The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #225 - Sean Wittenberg (Safe Catch)

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon: Hi, friends. Welcome back to the show. I am so incredibly excited about the conversation that I am about to have. I've been looking forward to it for months and the backstory on today's conversation. So, I talk about a lot of things on this show and my other show, The Intermittent Fasting Podcast. Two of themes that I talk about a lot is, one, my massively high fish consumption and how much I just love eating fish. And then two, I have talked a lot about my history with mercury toxicity and detoxing from that and just the really bad mercury poisoning that I experienced and how I'm super concerned about it, especially with mercury levels in fish. So, when I was approached a few months ago now by a company called Safe Catch, which I had heard of, you'll see them in stores, I was so, so excited.

And we'll talk all about this in today's episode, but their focus is that they really test for mercury levels in the fish. We'll talk about how they compare to normal mercury levels and other seafood products and such, but basically, I only had to see one sentence about this company, and I was like, “I am all in, sign me up and we'll talk about this more.” But the products themselves also have a lot of things that I'm really obsessed with, because you guys know I don't like fillers, additives, and flavors. I just like pure whole food and they don't package with oil. It's actual fish in the can and the pouches, they have salt free versions, which I am all about. So, basically, they're my ideal packaged fish company that there is ever.

I am so excited to learn so much and all about this. So, I am here with The President and Co-founder, Sean Wittenberg, who I also just learned has been doing intermittent fasting for how long, did you say? Like, 15 to 20 years? 

Sean Wittenberg: Yeah, I mean, since I graduated college. So, I graduated college in 2004-2005, around the cusp there. So, I've been doing it for quite a while now. 

Melanie Avalon: Accidentally fell into it, like you were saying. 

Sean Wittenberg: Yeah, accidentally fell into it just because it was part of this. I would wake up very, very, very early to go into fish processing facilities as we were developing technology [unintelligible [00:02:20]. So, I would be waking up and it would be 3 or 4 in the morning and you'd be going in, and so I wouldn't eat breakfast. I'd have a cup of coffee, and then next thing you know, I wouldn't eat until, late in the morning, early afternoon, and only eat over like 6 to 8 hours and go back to bed at 08:00 PM. And it just happened and then it just started to work for me. So, it was something I just fell into but your body responds and energy levels were improved with less food. It was crazy. So, yeah, it's great. 

Melanie Avalon: That's actually not that long, that 20-year mark, but we do hear a lot of people that were just doing intermittent fasting by accident or because it made sense to them and then it became a whole thing, although actually segue, talking about falling into things. So, your role here now with Safe Catch, I mean, you just mentioned that you were obviously, for years you've been working in this world. Was that by accident? What made you decide to [laughs] get into this?

Sean Wittenberg: You consumed a lot of fish and you had your bout with mercury toxicity. My history with mercury toxicity happened through my mother. So, I was at university at UC Davis in around 2001-2002, right in that strike zone. I came back on a holiday break to find my mom unwell. She had symptoms which she really did understand. My mom is a pretty sharp lady, ran her own business. The lights are on. But when I came home from school, she was having cognitive problems, some motor skill problems, and just a variety of ailments that didn't line up. She would start talking to me and all of a sudden, she would stop mid sentence and almost like an Alzheimer's type of memory gap. She would just freeze and then she would have these issues of numbness in her hands and her feet and she would have balancing issues at times and the symptoms were really scary.

So 2001-2002, when we took her to the doctor, they really didn't know anything about heavy metals or mercury toxicity. So, they began taking us down this path of different cancer treatments and scans. We went down and saw the experts and they couldn't find cancer, which is great. Thank God for that. But we still couldn't figure out what's hurting my mom, what was causing this problem. So, they started to take us down the autoimmune path because that was the next level of trying to understand these wide range of symptoms and trying to figure out the genesis of them.

While that process was happening, a nutritionist asked my mom, “Have you ever had your heavy metals tested?” And we were like, “Why? What are you talking about?” And so nevertheless, we listen to the nutritionist because we we're trying to find solutions and she gets her heavy metals tested. And sure enough, her mercury level was 10 times higher than what the FDA deemed was safe. So, her levels were off the chart. And what we realized is that my mom was trying a diet, a point-based diet system. She didn't tell us much about this, but we learned that canned tuna was one point on this program. So, my mom was eating five or six cans of tuna a week, not telling us that she was trying to manage weight and that was it.

So, she had to stop the eating the canned tuna and she had to do chelation and tried to remove all the heavy metals and do all of that. But for me, it was like this aha moment of something that I felt I could participate and solve for other moms. So, when we began, we began by studying mercury and fish and the industry and what was going on, as well as the technology solutions to do the testing. We saw that there were really accurate testing technologies out there. The two primary testing platforms were ICP-MS, which is a plasma mass spectroscopy system. The other one was called CVAA, cold vapor atomic absorption. These two platforms are very accurate, but they require a sophisticated operator, they require a laboratory setting and they cost between $50 to $100 to perform one test. They take a day to a week to turn around results.

So while they are accurate, they're very expensive, and they require a lot of infrastructure and cost to get their testing done. So, when you look at the tonnage, the volume of seafood going through the United States, as an example, it would require hundreds of thousands or millions of tests. So, when we got started, we thought this was a technology problem. If we built the technology, that we could give it to the government, we could give it to the industry, and they would take this technology and solve this problem for consumers and for the people and we could go move on with our life. So, I looked at this originally as a graduating school, good deed for the world before I go out and find my way, right?

So from 2003 while I was still in school, we started working on tech solutions. By 2004 to 2005, we started to really have some traction. I was really blessed because my dad is a patent and trademark attorney, so he had some experience there that I could lean on. And he had some friends that had labs, some PhD physicist friends of his. And then I had some friends as well, through UC Davis as well as Stanford that were PhD, EEs, and chemical engineers. So, we had this really blessed group of super sharp scientists that were able to come together and we developed a principle that was totally new for testing mercury and fish and which figured out to take that idea and put it into an actual machine. And that got done really in 2005, 2006.

And then in 2007, I went, still extremely green and naive about how the world works. I mean, to be quite blunt, but I still, with my optimism and hope, I went to Bethesda, Maryland, and I sat down with Dr. [unintelligible 00:08:28]. Dr. Atchinson in 2007 through the FDA was the head of food safety for the United States under George W. Bush, the top, top dog. And so, I sat down with him with this big stack of results and proof of our machine's accuracy and all the things you'd expect in a presentation to the FDA. I sat down with him in a conference room in Bethesda, Maryland. And the conference table was something out of that original Batman where Bruce Wayne has the table that's two miles long, it felt like.

We sat down with him and I walked through data, and while I was there I didn't even get to finish my full presentation before [unintelligible 00:09:02] Dr. Atchinson asked me, “Can you test for lead?” I said, “Not yet, but we're working on it. We we're going to work on all heavy metals, but we're starting with mercury. We have that.” He's like, “Well, we're having an issue right now with lead in gummy bear vitamins from China. These children's gummy bear vitamins have lead in them coming from China.” So, our first reaction was like, “Well, why don't we just stop importing the gummy bear vitamins? Isn't that a good, easy first step?” He's like, “Well, it's part of a bigger trade program and there're a lot of moving parts.” I mean, it was just a bunch of politics speak to me.

He basically left me from this meeting saying, “Well, we'll look at what you built for mercury, but if you could look at lead for us that would be really valuable.” So, I left there half deflated, a little confused, but hoping that he's going to look at our technology as we look at lead. Well, when I left that meeting and I went back to my hotel room in DC, we had left for the meeting so early, we left before the newspaper arrived. When I got back to my hotel, the newspaper was sitting there in front of the room and I picked up the newspaper and above the fold in the Washington Post, on the top headline it says, “Lead found in gummy bear vitamins.” I sat there and I just had this aha moment.

I realized that the FDA is grossly underfunded to realize its mandate and that much of what the FDA is really doing is more in line with perception management, as opposed to true food safety and health protocols. Two things happened from that meeting. Number one is, I never made fun of another person ever again for being paranoid about their health and taking their own health in their own hands. And number two is, I realized that if we're going to protect people, it's not going to happen through the government. It's got to happen through a brand or through a partnership.

So, the next six years after that moment, I stopped trying to get the government to participate in what we were doing. I tried to take this solution to the biggest seafood companies in the world, to try to get them to adopt our technology. Because the goal for us was not about necessarily money. It was really just about helping people. And how can we get this technology in the hands of those that are selling the most product to the most people so that we can help the most people by providing this technology? And so we went to all the usual suspects, the biggest distributors, the biggest seafood providers, all the big three, for canned tuna, StarKist, Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, and all that. We worked from about 2007 to about 2013, in that six-year period trying to get all of these folks to work with us. And we did a lot of good, interesting R&D work. 

But we realized through working with these firms that they were really coming back to us with two narratives. One is, Mercury is not a problem, go away. Just basically saying, “We're making money right now and this is just disruptive and this doesn't matter. Go away.” Or the second one was, “Let's test to a standard so weak that everything passes.” And so, essentially, we'll just wash this problem away with your technology by saying there is no problem. And so, in both of those outcomes, those narratives that we received, if you think about it, my mom would still be getting sick, my mom would still--. There'd be no protection for her. And that's what we set out to do from the beginning that is protect moms, kids everyone from mercury, so they can live healthier, happier lives.

So, what we did was, at 2013, I linked up with my current co-founder, Bryan, who helped me support a deal to essentially buy out my original shareholders from my original company and transition from being a technology and certification company to being a brand. And that brand is called Safe Catch. So, in 2013, we made this big pivot and the whole point of the pivot was to go to those same people that told me that mercury is not an issue or to test as something weak and saying, all right, if you don't want to use our technology and you don't want to protect the people the way we think you should, we're going to come up with our own brand and we're going to set it to our own standards and we're going to provide that directly to the people.

We're going to provide something that fully encapsulates all of our values. And at its nucleus, at its core, is health and wellness. So, for us, we look at mercury being the number one issue for seafood around health and wellness and we can talk about how we got to that and then anything else we can add to it. So, you'll see, we'll talk at the end of the show a little bit about other targets and things that we're working on. Whether it be radiation from Fukushima or whether it be testing for the big bugs like E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, or histamines. We look at ensuring that if my mom was to eat five, six cans of tuna a week, again, she needs to do so and be healthy.

And in fact, my mom is eating five to six cans of Safe Catch a week right now. We're almost having the exact same diet she had when she got sick. We have her heavy metals tested every three months and her levels are half of what they should be to be dangerous, 20 times below where she was when she got tested, when she was sick. So, the system works. But anyways, to come back to where I left off, that was our big pivot. So, we had done-- before Safe Catch we had probably performed close to a million mercury tests over a 10-year period before we became Safe Catch. Today, we've performed almost 8 million mercury tests.

