Seasonal fruits and vegetables are the most naturally available sources of food. Climate, soil and even water temperature can affect the quality of food harvested seasonally. Seafood, too, has a seasonal cycle that’s dependent on climatic changes as well as natural breeding, migratory patterns, and regulatory affairs.

Fresh seafood will always be the most savored. Fisheries across the globe are finding unique ways to keep that flavor intact for longer by flash freezing their catch. But nothing can beat the umami a fresh catch can bring to your palette.

As a fresh seafood wholesaler, we believe in regulating our practices to prevent overfishing. To promote sustainability, we consciously encourage buying in-season seafood, when it’s most abundant and harvesting is sustainable.

Importance of Consuming Seasonal Seafood

Seafood seasons are largely influenced by water temperature and migration patterns, making availability very flexible. Regulatory parties in the U.S. impose legal restrictions for selected species to keep individual varieties sustainable. To get the best catch of a certain species, their cyclical patterns must be understood. Besides being cost-effective, here are the main reasons to encourage seasonal consumption:

Freshness and Availability

Picking your favorite fish and shellfish during their seafood season provides you with the freshest selections in the market. During peak season of each individual seafood, their abundance ensures you get great variety, fresh flavors, and affordable pricing. Encouraging seasonal buying also reduces overhead for stores to stock-pile seafood the year round.

Conscious Fishing and Sustainability

Seasonal purchasing allows the supply of seafood time to replenish. Conscious consuming is a necessity to maintain ecological balance and availability of our favorite seafood varieties. Sustainability is key and proactively participating in responsible fishing guidelines is required.

A Seasonal Guide to Consuming Your Favorites

Crab

You’re in luck if you’re a crab lover. Crab season in America lasts the year round, with each variety being available at some point or another. By early December, crabs are done spawning in abundance, leaving the period till January as primary crabbing season in San Francisco. Our fishing of Dungeness crabs is optimized during this time. The fishing cycle is constant along the American coastal line, till the end of November, when crabs become inactive again to spawn.

Salmon

Wild salmon is at its peak during late spring to summer months if you want to indulge without the premium price tag. For Alaska alone, the season begins in May and runs through August. Fishing of these fish is largely encouraged once they’re done with their long swim upstream, where they spawn and replenish the waters with fresh catch for the next year.

Cod

Available abundantly between March to November, Cod has a reasonably long seafood season. Their spawning cycle makes their numbers replenish faster than most fishes. Known as ‘batch spawners’, cod fishes spawn in batches of 10-20 during a 3-month period between December to June. This explains their longer availability patterns in large numbers.

Ecologically speaking, seasonal consumption is best to ensure stocks are replenished and demands met. While frozen seafood is always an option, purchasing seasonal and fresh seafood wholesale from seafood wholesalers like Safe Coast Seafoods gives the best to your customers and the Earth.