidence of consumers who worry about seafood and mercury," said Chuck Holman, retail sales manager for Pacific Seafood, Holiday's supplier. "The technology is available, so we might as well use it."
Studies have found that high concentrations of mercury in pregnant women, nursing mothers and young children are harmful to brain development. Big fish, such as swordfish, shark and tuna, tend to contain more mercury than smaller fish such as salmon.
Federal and state advisories warning women of childbearing age to avoid fish with high levels of mercury, along with other adverse seafood publicity, are starting to eat into Holiday's sales. Over the last two years, the chain's sales of fresh fish have fallen 3% while the number of questions shoppers ask about mercury has risen, said David Parrish, Holiday's director of perishables.
That's a worrying trend for Holiday, as well as for Clackamas, Ore.-based Pacific Seafood. Holman hopes that by providing more information about the mercury in fish, the industry can win back customers such as Tina Kulek of Los Alamitos.
"I think twice before buying swordfish now, and I don't have it very often, maybe once in a while in a restaurant," said Kulek, as she did the family grocery shopping at a Trader Joe's in Long Beach. Kulek said she would be more likely to purchase fish if she knew it had a low mercury level.
"It is something that should be labeled," Kulek said.
Elsewhere, other consumers are changing their eating habits because of mercury warnings.
"I love sushi and we used to eat swordfish and grill big tuna steaks," said Everett Volk, an attorney in Washington. But Volk and his wife, Rebecca, cut those items from their diet several years ago. "We were planning kids and we were worried about mercury crossing the placenta."
Pacific Seafood's efforts to regain customers start in a building the size of two large supermarkets in an industrial park on the north side of Sacramento.
There, the company processes as much as 250,000 pounds of fish and shellfish daily, six days a week. Much of the building is maintained at 34 degrees and machines churn out 45 tons of ice daily to make sure fish stays fresh as it is prepared and shipped to Albertsons supermarkets, Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster restaurants and other clients.
Fish comes by airplane and truck from throughout the world -- 90-pound yellowfin tuna caught near Fiji, giant halibut that ply the icy coast of Alaska and sea bass that swim in the waters between Argentina and the Antarctic.
In the cutting room, workers wield razor-sharp, 16-inch knives as they slice blood-red ahi into quarters for delivery to sushi bars and snowy halibut into pre-packed steaks for grocery stores.
Now, more than 1,000 pounds of seafood a day makes an extra stop at a testing table where a worker uses a syringe and biopsy needle to extract a sample for insertion into the testing device developed by Micro Analytical Systems. The copy-machine-sized system takes about a minute to analyze the sample and signal whether the mercury concentration is low enough to warrant the Safe Harbor label.
"We expect to reject at least half of the fish we test," said Malcolm Wittenberg, chief executive of Micro Analytical.
Food and Drug Administration regulations say that any fish containing a mercury concentration of 1 part per million or more shouldn't be sold.
Safe Harbor brand fish is certified to have mercury concentrations well below that limit. Wittenberg has calibrated the certification to an FDA database derived from a series of random tests, reporting the lowest, median and highest levels of mercury found in different species.
Mercury in Chilean sea bass, for example, ranges from a low of 0.085 part per million to a high of 2.180 parts per million, more than twice the level at which the FDA says the fish isn't fit for human consumption. In most instances, only a fish that tests below the median level on that database -- in Chilean sea bass, that's 0.303 ppm -- gets the Safe Harbor label, Wittenberg said.
Some species, such as salmon, have consistently low reported mercury levels. For those species, the test will look for aberrations rather than the median, Wittenberg said.