To give you perspective on the size and scale of that amount of testing, the FDA we talked about previously in the last 40 years has performed about 4000 tests. Safe Catch today is performing between 10,000 to 12,000 tests per day. So, in a single day and one shift will do more than the FDA has done in its entire history. And all of that work is being done to make sure that Melanie for you or anyone who goes into one of our shops, whether it be Costco or Sprouts or Kroger, wherever you are, safecatch.com, you can get access to a fish source that's been tested to levels that would meet the most stringent standards for our most vulnerable consumers.

So, if you gear your levels up to protect pregnant women, small children, people with autoimmune issues, or people going through chemotherapy, if you set your standards to protect that audience, then a healthy, everyday consumer, me, you, whoever, they can eat our products with absolute confidence because they know they could eat it if they were sick or vulnerable. So, by setting that up, we now have a product where people can eat it, really put the issue of mercury behind them, and just eat it with confidence. And that was ultimately our goal, was to just say, eat it every day. You can eat it all the time and not have to think about this issue. So, we built on that platform of purity. We built on that with making sure that our product is fully sustainable.

We're partnered with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch Program as well as the MSC program or in Stewardship Council. So, we match both of those. All of our processing is done by hand. So instead of heavily machine processed with precookers and all these other steps, we embrace a very artisan processing technique. So, we've built new processing lines within the factory exclusively for us, where it's just a bunch of people hand cutting fish, packing high quality fish directly into BPA free packaging. We cook our fish in its own natural fats without any additives or fillers. And by doing that, you capture all the fat-soluble nutrients that's lost in traditional tuna packing.

So, you get more omega-3s, you retain all the other micronutrients that will actually allow you-- it’s say a biohacking thing will allow you to optimize your absorption of those omega-3s as well as the protein and other vitamins and nutrients that are naturally found in seafood. So, when you take that, you have sustainability, you have a better taste that's more nutrient dense, and then you remove toxicity concerns. And what you're left with is the fish that you would have enjoyed 100 years ago before we started to, as a species, really pollute this planet. I think that would be a good next topic, unless you have some questions on that, Melanie, for it to talk about what's been going on in the oceans and why we exist. We can also then come back and talk about how the technology works or whatever you want.

Melanie Avalon: I was having flashbacks to my mercury experience with the memory and stuff. I literally thought I was dying and I literally thought like, I was getting Alzheimer's. Was it her blood that she was testing? 

Sean Wittenberg: We tested both blood and hair. So, once I got her blood test done the first time, the levels were so high, they thought her results were wrong. So, they asked to do a follow-up test. And then the follow-up test, they did multiple, where they tested her hair and they tested her blood, and then they both were pretty close to one another, definitely statistically alike. And then they're like, “Holy cow, this is nuts.” So, we just sat down and they're like, “You can stop this additional testing. This is the issue.” So, then we started with the chelation, and the chelation was, I couldn't believe how difficult it was. My mom was just-- It's really, really a physically taxing process to do chelation and try to remove these heavy metals from your body. 

I'm sure that there's probably better techniques today since there're more people doing this type of work than they were doing 22 years ago. But for her, it was really difficult. It took almost seven months. She tried it the first time, tried to take a break from it, because it was just so physically difficult for her. So, it took her a while to do it. Some people, I guess, are tougher with it, but for her, it was quite difficult. But I think that it was the combination of her symptoms, how close I am to my mom, and then the process to get healthy, and then realizing that for an adult like you or my mom, most of your facilities will come back to full strength as a developed mind and body.

However, if that exposure happened to a kid or someone whose brain and body is still developing, those impacts are forever. So, this issue of mercury and fish is really a serious thing particularly for kids and for pregnant women, more so than even adults. While I still say it's important for everybody that is the most vulnerable group to the impacts of mercury toxicity. So, the statistics that you could get out of research through the Harvard School of Public Health and some other reputable research bodies talking about a woman who gives birth-- who has high mercury levels giving birth to a child. That child can have anywhere from 7 to 15 times IQ point loss.

Then, they did the gradings of saying that if you also don't have Omega-3s and the fat-soluble nutrients, you can also have an IQ and performance loss in your unborn child. So, as a mother, you're trying to strike this balance between how do I get my Omega-3s and nutrients to optimize the health of my fetus? At the same time, how do I mitigate and remove this mercury issue so that this baby is born with optimal health and wellness, with its peak brain capacity and physical capabilities? And so that's a big part of some of the work we do with the medical community is trying to help them get that answer most succinctly provided to their clients and patients. But it's a challenge, it's a real big challenge for that particular group. 

So, if you think about that in terms of a kid where 100 IQ is average to right where you're supposed to be, that's the middle of the road. So, if you had a kid who was going to be born with an IQ of 110, let's say, above the curve, school comes a bit easier to that student, life is a bit easier for that student. They're going to have an easier path towards realizing success because they're going to have a stronger processor in their brain. That person then can have exposure to mercury and the mom doesn't know this thing or gets deficiency of Omega-3s during the pregnancy and that child can lose that 15 IQ points, now they're at 95. 

Now that same kid is working harder and struggling more to do the same work it could have had with just a couple of changes during that pregnancy. And it's a really alarming thing to think about because most of the expecting parents and mothers that I talk to and families that I talk to, it's not like they're trying to optimize their kids. What they're really saying is, “I don't want to screw this up.” It's more of a defense mentality. So, what we want to do, particularly through maternity and pregnancy, is we want to be able to give them clear information and data on what's in our products, arm their prenatal nutritionists and their OB/GYNs and their pediatricians with the type of data that only we can provide.

Now, they can specifically give information to their patients that allows them to maximize their likelihood of having the healthiest pregnancy possible. And that's one of the things that we do. We don't talk about it too much, but it really makes me proud of the work we've built and the team we've built and the great people we have around our company making that possible. That's one of our greatest points of pride.

Melanie Avalon: I am so grateful to you for that because like I said, I'm all about the health benefits of fish and the Omega-3s and all the nutrients, but I just think this mercury is such a problem. When I had the toxicity, I bet your mom and I are probably similar because my blood levels were around 30, which is off the charts on the paper. Also, just a comment on the chelation, I don't know that it's honestly evolved that much, because it's still pretty much-- There's, like, a few different compounds people use EDTA, DMPS, or DMSA, I think. It is really taxing running the IVs. I could go on a whole tangent about that. I think the biggest mind blown moment I had in that journey was there's this document I love. 

I would literally just look at this document for probably hours cumulatively and it's this FDA document about mercury levels and commercial fish and shellfish. What made me sad is it's 1990 to 2012, so I'm sure it's much worse since then, but I don't think they've updated it since that 2012 data. But if you look at the lowest possible option on the chart, which I think is like, scallops, it's like 0.003. And then if you look at the highest number--

Sean Wittenberg: Swordfish.

Melanie Avalon: Swordfish, yeah. So, swordfish, it's like 300 times the amount of scallops. I don't want to put a blanket statement for scallops because that was a range, but just to compare numbers. So, basically, you could be-- I just remember thinking about this. I was like, so you could be in a situation where you eat one piece of swordfish and it's like you ate 300 servings of scallops or tilapia all in one meal. Because I think the reason I got it was I historically was eating-- I was only eating low mercury “species” to prevent mercury toxicity. But I moved back to California and I tried swordfish for the first time somewhere and I was like, it was so good. And I was like, “Oh, it can't be that bad if I have a piece here, a piece there,” or if I have, like, I discovered Chilean sea bass, and I was like, “This can't be that bad.” And then we're looking at that chart. I was like, “Oh, it can be that bad.”

Sean Wittenberg: Oh, yeah. One swordfish serving can give your mercury load for a calendar year. So that just gives you a perspective. 

Melanie Avalon: It's mind blowing. And honestly, I get upset, honestly, that it's even-- And I actually posted about this in the group when I was talking about Safe Catch, because I'm personally, and I'm all for people being politically whatever they want to be, I personally am more hands off. Like, I don't like a ton of government control and things, but when it comes to this mercury issue, I don't know how it's okay to have-- I'm getting emotional, to have swordfish on a menu at restaurants. I see it and I'm like, “How is this okay?” 

Sean Wittenberg: No, no. Once I started testing, I became the same thing. But I think this would be a great way to just explain to your listeners about, your audience about how mercury is getting in fish and why this problem is becoming more severe and how it gets into the fish, because I think that's really important. So, over the last 75 years, right, since right after World War II, let's say the 1950s to today, the mercury levels in our oceans have gone up by over 300%. Why? Well, the number one contributing factor to mercury and fish is coal-fired power plants. So, if you look at what's happened in the last 75 years, the globe has industrialized itself, and it's done so mainly on the back of coal, cheap. It's scalable, it's easy to use. 

So, if you think about countries like China or India that were once agricultural nations, mostly farming countries, have now become these industrial powerhouses, producing and creating a vast majority of the goods we buy and consume. They did all of that scaling on the back of coal and they did so without any real environmental oversight. So, there's no scrubbers, no filtration systems on much of their coal fire powerplants. It's basically a cigarette without a filter. They burn it and it goes up. It was simple math. There was an opportunity when they first started to scale up in the 80s and 90s really was when it really went nuts, late 70s to late 90s. 

But when they produced all these coal-fired power plants, they realized that if we build our fume stacks, our combustion towers, where the exhaust comes out, if we build them taller, we can push this problem into the upper stratosphere as opposed to making it a local pollution problem and it won't hit our neighboring communities. But what it did do is it then took the mercury and it started to export it around the world. So, what happens is you take coal and you burn it, an elemental mercury, Hg, if you remember, your high school chemistry, is trapped in that coal with arsenic and other heavy metals. When you burn that coal at 425 C, as that coal is burning, the mercury vaporizes, and that mercury goes into a vapor state and smokes.

And that mercury smoke will go up that smokestack, up into the upper stratosphere with the rest of the products of combustion and that mercury will get trapped in the clouds. And when the rain falls, so does the elemental mercury. And what happens when elemental mercury, Hg, gets exposed to salt water or other water? A chemical reaction takes place and it becomes a new organic compound called methylmercury. Methylmercury is a far more dangerous compound than elemental mercury. It's a neurotoxin and it's the type of mercury like 95 plus percent of the mercury found in fish is methylmercury. And methylmercury, once it's in its oceans, is not only toxic, it's really sticky stuff. So, what happens is this methylmercury sticks to plant life and plankton and then these smaller fish eat the plant life and plankton. When they eat the plant life and plankton, they ingest that methylmercury.

So now that methylmercury is in that fish, it's not going to ever leave that fish, it's in it. And then a larger fish, let's say a sea bass or a halibut, whatever, will eat that smaller fish, that ate that plankton or plant life and ingest all the mercury in that smaller fish. And so, as you go up the seafood supply chain towards that apex predator, towards swordfish and shark and marlin, you're going to find that the average mercury concentration goes up. That's what's a process known as biomagnification. And so that's why your swordfish would be 300, 500 times what you may see in a herring or a scallop or a mussel. 

But what you don't see in that process is that within that actual seafood species, while the average is going up, the variance is also widening, which is R-squared. What we realized as we started doing all these millions and millions of tests and testing all over the world, we've installed our technology and we've tested pretty much every major body of water and the seafood stocks within those bodies of water from around the world. And what we realized is that the variance was going up at a higher magnitude than the average mercury concentration was going up. And what that means, in simple terms, is that you can go into a school of tuna and two fish in the same school can vary in mercury concentration by over 10 times. 

So, within a school of tuna, you could have some fish that my mom could eat every day and have no mercury problem and there was other fish that if my mom ate that fish, she's going to have the symptoms, or Melanie, you'd have the symptoms that you had, right. So, you have this ultra-low stock and not potentially high stock commingled within a school of fish. So, we realized that we had to develop a technology if we're going to protect consumers and provide low mercury fish every time. We couldn't batch test, we couldn't just take a sample of four or five tuna from 1000 fish and say, “Oh, this is a good bunch, and that's a bad bunch, and this is a good bunch.”

We realized that we had to find a way to test each tuna one by one, and that we couldn't rely on some general batch or statistical algorithm in tuna or highly migratory species. We had to test them one by one. And so that's what set us on our technology path to develop a system that can take a tissue sample about the size of a grain of rice from a particular fish and give you the mercury concentration in seconds. So, we'll talk about that in a second. But you now have this issue that we've become really clear on. So around the world, coal usage is sadly on the rise. And it has been because it's so cheap and so readily available.

Now, in the United States, through the Obama administration, there was mercury regulations that were put into place in the United States which put pressure on polluters, coal-fired power plants, to increase their filtration systems to mitigate the products of combustion such that the mercury levels from our industrial pollution went down dramatically. And in fact, we saw as a result of those programs, the mercury levels in our oceans started to or in our local areas started to decrease that we tested lakes and rivers and stuff like that would be near and around those coal-fired power plants. It did work. It started to go down. But we're just one of many nations around the world. When you're focused more on survival and scaling and dealing with really severe poverty, you're focused more on survival and those types of programs and systems are not required.

So, the majority of these coal-fired power plants do not have these scrubbers on top that can remove large amounts of mercury from their processes. So, anyways, that coal consumption right now is what's driving this issue of mercury in fish. I think it'd be interesting to explain tuna as a species and why that can vary so much. Tuna is highly migratory, so it doesn't stay, like, in one body of water. So, this tuna travel in schools and engage what we call feedstock. So, they're going from a bait ball to bait ball traveling in a school, trying to find food, and they just have these big, long migration paths, these big, long loops that they will perform through our oceans. 

And so since the pollution is asymmetrical and these schools of tuna are moving from different levels of feedstock that have different varying mercury levels, the fish will have this behavior within the school. So, in the front of the school, when the schools are traveling, you have a hungry or more aggressive fish in the school in the front of the school, and then you have a less hungry fish that's a little bit more docile on the back of the school as they're moving to a new feedstock. So, when they get to that new feedstock, that fish in the front of the school is going to get more of that feedstock than the fish in the back and they're going to eat more of that stock. 

So, what will happen then after they finish that feedstock and they go to the next feedstock, the next bait ball, that fish that was in the back of the school is now hungrier than the fish that was in the front of the school and they're going to change positioning within the school. And now that fish that was ate less of the first bait ball is going to eat more of the second. And when those bait balls have varying mercury levels, you do that over time. And what happens is you start to get this large R-squared, it’s large variance. So, before Safe Catch, if you were to go into the store and you were just to buy another brand of tuna, the tuna brand just would buy all of the fish.

So, the low mercury fish is in there. The high mercury fish is in there. They're all mixed together. And sometimes you'll get a low can, sometimes you get a higher can. And if you don't eat much fish, maybe if you have big body mass, you don't eat much fish, maybe that type of variance isn't going to impact you. But if you're someone like you, Melanie, or someone like me who eats fish five, six days a week, or you're someone who has small body mass, or you're a child with a developing body and mind, or all these different groups, that risk of high and low is not good enough. You're going to get mercury toxicity eventually from just the natural variation of mercury levels in the seafood stock for the other brands. 

So for us, what we did, the system we set up with our technology, is we said, basically, we went first to the medical community and we said, what is the levels of mercury and fish that you think you'd want to see that would not make you just check the box and say, “Yeah, this is cool. You can sell this legally for sale,” but to have it be at a level where you're excited to recommend our products to vulnerable consumers. Like to tell a pregnant woman, “You're pregnant, you can eat Safe Catch Elite, which is our skipjack or Safe Catch ahi, which is our yellowfin. You can eat that tuna and it will be a positive for your pregnancy.” That was our target in establishing our levels.

And we said, whatever stock we were going to be able to establish within that levels, that's what we're going to be. So, the medical community that we spoke to really had their mindset. They said, we want to see an average at 0.1 parts per million or less as being a target for you. So, for us, what we did is we set our limit for our products to meet that average. So, our limit is that average and our average is about half below that. In fact, the average in most of our Safe Catch Elite and our Safe Catch Ahi, which are the two SKUs that I eat the most, the two products we make that I eat the most, those have an average mercury concentration of less than 0.4 parts per million, which would make it averaging like a salmon or a sardine. And we carve out all of the high mercury fish from that stock.

So, for us, we have a process of receiving fish where we have four criteria or steps before we will actually buy a fish. So, for us to buy a fish, and remember, we're testing 10,000 of these a day. But to buy one of those 10,000, that fish has to first meet our conventional quality standards. We have a 23-point organoleptic or sensory review of each fish, looking at things like eye clarity and gill quality, salt content, a variety of factors. Once it passes that criteria it will get reviewed for sustainability. As I mentioned, it has to meet both the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch standards as well as the MFC Marine Stewardship Council. So, we verify that. Then we have a social audit step, which is unique to us. 

The social audit step is an artifact of some of the poor fishing behavior that we saw in the industry. That was reported on, particularly in 2016 and 2017. And that was an issue of fishermen being trapped at sea. It was like slave like practices. So, what was happening is these fishermen would go out to sea, they'd be fishing with a company, and what they'd do is they'd bring a transshipment vessel, another boat would go out, pick up their catch, and the transshipment vessel would bring the catch in, but the fishing vessel would stay at sea. So, these fishermen couldn't get off the boat and couldn't get back to shore, and they were essentially trapped at sea like slaves. So, we had to put together a system with our fishing partners to ensure that that wasn't happening.

So, we developed this count on, count off program and a policy of no transshipment vessels. At Safe Catch, every fishing boat that goes out has to come back in with their catch. We won't use a transshipment vessel. And every fishing boat that comes out has to have a count on, count off program. So, every fisherman with an independent observer signs a document getting onto the boat and every fisherman has to sign that same document. They get off the boat. And we have to verify that all these fishermen were treated fairly and received opportunity to get off the boat before we would buy that catch. That's something we don't obviously promote or talk much about, but it's just not about only doing the right thing for mercury, but not only doing the right thing for sustainability. 

You also have to have that social and just the right values to run a company today. Because when it comes to profit, people do a lot of shady things anyhow. So, we have those three criteria. Once it passes those three, the quality, sustainability and social audit, then we will individually test that fish for mercury one by one. So, in the case of our skipjack or yellowfin, that would have to be to a limit of 0.1 parts per million. That would be 10 times below what the FDA says is the acceptable level. Okay, so it's 10 times below the FDA is what we're testing these fish to. If it matches and passes all four of those criteria, our relationship with our fishing suppliers is saying, “We will buy that fish from you right there on the spot. We will buy that fish.” If it doesn't meet any one of those four criteria, we will not buy that fish.

So right now, what makes us really special as a brand amongst other things. But what really makes us special is that behind the scenes, our operation now is here. We have a 10,000 metric ton cold storage facility, and we've got a 6000-square foot testing facility where we're doing this work. And we have about 120 people testing mercury and fish every day. What we're doing behind the scenes before we-- is just building and establishing this big safety stock, this big inventory of the purest, healthiest, most sustainable, most socially responsible seafood stock we can possibly make. And then from there, our manufacturing partners can come to our cold storage, pick up our fish and process our fish by hand with our specification. And then we bring that product to market and we sell it around the world right now.

But that's what makes us really, really special, is that, that system of being able to qualify and test each fish. So, people ask us like, “Why are you in Thailand. Why do you set up in Thailand?” Well, the reason we're in Thailand is half the world's shelf stable tuna is packed here. So, for us to be able to test 10,000, 15,000 fish a day and to only accept two-thirds or 60, 70% of those fish, let's say, on average, the fish that we don't accept has to be able to be sold elsewhere for the fishing groups to be successful. So, the fish that we don't accept does make its way into the market. It just doesn't go into our brand. And that product is sold to around the world. Like I said, there's like $6 to $8 billion worth of shelf stable tuna packed in this one area of Thailand where we hide in the shadows of giants as a small little brand. 

Melanie Avalon: Wow, this is insane. That's crazy about the fishermen at sea. 

Sean Wittenberg: This stuff you'd never learn about like we talked earlier, before you started recording. As an entrepreneur, you have a general thesis, a general vision that you're trying to realize and along the way, you learn so much about how the world operates and you just react to it step by step. The same thing could be said and can touch on at the end around radiation. Fukushima hits 2011, we started for the US government, well, not really for the government, for the big food service providers, United States, that wanted to import from Japan. Because of our background, they reached out to us to start building screening and testing protocols to look for Cesium-134 and Cesium-137. And we built those systems up for them and started to do that testing work. 

We were also firm that they contacted when there was the BP oil spill. BP put anticoagulants on the oil, which makes the oil drop from the surface to the bottom. It was a PR nightmare, if you recall, for BP with the oil just sitting there and every day on CNN, it's showing the big lake, ocean size puddle of oil. So, what BP did is they put these anticoagulants on there, which made the oil drop to the bottom, and it made the Gulf of Mexico look pristine again. But what they didn't realize is when you put anticoagulant on a PAH, which is the compound built in the oil, while it makes it heavier and denser to fall to the bottom, it also makes it 60 times more toxic.

So, it decimated the native shrimp population and the wild shrimp population and it forever crushed what was one of the most vibrant fisheries in the United States, particularly feeding New Orleans, which was arguably the best food town in America. And one of the reasons was they had that beautiful seafood stock to pull from out there. And then that got compromised. And all these communities up and down the coastline there really suffered health wise from that problem. But they hired us to try to do some testing work there to try to figure out just how bad the problem was and if there were areas to avoid and areas to aim the fishermen towards trying to figure out how to navigate that disaster. That was manmade and it was horrible and then greed made it even worse. 

But the only point of bringing this up is to say that as our background, we're scientists, So, we came from that background and then we had to learn how to make food. So going into Thailand, making the product, learning how to make canned tuna and how to do it better and how to make it healthier and how to make it taste better, and all of that was stuff we had to learn as went, because they don't teach that at UC Davis. It's just part of the process. It's part of the journey. And for us, we even have customers and folks that will chime in and reach out to us through our info@safecatch.com. And ask questions or drop in suggestions. And that consumer and customer engagement is one of the ways in which we learn, we grow, and we adapt. 

So, I look at my role at Safe Catch as not being like necessarily the big chief, but really just like a conduit between our brand in this greater community and creating an opportunity to allow all of us to consider it to be our brand. And that way it can exist in a way that serves the people best by listening and trying our best to either adapt or explain why we're not changing on any particular issue. So just for your audience, if anyone ever has fish questions, they're more than welcome to reach out to our platform. And if they have ideas that can make us better, we listen for what it's worth.

Melanie Avalon: No, this is beyond incredible and question about the actual testings-- and thank you. When you're telling about the variance within the schools, I was literally going to ask that. I was so excited because I was like, I've been wondering this for so long to recap that, the more fit, intense, better fish that are eating more are getting more mercury.

Sean Wittenberg: Yeah. And it just depends on what-- There's a lot of chance in it, right? You don't know what feedstock and where these tuna are technically swimming. And climate change, which is impacting this as well. Right? So as the water is warm two things are happening through climate change, which is all documented. I believe it was, again, through Harvard School of Public Health that did this research, but it was some division within Harvard that did it. But they basically were looking at the impacts of climate change on mercury levels in fish. And what they discovered was that two things that are making climate change increase the level of mercury in our fish. One is the warming of our waters are causing fish to eat more and so they're moving more, they're eating more actual food.

So, eating more sardines or herring, if it's the case of a tuna, more bait balls, and sharks are eating more, and everything's eating more. So, you're consuming more fish as they can consume more fish. They don't have the filtration system in their bodies that we have as people, so that mercury is in there forever, so they're eating more. That's one area that they discovered. The second thing they discovered is that through climate change, we're seeing a really large decrease in biodiversity. So, the number of species and the number of fish in the sea are decreasing. And then while that decreases, the amount of mercury in our oceans are increasing. And so what you're having is you're having more mercury exposure to less fish. So, the amount of fish that, it's just like thinking about how many points of contact you have with that mercury. If the points of contact are decreasing then each point is going to have more mercury in the point. And so that combination is causing mercury levels in our seafood stocks to go up.

Melanie Avalon: So, this is a naive question. So, these are wild fish, but they're swimming in the stock is that manmade?

Sean Wittenberg: No, no, no. We just call it as that’s just the seafood jargon. No. So these are all wild fish These are all wild fish. We look at the school, we could call it instead of the stock, if you wanted to call it the school, the tuna school. That's what's traveling. So, there're different species of fish. Some are live, eat, thrive, and die in the same area of the waters. You could see different types of seabass or if you looked in the case of maybe some rock cods or some snappers and things of that nature, those fish tend to be born, live, and die in the localized waters. They're not highly migratory. Tuna, as an example, is a highly migratory species. It's classified as such.

So, it will travel up to 40-50 miles a day and just continuing to move and mov and move and move and move as it circumnavigates the world. Now, in the case of albacore, they would go up towards the colder poles that go from the equator up towards the poles, and that's where they would start to reproduce. And then they would come back down towards the equator, and they do these big northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere, big loops, the skipjack, which reproduce many more times per year, two to three times per year. Their loops will be through warmer waters. They won't go as far north. So, there'll be an oval pattern around the equator, not as high, but wider. So, there're these different migration patterns of different schools of tuna within the ocean. So, how those different fish are traveling and what feedstocks are being exposed to is really the origin of their potential mercury exposure. 

Melanie Avalon: Okay, got you. And does the mercury not hurt the fish? 

Sean Wittenberg: That's a great question that I couldn't answer for you. I don't know. I know that in the case of mammals or fish that will breathe air, I don't think it's mammal’s right word but few of the [unintelligible 00:50:54] like dolphins, whales, seals, otters, we know for a fact that those species of animals are affected by the mercury load. And you'll find pods of whales that get lost. They find themselves in areas where they're not supposed to be. You can find the same thing with-

Melanie Avalon: Oh, wow from the mercury. 

Sean Wittenberg: -yeah, mercury, absolutely. Dolphins as well and they're just getting exposed to it. So, yeah, I mean, this is an issue that affects people and it affects all of those types of species. And whether it affects the tuna themselves, I'm not 100% sure. I mean, I'm sure it affects them some way, but the scope and scale, I couldn't speak intelligently to it, and I wouldn't want to represent anything on your show that I can't support with peer-reviewed science. 

Melanie Avalon: Speaking of the variance within the fish, when you're doing the testing, do you test a small portion of it and that reflects the levels of the whole fish? 

Sean Wittenberg: Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. So, it started off with us taking a whole fish and testing that fish 300 times. So, we did is we built these three-dimensional graphs and we would plot where every single one of the mercury results and levels was in that fish, trying to find-- to discover whether it was relatively homogeneous or if it was homogeneous or if it wasn't or is there a part of the fish that was higher in mercury were concentrated versus other parts of the fish. So, what we saw was that the mercury concentration in fish when tuna was relatively homogeneous in the edible tissue. So, we weren't focusing on organs or the noncommercial edible pieces, you know what I mean? So, when we looked inside.

So, in the case of tuna, we found that the mercury concentration was relatively homogeneous. There was about a variance level within the tuna of about 10 to 12%. So, while I publish our mercury results at 0.1 parts per million, we actually internally test that fish to 0.07 to 0.075 parts per million, and we put that 25% buffer in there internally. The reason we do that is to overcome any potential variance within the fish. So, we actually test to 0.07 and we publish 0.1 that’s why our internal average is less than 0.04 because we're screening at a much even more stringent level than we advertise. And we do that to overcome like I said, that relative variance, the relative homogeneality of 10 to 15%, and then our machines ourselves are accurate to +/-3% and so 3+15 is 18. So, we put that as our risk coefficient inside of our testing limits.

Melanie Avalon: Is there less variance in salmon since it's at a lower, presumably, mercury concentration?

Sean Wittenberg: Yes, yes, yes and it's also less variance as you go down the seafood supply chain, away from the apex predators. So, the variance is like in a school of sardines or in a school of herring or anchovy. We test all of those products too. I mean, if you go to our website, you'll see mackerel on there and you'll see sardines on there. And for those species of products, we can actually run a statistical algorithm. So, we'll test between 100 to 250 sardines as an example from a catch. And that would be enough testing to give us a statistically relevant representation of the whole sardine catch. So, we can do that there, but we can't do it for tuna, we can't do it for halibut.

So, for us, we still test every single salmon because there is more variance in that salmon than there is in sardine. But the mercury levels in wild salmon is much, much lower than tuna. And the reasons for that is largely because of the life cycle of the salmon, the diet of the salmon are different than the tuna. So, a life cycle of a salmon will go out from a river where it's born into the ocean two to three years, go back into that same river, spawn and die. So that fish is only going to live max three years, right from its hatch to its birth or its pregnancy or its eggs hatching and then it dies and it'll go back down the river. So, for the salmons that are doing these runs, the average mercury concentration is much, much, much less. 

If you looked on our cans, we're reflective of that. So, we have on our products right now for our salmon, we have a published limit of 0.4 parts per million, 96% below the FDA 1.0. We do that because we just want to be able to provide that standard of ultimate purity that we can. So for us, when we deal with people with autoimmune disease in particular, we really point them in even that direction where anything, any toxicity at all is unacceptable for their body that's as low, low, low as it gets. So, when you see our salmons, that's something anyone could eat multiple times per day, every day, never have a concern around ever accumulating too much mercury.

I know that one of the questions you asked me earlier, I think it'd be a good place touch on, it’s like, how do you determine how much mercury is safe for you? Well, first of all, you should always talk to your medical professional, but the rule there's a mercury calculator, which they call the reference dose.

Melanie Avalon: Oh, yes, I know this calculator well.

Sean Wittenberg: That's right. So, the reference dose is basically saying that as a human being, you can have 1 mcg of mercury for every kilogram of body mass per day. So that's the ratio that you would have of how you would run the calculator. So, what the calculator does is it takes the average concentration of mercury in a particular species, and they usually use the FDA data, and then they would use you type in your body weight and what fish you're eating, and it can tell you, “Oh, it's safe or not safe.” But that's the calculation. Now, most people aren't measuring 1 mcg/day. They're usually looking at it and the [unintelligible 00:57:20] way I consider and suggest people look at it is on a weekly basis, because that's just a more reasonable amount of time, so that would just be x7.

So 7 mcg/kg of body mass per week. So if you think about it, it really makes sense. You have a baby or a small child, let's say 15-20 kg then you have the mom that might be 55-60 kg and then you have the dad that's 70 to 80 kg. Well, each one of those people, because of their body mass, can handle a different mercury load where the 80 kg man can consume more than the 15-20 kg kid which is logical. That makes sense. That is the general math behind the consumption regulations and so, for us, when you don't test every fish, you really are working off the average. If you're working on the variance, you're not really able to use that calculator all that well.

So, for us, if you were to go and use the mercury calculator for Safe Catch products, you could look at it from two levels. You could look at it based on our averages, which is the way I do it or if you're really risk averse, you can build your consumption guidelines off of the limit, which would be ultimate worst case. So, when we make recommendations for someone who, like you or me, actually, I can't speak for you right now. I don't know where you are in your life. But for me, as an example, I work off the averages because I'm a relatively healthy adult male, 76 kg. I use that math to guide my consumption in the fish I eat to make sure that I'm always keeping my mercury levels low.

But if, say, you were pregnant, I would have you operating off of our limits, not our averages, because I want to give you the most risk averse posturing and recommendation for you, because your fetus is the most vulnerable to the issues of mercury toxicity. So that's a little bit of how the science and the recommendations go from our point of view from the industry.

Melanie Avalon: What are your thoughts as well? Because when I would go down this rabbit hole of researching all the species and this was way before my exposure to Safe Catch, it seemed like the conclusion I drew was that with salmon, for example, that I decided I actually preferred sustainably raised, responsibly farmed salmon because of what I was seeing in the data about mercury levels compared to wild salmon, for example. How do you feel about Safe Catch aside like farmed versus wild? I know there's farmed is like talking about variance, huge variance there with practices and everything. 

Sean Wittenberg: I totally get what you're saying. Look, let's talk, first of all, farming in seafood is very much like farming in America. You have an organic biodiverse farm sitting there, going to the farmers market, selling the goods that they just harvested from their organic, completely controlled farm. And then you have the other type of farm, the mega farm, where you're like, this is a GMO corn that got sprayed with pesticides, and it's just covered in stuff, and it's not as healthy. And so that same ear of corn that you get from that farmers market, from your local farmer who grew it from organic soils and tested and pure everything versus that GMO DDT covered ear of corn that same disparity exists within farmed food. So, there are some farmed fish operators out there that are doing a spectacular job okay.

They're keeping the feed protein forward more in line with what the fish would naturally eat if it was a wild fish and the pods are very low density, so it has a lot of water filtration coming through the pods and they're doing a phenomenal job. And it's expensive to do the job very, very well. Very expensive to do the job very well. And that's reflective in the price that you would see at your fishmonger, your grocery store, wherever you're buying your farm fish. Then there're those farms out there that are doing it the other way, where you're using a very cheap feed, grain based, very dense feed that would be producing more omega-6s in the fish than omega-3s and then they're in a pod that is over packed. So, to keep the fish alive in that pod, they're dosing it with antibiotics to avoid it from getting sick because the water is not clean and the filtration is not working well.

And you have all of those types of behaviors happening within that farm. And while it would give them a greater yield and more product, just like that GMO ear of corn would, you're not getting as healthy of a product. And if you're eating seafood, you're not only eating it because it tastes great, you're eating it because you're hoping it's healthier for you than any other protein you're putting in your body. But that farm fish might have more omega-6s than omega-3s and it might have your antibiotic dose.

So, when you look at things like shrimp, which is the number one seafood item in America, is mainly farmed, almost 80-90% farmed and there's a huge disparity between what is high quality farmed shrimp and some of the dirtiest aquaculture in the world. So, you just don't know what you're getting. So, ASC, as far as a certification label, while it's about sustainability, also puts pressure on having those types of water filtration pod densities to allow for healthier farm stock, just farm food is something you really have to look forward to make sure that you know where it's coming from and you trust the source so I don't eat much farmed fish, but when I do, I have to know where it's coming from and I have to be able to really feel comfortable in that farm. 

So, I don't know if that answered your question, Melanie, as well as you'd like, but it's just a huge, wide range. So, from a mercury perspective, when you control the feed, you can do a lot of good in controlling the mercury loads. So, you can get a much lower average mercury level and a much more consistent mercury concentration across your portfolio. But for the most part, it's a really strong way. Although, as a funny story, when we first got started testing-- I don't know if it's funny, it might be sad, actually, now that I'm just preparing to share it with you. [laughs] But we were testing a Canadian farm salmon back in 2006 as we first got started and we saw the mercury concentration in this particular farm salmon to be super high.

I thought our machine was off and we were recalibrating it and testing it again. I was like. “This can’t be right.” And sure enough, we kept getting the same results over and over again. I took a sample, I sent it to a third-party lab, because this was early in our process, and I just couldn't believe it. What we realized was that this salmon farm, where they were farming the salmon, was near a gold mining operation. So, they use mercury heavily in gold mining because mercury binds to gold and so they use mercury to identify in gold mining. So, gold mining is a big polluter of mercury in our lakes and streams, gold mining is and so we found that out. Like, “Oh, my gosh, this is like, what a discovery.” 

So, our partner that we were working with stopped buying salmon from that farm, and we protected a group of people. It was one of our first really good like feel-good moments where our technology found a problem and gave a solution to protect consumers. And it wasn't in tuna, it was in farmed salmon on this particular instance. Now, that was anomaly. I won't say that that's going to be common practice. I don't want to alarm anyone on your listening right now, but about farmed salmon because most [unintelligible 01:05:56] farmed salmon is a great thing to eat.

And the other thing I want touch on really quickly before I get off it is while we talk a lot about mercury and the dangers of mercury and other issues in fish, eating seafood, eating particularly healthy seafood is the best thing you can do for your health from a diet perspective, there's nothing better that you can put in your body than particularly nutrient dense, high omega-3 rich wild seafood that's low in mercury. Your body, your brain function, your health, your metabolism, motor skills, everything benefits from seafood.

So, finding a way to at least get two to three servings of seafood in your life on a weekly basis is a fantastic thing you can do for your health. If you only have low income or you don't have a budget that allows you to really enjoy some of the wild Alaskan fair or some of the more expensive premium fish. Since this is a biohacking show, we can have a little hack for you. If you buy farmed fish like a tilapia, which is a very low-cost seafood species or things like that farmed fish that you can afford, try to find yourself a fish oil pill that you trust and take your omega-3 fish oil pill with the seafood that you're eating.

Now what people don't realize is when you take a fish oil pill without the seafood, your bioavailability of that omega-3s from the fish oil is somewhere between 7% to 15%, is the science that I read of that omega-3. Now, if you take that same fish oil pill with fish, even if that fish is a low omega-3 fish, there are micronutrients and things within that fish that work with that omega-3 that allows your body to absorb up to 90 plus percent of those omega-3s coming from that fish oil pill.

So, taking a fish oil pill with eating fish together would be the greatest way to get the most omega-3s in your system. If you can't get a wild salmon or some of these other species which are naturally super high in omega-3s, more than you would really ever need to get into your body because there's diminishing returns to omega-3s like any other nutrient. But that's a little hack that we talk particularly to pregnant women who are middle to low income and really can't afford to buy $25 a pound of salmon from Alaska or stuff like that. So, just a fun little hack.

Melanie Avalon: I will comment on that to make sure you're getting a high-quality omega-3 supplement, because I get really concerned with the oxidation of those sensitive oils.

Sean Wittenberg: I'm sure you have on your platform a recommended fish oil that you enjoy. I mean, cold press as a way of doing it. I like cold press omega-3s, they take it from salmon frames from Alaska is one that I like. So, like a salmon where they'll cold press the heads in the frames and pull the oil from the fish there. And that gives a high-quality omega-3. There's krill-based omega-3 pills which are also very good. There're some fantastic ones out there, and I don't want to go down all of them, but there're some great fish oil pills out there. I just don't recommend taking a fish oil pill exclusively without eating seafood because, as I mentioned, you're not going to be able to replace everything that you get from fish with just a pill.

Melanie Avalon: I had never thought about it in that context, so I'm remembering that for ongoing and actually related to that. So, the processing, the cooking of your fish, of Safe Catch, how does that occur? Is it low heat? Does it retain the omega-3 oils?

Sean Wittenberg: It does. It retains all the omega-3s naturally found in the fish in the can and with little to no omega-3 loss from the processing. So, it took like I said we’re scientists, so at least that's what we represent. When we came into building the tuna process, we started from scratch and we went around and looking at all these different processing methods and all the different ways you can do it. And when you look at traditional tuna packing, what they do is fish are frozen at sea. We call them frozen round fish. So, the tuna is frozen at sea either in a brine base freezer or blast freezer. And then that frozen round fish is brought to a landing and then that fish is unloaded. 

If it wasn't for us, will go into a cold storage facility and then the tuna packer would go pull the fish from the cold storage facility and process it. And what they would do is they would take the frozen round fish and they'd put them in these pre-cookers, these racks, and the fish would cook with guts in, heads on, tails on, the whole thing just cook. They would cook away the fat-soluble nutrients the fish oils and stuff would cook away, not 100%, but large amounts cook away and just drop out. And then you would be left at the end with this lean, dehydrated protein. The lean, dehydrated protein would come out of these pre-cookers, this cooked fish, they'd go into these cooling rooms where basically they're just a room with a sprinkler on, and it's just like a room with fire sprinklers above on the roof, just cooling the fish to bring the temperature down.

Once the temperature drops, the fish are then brought into these cleaning rooms where the fish are loined and then cleaned and skin, head, and guts are removed and bloodlines removed until you have this tuna loin, four loins on one tuna, and then that's a lean dehydrated protein without really any oils in it or any water in it now. So that fish is then processed into a can and depending on the spec, it would either be a solid, which would be mostly steak or a chunk which would be steak and flake mixed together. Those are just different qualities of spec.

Then they would have to add a packing medium to it to seal it and cook it a second time. So, we call it twice cooked. So, you'd add, it would say in water means that lean dehydrated loin was added with water. If it was in oil, they added oil. If they were trying to really cost engineer the product, they would add, in some cases, a vegetable broth and a pyrophosphate. And the vegetable broth and pyrophosphate are just cheaper than tuna and they're fillers and that allows them to drop the cost of goods, drop the cost down. And then they would seal the cans with either water or oil with the potential of vegetable broth and things like that, seal it, and then they would put into a retort again and cook it a second time. 

And then that second-time cooking it is what makes it shelf stable. It sits on your shelf and that's what we all grew up with. If you go all the way back in time to what happened, how this all came to be was really at the turn of the 19th century. It's like as we were becoming the 1900s, this is the turn of the 20th century. So, as we become the 1900s, there was a shortage of essentially canned chicken. The US population was growing, and canned chicken was in short supply and so they realized this fish species, which they used to call Tombo later rebranded albacore, was this process and if you cooked it once and you cooked away all the fat-soluble nutrients, and you're left with this white, lean, dehydrated protein, and you added water or oil and you cooked it, there was this flavorless, white or low flavor, low fish taste flavor white steak like protein. So, when you look at names like Chicken of the Sea-

Melanie Avalon: Oh, man.

Sean Wittenberg: -that's where it came from. So, the whole marketing was around, like, if you don't have canned chicken, this is a cheaper alternative to canned chicken. Now, that unit economics and all that has changed over the last 100 years. But the point is, that's how it all started. So, this twice-cooked processing method was just an artifact of a demand or a solution to a problem 100 years ago. So fast forward today, we're not looking for a substitute for canned chicken. That's not what we're building.

We're trying to find the best way to make a shelf stable tuna or seafood product. And so that twice-cooked processing, to me, was like the old way, which is funny because the processing technique that we adopted was an even older way. It was a process that was really adopted. They call it the sous vide method, where we just basically cook the fish in its own natural fats. So, if you were to go into the processing line of our copacker, you have seven, eight lines that are doing it the traditional way, which would be 95% of what you see-- 99% of what you see on the shelves of the grocery stores or wherever you go to buy your tuna. And then you could see our products doing it a totally different way.

So, what we did is, with our sous vide method, instead of using that pre-cooker, our frozen round fish that would have been mercury tested, and as I mentioned, went through all of our criteria for acceptance and purchase. Our raw material, instead of going to a pre-cooker, goes into an ice bath. So, we take all of our fish and we put it in ice water overnight to slowly get it just soft enough to be able to cut by hand. So, we're looking at 33 degrees Fahrenheit to 36 degrees Fahrenheit right to that temperature. Once we get it to that temperature, we'll take that fish out, and we'll process it by hand, and we'll hand cut and hand pack.

So we'll cut that loin out of the fish itself, raw, steak that tuna steak raw and then put that sashimi-grade tuna steak really directly into that can without adding anything else. Then we seal the can and then we put that can directly into a retort basket and we cook it. And we developed a retort algorithm for cooking our fish that takes longer at less heat in order to ensure that not only it retains all of its nutrients, but that it has the most balanced and delicious flavor and texture we can possibly create. Again, it's food which, for us, on this call, is both something we can enjoy to eat. It's also nutrients, it's our lifeblood it's all of the things we want it to be. So we don't want it to be just medicine, we want it to be delicious, because that makes it easy for people to develop better habits if they love what they eat. And it tastes great.

And so that's how we built it out. And it took us about five or six months of ideation just to get the cook method the way we want it. And our R&D group and our OEM were very patient with us because we were a bunch of scientists geeking out on how do we make this better again, again, again, again, again? How can we fix the retort baskets to make sure that the heat distribution is even and making sure that the cans in the center of the retort basket versus the cans on the edge of the retort baskets are all cooked the same with the same thermodynamic conditioning. And we're putting in sensors inside of the retort baskets and building all these data sets to ensure that when people buy our product and they get it, that they're getting not only the lowest mercury, not only the most sustainable, not only the most nutrient dense, but also the best tasting. We were hyper focused on that and so that underpins every product we make that same philosophy around ensuring every element has been satisfied.

Melanie Avalon: That is incredible. In the cooking process, is there anything that can leach from the cans into the fish? 

Sean Wittenberg: Great, great question. So, we started out looking at lacquer. So, we did PAHs. I mean, not PAHs, PCBs was a big focus for us in can selection. So, we were concerned about what was we call it a horrible word to use on your show, but we call it a lacquer, which is basically the sealer. So, you have steel on steel for the cans as they seal, but you need something to be in that little rim there to make it airtight and to ensure that there's no leaching. So, we worked with a can provider that provided an organic lacquer made out of natural materials that could go into and be our sealing agent. Now, because of Prop 65 in California, we don't say BPA free on our packaging because we can't. 

Our legal staff and everyone tell us not to say it and so we don't say it. But I can tell you that the lacquer that we have-- that we use to seal our cans is PCB free. That we test our products for PCBs and we test our products for everything. We test our products through [unintelligible 01:18:58] for PCBs and we've never found any detectable levels of PCBs in our products ever and that was the concern about the potential leaching. 

Melanie Avalon: What are the cans made out of, like, what metal? 

Sean Wittenberg: Steel. 

Melanie Avalon: Steel. Okay, got you. I'm just really excited because we're going back to earlier there's just so much health benefits to fish. But then there's just all these concerns and so you're really just addressing all of that. So even with the lower temperature cooking and everything, that is just beyond incredible. I saw on your website it's Kosher as well, the cans. 

Sean Wittenberg: Yeah, yeah. So, for us just to take a step back and to think about what we're dealing with, that's why you're doing such great work, Melanie, with your podcast, trying to educate people. But as you know, it's whack-a-mole. You're just like, there're so many things coming at you at so many times. You hit one thing, you're onto the next and so. What we try to do at Safe Catch, particularly thinking about single moms. My dad was raised by a single mom. Thinking about single moms in particular and we started thinking about, like, “Okay, you're a single mom, you're earning money, you're raising kids, you're running a household, you're doing superpower stuff.” So, can we create a brand that she's like, “Okay, I just can look for the Safe Catch brand and this mole is not going to resurface.”

This whack-a-mole got hit down, it stayed down, it's out. So, I now have something that's fast, healthy, tested, and safe. So, I can say, like I said at the beginning of this conversation, “I'm not screwing up my kids.” It's not like I'm making their lives perfect. It's much more defense than offense. I want to be able to say, “Here's this one for you, mom. You do not have to worry anymore about the mercury issue or about getting the right proteins and healthy products.” So, our marketing team and our product development team spend a lot of time working on recipes and creative ways to take our tuna and our different products and develop different recipes and cool ways to eat it healthy, to keep it fresh and unique, so that here's something that's shell stable. 

You can leave it in your pantry. It's good for three years. It's sitting there. And now, if you don't have time to go to the grocery store, you're running home after your job to come back to see your kids, to then make them some dinner. You have something that's fast, nutritious. So, it becomes a part of this single mom's toolbox and I should say single parents. I do know single dads, as well, are doing the thing. But just because of my upbringing and the stories, my dad would tell me as a child of the challenges that he faced with having only one parent. You just start to think about these types of consumers. So, for us, we're having a lot of fun with what we're doing because we're not hyper focused on our commercial success. We're not hyper focused. 

We don't have a revenue goal or something we want to do. We just want to continue to keep our mind focused on the people who are eating our products and their families and keep our mind focused on our partners who help facilitate to make this all possible. It's not just safe catches here. We're the brand, but we have worked with fishing companies now all over the world. I've been in this space now for over 20 years, and I have fishing relationships. So, we'll buy from everywhere, from South Africa, all throughout the Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, Atlantic Ocean. These fishing partners are doing tremendous work. We wouldn't exist without them. And when we support their sustainable fishing practices and we're able to be a customer for them, it makes that work easier. 

We're able to communicate that to our customers and the people who are eating our products, then they get excited and it completes the chain. But we give props to our warehousing groups, to our cold storage support, to our pallet manufacturers and our packaging manufacturers and all these different folks out there. And then ultimately, we're at this phase now where it's hard to build awareness. The same whack-a-mole challenges that a mom has or a family has in making sure that they're doing the right thing, eating the right products, avoiding the potholes and the riskier items, and just trying to navigate this rapidly changing world. It's also full of information, real and not real. So, the amount of images through social media, the amount of podcasts, the amount of noise that's out there is a lot. 

So, for us, when we feel we're doing this great work and we're really providing a product of unmatched purity, and quality, and integrity to get that word out there, right, to be able to tell people about it in an authentic way, where people can really understand that, no, no, no this isn't a gimmick. This is real. It's rooted in love and compassion and designed to help you live a healthier, happier life. To get that messaging out there is so challenging. So, I just wanted to make sure before our time ran out, that I took a moment to thank you, Melanie, for giving a small brand like ours the opportunity to share our story on your platform,

Because awareness for us is our hardest challenge today, explaining to people that we have three to five times less mercury than most other brands on the shelf and that we're doing this work because we believe in it and we care about it, and we care about the people that are trying to live healthier, happier lives, and we care about trying to be a part of that solution for them. But it's so difficult, Melanie, to share this. It's nothing that can pop up in a digital ad on the side of your Google search or something. And you're like, “Oh, yeah, I learned it all right there,” in that little pop-up ad. Like, “No, you don't.” So, hopefully we can get more trusted experts like you to give us this opportunity. But it's hard. 

Yes, it's early in the morning here in Thailand, but it's an exciting morning for me to have this chance to talk with you, to have the privilege of sharing our brand and company with your listeners and your followers who count on you and trust your word. And then to give us that platform to extend your trust and your platform to us is huge. It's an honor and we're very very grateful for that. 

Melanie Avalon: I am so grateful to you guys. You're literally what I'm searching for because it's just so, so needed and nobody, I mean, obviously, you basically pioneered what you're doing right now, and I'm just overwhelmingly grateful. And it goes back to what you were saying about the trust aspect. It's just so convoluted and there're so many factors and who do you know what to trust? So, it's really nice when you can have a company that you can just trust the company and then you're good. [giggles] You can get the products from you guys and be good to go on that front. And even we didn't even talk about this. I'm really curious because I'm fascinated by fish fraud. 

Have you guys been looking for, I don't know how the process works when you guys are vetting and looking for sourcing, but have you guys personally come across fish fraud? I mean, I just know the stats on it. The stats blew my mind about the percentage of fish, even at restaurants and at grocery stores that are just not the species they say they are. It's like, mind blowing. 

Sean Wittenberg: It is mind blowing. It is mind blowing. So, before we became a brand, right, I told you 2013 was our big pivot. But before 2013, we would work with seafood distributors and go into those different environments and do testing and try to test to certify restaurant menus or grocery store retail shelves or trying to do that type of work. So, I got a firsthand look from 2008 till 2013, that period of time I saw this happening. So, yeah, it's significant. So, think about it like this. You have that farm salmon that is at that real value engineered side where they're focused exclusively on yield and maximizing or minimizing their cost, one of these fish farms like that. They're making salmon and that product is going to come out of that farm let's just say for $5 a pound.

And then you're going to go up to Alaska and you're going to go to a wild sockeye or coho. Well, let's just say coho, for example. And you're going to look at that product coming out of that fishery and it'll be two to three times the cost just for the raw material, let alone the processing and supply chain and all the other challenges to get it to your restaurant, to your chef or to your fishmonger at the grocery store counter. So, you have a price discrepancy between the raw material of 2, 3, 4x. So, you can go ahead and you can sell one species for the other. That's harder to do, but what's not harder to do is to take a percentage of that fish that you're selling and put in 10% of that farm fish, 20% of that farm fish that has that 3, 4x discrepancy. And now you're dropping your costs, increasing your margins. So that happens a lot.

And when you go to a restaurant and a restaurant wants to sell a premium salmon and they sell it, oh, this is a coho from Alaska and it's MSC certified and all that jazz. And then it comes onto your plate for the average consumer, they're not going to be able to tell the difference from looking at it that one was farmed for $5 a pound and one was caught wild for $20 a pound. And so that type of fraud right there is prevalent. It is in the market place a lot today. I think that comes down to the trust factor.

It’s not an issue for us as a company because we buy directly from the source. We sort the species, we run it all ourselves. So, we'll get MSC certified pink salmon from Alaska and we might get a couple of other species of salmon that got commingled potentially. We might get a chinook or sockeye or something might get in the mix there somehow. We pull those out. We only pack the pink salmon in there, but it's a very, very small percentage. They're all wild fish and they're all good. But when you get to the actual restaurant side of the world, Atlantic salmon is traditionally what you would see would be farmed salmon.

So, when you see Atlantic salmon on the menu, that's traditionally farmed, and if you're at a nice restaurant or even a restaurant that has high integrity, that's a more value restaurant, you can ask them about that Atlantic salmon, and I encourage you to just ask them about it. Is it farmed or wild? And if it's farmed, like, where did the farm come from? What's it called? And they should be able to tell you all that. If they don't know the name of the farm-- For me, if it's farmed salmon and they can't tell me the name of the farm, they don't know much about it, then I usually won't buy it. 

If you can't get me comfortable at the restaurant when I'm sitting down on the farm salmon, if you can, then I'll have that farm salmon and it could be great. But that's the reason they do it. And you can see the same thing in other species. You can see it in different types of sole, different types of rockfish, different types of shrimp. There's just a wide range of value between a wild shrimp or even a high-grade farm shrimp. There're some great operations in Costa Rica and stuff like that producing really high-end farm shrimp versus a farm in Mainland China, which is really focused on cost engineering. And so that's another issue. Sometimes, I'll look at country of origin, and for me, personally, I don't know if this is good to say on your show or not. For me, I don't do tend to geek farm shrimp from China or India just because I don't trust the water filtration and the environment around the pods.

Melanie Avalon: I agree with that with the sourcing. And also, I was seeing studies where they were checking fish in grocery stores and restaurants and it wasn't even the same species, which is just, like-- And it was shockingly high numbers.

Sean Wittenberg: Yeah. And there's another issue that's out there that we call, it's called honey laundering. So, what happens is these fish farms will use antibiotics and a lot of things that are not allowed to be in the fish or in the seafood, and they import that into the United States. And the FDA, while I mentioned it, is underfunded to realize it's mandate, it still is doing work. It still is testing product. It still is rejecting product. So, a farm, let's say a product from Vietnam of farmed shrimp is coming in and they test it and test positive for antibiotics. So, like, “Ah, you're rejected. You can't come in. You have an illegal antibiotic in this.” I'm going to send it back. So, what happens to that shrimp? 

Well, with the honey laundering, what we call that is they'll take that load of shrimp and the company will ask for it returned, and then they'll ship the shrimp back to the original source. And what they'll do is they'll repackage it and put it into a different brand and send it right back to the United States. And send it right back. And sometimes they'll send it to a different country. They'll put a Philippines tag on it or they'll put-- another country send it back in and because the FDA can't test everything, they're playing the statistics game that it will come in and it'll get through the second time or the third time and eventually it'll get into the US a different way. And there's nothing that the US can really do to stop that. 

And so that's why getting trusted brands become such a big deal in seafood, because it’s like who can you trust because that behavior is happening right now. Another thing that happens right now in the industry is something we call the green card. And this happens with swordfish, which started our conversation. So, when you have swordfish, what will happen is they'll bring in, once you get a certain number of imports in a calendar year that can get tested, you can get something which is like this green importation card, which allows you to just import without being tested anymore because you've got enough results under your brand.

So, what happens is people in swordfish will bring in what we call pups, which are just like baby swordfish and they'll bring in a couple of loads of these baby swordfish, which are so juvenile, they haven't even lived long enough to accumulate the high levels of mercury. And then once they have that number of imports done, they get their card. Now they're going to start bringing in the commercial volumes of the larger fish, which they know are going to be above one part per million. That's not every provider. I don't want to just paint a horrible brush across the whole industry, but that is another one of those sneaky behaviors that happens within the industry that allows higher mercury product to swiftly get into the United States. 

So, to me, those two issues of honey laundering and this green card importation system are two different areas in which the US government could get a little bit tighter with their regulations because the industry knows how to do it right. The industry knows how to work around some of these regulations and perceived protections.

Melanie Avalon: That is so overwhelmingly upsetting. 

Sean Wittenberg: I'm sorry, I didn't want to end you on that. I wanted to end on something positive note. 

Melanie Avalon: Well, actually, just really quick question about that because I opened this up by saying that I was into less regulation, but that I get really upset when I see swordfish on the menu. Do you think it should be okay to even have swordfish as something that we buy, for example? 

Sean Wittenberg: Really hard question because I'm all about choice. If you're a consumer and you want to eat swordfish, I feel like you should be allowed to eat swordfish. I have some family friends, people who've known me now for my whole life, who I know love swordfish, and I tell them this news and they've definitely reduced their consumption after learning the facts, but they still love it and they still want to eat it, So, who am I? I like a drink. If I have one or two drinks, not the end of the world. If I sat down and had 15 drinks that's a problem. 

So, if you're going to have something like this, like swordfish, I would caution you to just do so mindfully and with the awareness that you're eating something that's high in mercury and that it should be a rarity, something that you really enjoy sparingly, I guess, is how I would say it. If you want to have it, just know what you're eating. It's really important to just know. And if you're doing that, know what you're going to eat seafood. Otherwise, like, if you're going to eat swordfish, that should be, at a minimum, the only seafood you eat that month, at a minimum, and maybe longer, depending on who you are and if you're pregnant or trying to become pregnant or you're a small child, zero. You should eat zero. But if you're a 25-year-old or plus and your body is fully developed, your brain is fully developed, and this is something you want to eat and you understand the risks, enjoy. 

Melanie Avalon: I feel the exact same way. And I think the main issue was just, and we were talking about this, like, the lack of awareness. I just don't think people realize with wine, alcohol, and cigarettes, we know the issues, but with fish, you don't see the mercury, there's not a lot of education, o that's where I think the--

Sean Wittenberg: Think about this, Melanie, when I mentioned the fact that we're approaching 8 million mercury tests as a company, right. That's more mercury testing than every government, every private laboratory, every private company, and publicly traded company in the world's database combined, way more. So, a large part of the issue that could exist before Safe Catch is there just wasn't the opportunity to do enough testing to be able to provide a reliable standard. I mean, the fact that we test every single tuna for mercury, that we know the mercury concentration of every fish that goes into every can and we can publish exact limits. And those limits and averages are available to consumers to be able to not just use an average representation to the mercury calculator, but use the actual mercury numbers in the product for your actual body mass and where you are in your life. 

Like, are you pregnant or not? Are you under the age of 25 or over the age of 25? Do you have other health issues? Does your body have a challenging time processing toxins? These are all personal issues that each person has to understand and then that will help shape for you, the individual, what is safe or not safe. But the information needs to be more readily available and consumers need to have more and more accurate information. I think that the information, particularly on a swordfish versus just how much mercury is in there is not well known. People do not-- I'm sure if you're talking to your friends in Atlanta and you're going out to some seafood restaurant in Atlanta, you're going to go sit down and you see the seafood menu. 

I promise you that you're likely going to be a multiple of knowledge greater than your friends around the table who are going to go look, “Oh, I'm going to have this today.” Like, “Oh, this looks good.” I'm thinking more about the recipe. Like, “Oh, this is Cajun swordfish or black pepper or something swordfish.” That sounds good. I like spicy or something like that. And they're going to look at it that way, and you're going to be at the table like, [unintelligible 01:38:23] “ow, ow, ow, ow,” did you know? And they're going to look at you like, “What are you talking about, Melanie? It's just fish. All fish is good,” “No, no, no, no, there is more nuance to it.” The other thing that's interesting about fish is just we're just now-- as the United States, particularly, we're just now becoming seafood savvy. For the United States, that's a relatively new thing. 

I think that a large part of that came as a byproduct of the sushi boom that took over America over the last like, 15, 20 years, where people all of a sudden now know the difference between a bluefin and a bigeye and an albacore and a skipjack and a yellowfin. Like, know all the tuna species and they know different salmon species and they know the different food grade and quality, and they know a good fish shouldn't smell like fish. And all that type of stuff is now known for the US population. But go back to when I was a kid in the 80s, I didn't know there was a difference between species of tuna, just a tuna and then there was salmon, and all species of salmon was salmon. You know what I mean? 

I just didn't have the knowledge base that I have today. Because if you look inside of other proteins, there's not a wide range of species of cow, right? There's not a huge range of chicken species, there's not a huge range of pork species, but there are hundreds and hundreds of commercial seafood species being sold in the United States and around the world today, like, hundreds and hundreds. So, there're more types of salmon, as an example, than there are types of commercial pigs, chickens, and cows combined. And that's just salmons, let alone soles or there're dozens of species of shrimp being sold in the United States and around the world today. So, there's just so much more variety in the seafood supply chain. And another thing to remind yourselves is that seafood is one of the last products that we still consume that's a wild animal. 

We're not having a lot of bison and deer and things like that are wild animals today. Farm chicken, farm cows, farm pigs, and then wild tuna and wild swordfish and wild seabass. So, aquaculture is growing at a significant rate and if done at a high-quality operation, is a needed and excellent addition to our food systems, and something that I applaud. So, I'm just not like, 100% pro wild. I prefer wild fish because I find that the fish tastes better for me when it has a wild feedstock. But as far as health and wellness is concerned, these ASC and other well-run aquaculture operations are needed because it takes pressure off of climate change. I'd like to talk about that really quickly if we can do that for a second just to think about it. 

Melanie Avalon: No, that'd be great. 

Sean Wittenberg: If you look at climate change and you look at a cow versus a tuna and you look at the difference there, if you were to look at a four-ounce serving of beef-- I'm trying to get this here, get it up. Yeah. So, a four-ounce serving of beef would put out around 27 kg of CO2 to create around 22 g of protein. So, 27 kg of CO2 for 22 kg of protein. When you look at a Safe Catch Ahi or our Elite, which are super, super low mercury, that's our skipjack and our yellowfin, you're going to use about 2 to 3 kg of CO2 to create 36 g of protein. 

So, you're going to get, instead of 22 g of protein in that four-ounce beef burger, you're going to get 36 g of protein and you're going to actively remove 25 kg of CO2 when you choose that Safe Catch tuna sandwich over that hamburger. Now that is a powerful way to not only eat a healthier protein, but to actively participate in fighting climate change. I mean, if you look at the impossible burger, the impossible burger only has about 18 g of protein in that four-ounce burger and they use about 4 kg of CO2 to make that. So, from a carbon perspective, that impossible burger is an absolute homerun compared to the beef burger, but you're getting less protein. But when you look at Safe Catch, Safe Catch is superior to the impossible burger, it has about half the carbon load of an impossible burger. It has about one eighth, one tenth of the beef burger. And you're going to get a superior protein and you're going to get 50% more of it when compared to the beef burger.

So, it's just a way to look at us as consumers where we look at how do we act as participants in protecting our environment. I look at climate change as the largest threat to the human population and to the world at large. I look at what can we do as consumers to be participants in the solution. And to me, the food you eat and the energy you consume, those two factors as an individual are the greatest opportunities for you to combat climate change. So just food for thought as we put a bow on this thing, just to know that when you're eating Safe Catch, you're not just doing what's right for you and your body, you're not just eating something that's sustainable to protect the food stock, you're also doing something greater than that. And that is you're making a conscious choice to help protect the planet from climate change. 

Melanie Avalon: I'm actually surprised I haven't thought about this aspect more with the climate change debate, because, as you know, it's hotly debated. It's confusing. We hear claims on all sides, especially the plant based versus the regenerative agriculture versus animal products. I personally am suspicious about an entirely plant-based system and the effects on climate change. I think a lot is not accounted for there. It sounds like, honestly, this is the way to go as far as ultimate nutrition and climate supportive, like regenerative agriculture and this type of seafood.

Sean Wittenberg: Yeah. Look, I want to say that I also eat red meat, I also eat pork, I also eat chicken. But for me, I'm very, very focused on being able to have that traceability to the farm. Like, is it grass fed? meaning, is it grazing, is it natural, is it cage free chickens? What's the feed for these animals? And when you eat responsibly raised and processed red meats, then that's a great source. It's healthy, it can be very good for you, and it can be minimally damaging to our environment more so than other proteins. But if you're going to do it rarely or once a week versus many people in America have red meat four or five times a week. 

If you're going to go from four or five times a week to once a week and you're to replace those other red meat days with Safe Catch days, then that's a great way to make a shift, that's great for the planet, great for your health and still get a chance to enjoy those foods that are delicious. Who doesn't love a burger or a steak? I mean, come on. I know I do. So, I don't want to push people to a place where it's like, just reject red meat or reject chicken or reject and be pescatarian. I'm about 85% pescatarian, I would say. I have two land animal protein meals per week between chicken and beef. And other than that, it's basically all seafood.

Melanie Avalon: Yeah, we're similar, actually. I mean, I eat seafood most nights. And you test for radiation as well? 

Sean Wittenberg: Oh, yeah, we do that. We do that radiation testing work as well. We stopped doing it at about 2014 because we hadn't seen any detectable levels. We really never did in tuna because it's a highly migratory species. But we stopped doing that testing at that time. But then in the recent news about Japan beginning to release wastewater again from the Fukushima powerplant, we started to implement testing again. And the testing that we're doing right now is really just preventative and just appeasing people's potential concerns. We have yet to see anything that would be newsworthy or a point of concern thus far, but we're doing that work because, like we said, we want consumers to just be able to know that I go to Safe Catch and I just trust it. 

I know that they're going to be doing whatever they need to do to make sure that we're okay and we're safe, and that safety and wellness will be their number one priority above all else. And so that's why we do that testing. That's why we do histamine and additional testing that we do, even stuff that we don't market or advertise. 

Melanie Avalon: Sorry, I have to interrupt because I'm so excited about the histamine. You test for histamine in Safe catch?

Sean Wittenberg: Yes, we do. And so not every single day. We test daily. We run samples throughout the day on raw material for histamine testing for the listeners. Histamine is a chemical that develops in scombroid species when the fish gets above, I believe, 45 degrees Fahrenheit, it can start to develop histamines. And once you cook the fish, the histamine development will stop. So, if a fish is temperature abused before cooking, you can develop histamines, and histamines will give you, like, it will make you sick instantly, really with. It could be anywhere from two minutes to two hours after consuming histamines.

And the results or the impact for your health is very similar to what's it called-- unlike food poisoning, where you could either be vomiting or diarrhea or both and it can be quite severe. So obviously, that's a problem that is normal. The industry is very aware of it. Most people have really good HACCP and chain of custody protocols. We do as well. But just to make sure that everyone's doing their job, we'll test each of these catches and make sure that histamine results are passing below any detectable levels as well. We use a competitive ELISA technology for that.

Melanie Avalon: I actually have an app called Food Sense Guide and it compares eleven different compounds in over 300 foods. And one of the reasons I created it was histamine was something I was paying acutely attention to. So canned fish is often said to be higher in histamines--

Sean Wittenberg: Well, yeah, it's just all about temperature abuse. And so, the temperature abuse is what does it. So, it's getting better now. I mean, the controls and the systems are just much better, but it still can happen. So, we do that testing. Funny thing is, we started doing that testing for food service purveyors in Las Vegas when we first started, before we became a brand. And the reason they did it is that the difference between alcohol poisoning and histamine poisoning are hard to determine. You can just get vomiting. So, what was happening was, in Las Vegas, they were having guests who would go to some Michelin-rated sushi restaurant, and they would complain about getting histamine poisoning. And they're like, well, we think it might be the 13 shots of tequila you had by the pool. 

So, what they would say is that they couldn't tell. They couldn't defend it. So, the casinos would end up comping people's dinners or comping people's rooms because they couldn't defend whether it was histamine or not, they just didn't have the evidence. It was my word against your word. And the PR could be too bad. So, it's just cheaper to give someone a room. Well, then they hired us to build the protocols and then all of a sudden, that same narrative would happen. They'd be like, “Well, you gave this histamine poisoning from the tuna at the sushi restaurant.”  And they're like, “No, we didn't.” How do you know? We have all of our fish tested and we would provide them with results. And all of a sudden, that loophole where people would get free rooms, they got closed, closed the loop.

Those are the funny stories along the way over 20 years of doing this, where you're just like, wow, sitting in a room with some food safety guy at the wind underneath their hotel, asking us to help protect against people who are out at one of their day clubs getting drunk and then asking for free stuff.

Melanie Avalon: I love that story. That's amazing. Last rapid-fire question, I swear, the ones that are salt free. Is all of the fish brined or is some of the fish brined?

Sean Wittenberg: Yes. So, our skipjack and some of our yellow fin, but most of our skipjack is what's called brine frozen. So, what you do is when you add salt to water, the freezing point goes down. That's why when you go up to Antarctica and stuff like that, there's water there around these big icebergs. Well, that water is definitely colder than 32 degrees or 0 Celsius and that's because it has [unintelligible 01:52:01] salt in the water. And then the glaciers themselves are usually the fresh water on top. But the point is that salt water go down. So, the same scientific principle happens in the hole when you freeze it. And so, you'll have salt water. 

We put the catch of skipjack would go into that salt water, freeze the fish, and then you drain out the saltwater, and some salt can leach into the fish in that circumstances. But if you have a really good fishing supplier, they can control that pretty well. And then the blast freezing, which is really all of our albacore and our salmon products, the blast freezing there is completely devoid of all salt. So, when we have our no salt added products, we only have it for our salmon and our albacore because those would only have no chance of any type of brine freezing, leaching getting into the products. Our skipjack, our Safe Catch Elite, which was our flagship, the first queue we launched, that one is mainly brine frozen. So, there's only one species, no salt added option. 

While we don't add any salt to the product, we consider the salts that you'll have in there to be added from the freezing. So, we don't ever represent no-salt added in our Elite and our yellowfin, but we do a good job of controlling the salt content there. And again, for me, within our-- I don't really eat our albacores. For us, albacore, some people love it. I'm a huge proponent of our Safe Catch Ahi and our Safe Catch Elite. Those are our two lowest mercury tuna species that we provide. Those are the two that are the official tuna of the American Pregnancy Association. So, if you go to the American Pregnancy association, before Safe Catch, there was just do not eat tuna.

So now the American Pregnancy association says, “If you're going to eat tuna, you can eat Safe Catch Elite or skipjack or Ahi. That's been the big shift. So, one of the ways we've launched our brand and really became what we are today. Today, we're the number five brand in America and the number two premium. The way we've really grown is by building a relationship with expecting families, with moms like my mom. So, what we do is a mom now realizes from her health professional, I want to eat tuna while I'm pregnant. And like, well, you can eat Safe Catch. So, then they go and they eat our Safe Catch. They like it, they deliver their baby, and they stay on Safe Catch, and they become loyal customers and members of our community. 

And so, for us, that has been what we've done year over year. So, we've really been in the marketplace since June of 2015 when we launched. So today, we're the number one indexing brand with families with kids age eight and under, because that's the number of years we've been talking to these families. And next year, we hope to be nine and under and then ten and under, and each year just building that relationship and staying true to our values and servicing that community. But again, our Safe Catch Elite. Not here great for everybody, not just pregnant women. It's great for if you're a fitness guy and you want to eat a bunch of tuna and optimize your health and your recovery, because mercury is a neurotoxin. 

So, even if you're not concerned about the issues of your brain function or some of these motor skills or the things that can happen if you're someone like you, Melanie or me, who eats a ton of fish, if you're not concerned about just the accumulation from diet, but you're just trying to be peak performance and optimization, you want to mitigate and remove as many toxins from your body as possible. Because when your toxins are removed, then your body can fix. Spend its time not on removing toxins, but spend its time on healing torn muscles and fortifying your brain function and doing all the things your body will continue to work. If it's not removing toxins, it's going to continue to work on making yourself healthier and better.

So even if you eat fish only a couple of times a week, and you're still focused on maximizing your mind and your body and your health and your physical fitness and wellness, you still want to wherever you can mitigate toxins and again, mercury being one of the more dangerous neurotoxins, is a great one to remove from your diet. So, I don't want this to be like a child and maternity thing. It can be an every person thing. So, my co-founder, Bryan, his wife was pregnant when we were rolling this and so she was able to eat Safe Catch for her. But he's a very healthy guy, doesn't drink and stuff like that. And he was hyper focused on his health and wellness and optimization. So, for him, it was in his household, this was just a homerun for both his wife and now his kids and himself for being optimizing his physical wellness. So, I don't know if that's a good place to close it up, but that's kind of the Safe Catch story and why we built it and what we've learned and what we're trying to do.

Melanie Avalon: It is absolutely incredible. The last question I ask every single guest on this show and it ties into this so much because I'm just so, so grateful for what you guys are doing. So, what is something that you're grateful for? 

Sean Wittenberg: I'm grateful for this opportunity to be able to speak with you here. I'm grateful that while my mom got sick and it was a traumatizing experience for me in my past that we’re able to take that experience and create a product that fully encapsulates our values to protect other moms like my mom. And so that's what I'm grateful. I'm grateful that my partners, these fishing companies, there're a lot of people that took a big risk, Melanie, on supporting our business and going against the grain and allowing us to disrupt and to provide this product and to do this work. If without them, this wouldn't exist. And with them, we can protect moms and kids and everybody and give this opportunity. So, I am grateful for you to be able to share this story. 

I'm grateful for my partners to be able to create a product that can realize our vision and our values and mandate. And those are the things that I'm most grateful for. I'm grateful for an opportunity just to be a part of it. We run a flat organization where we're just really focused on helping. So, I'm just grateful to have an opportunity to help and to be a part of a solution. 

Melanie Avalon: Seriously, thank you so much. I mean, I was already, before this conversation, so grateful for what you guys are doing. And now just hearing all of that in granular detail and everything that goes into it and just how you go above and beyond everything I could have ever imagined. I'm just so, so grateful. And also, for listeners, I'm grateful for this as well. So, if listeners would like to stock up on Safe Catch, which I obviously cannot highly recommend enough, let me just sing it from the rooftops. You can go to safecatch.com, and you can use the coupon code, MELANIEAVALON and that will get you 20% off sitewide. So, thank you so much. Super, super grateful for that. And people could get this in stores as well. 

Sean Wittenberg: One other thing I want to mention is, is we also do this work for your pets. And so, before I go jump off, we have a brand called Pure Cravings. And so, purecravings.com, you can go check that one out as well. And that would be the same values and attributes. We're starting now with cat food to help cats live longer, healthier lives. But we will be working on dog food next. And basically, for us, it's about providing pure healthy food to people and animals while protecting the integrity of this planet. So, if you guys have cats and you also want to look after them, check out purecravings.com. Same tech, same philosophy. Instead of working with OB/GYNS and doctors, we're working with vets and pet nutritionists and doing it that way.

Melanie Avalon: Wow. Oh, my goodness. I'm so excited to see. I mean, you've done so much already. I can't wait to see the future of all the things down the line. This is just--

Sean Wittenberg: Oh, yeah. More will come and hopefully we can do another one of these chats in some future date and we can tell you what's going on next. 

Melanie Avalon: Yes. That would be amazing. Well, thank you, Sean. Thank you for your time. Thank you for what you're doing. Again, listeners, go to safecatch.com and use the coupon code MELANIEAVALON to get 20% off sitewide and just. Yeah. Thank you. I can't wait to see the future of everything and talk again and keep on doing what you're doing because it's changing lives. 

Sean Wittenberg: Thank you so much, Melanie. And thank you for this opportunity to speak to you and to your listeners. It's an honor.

Melanie Avalon: Awesome. Thank you. Have a good day in Thailand.

Sean Wittenberg: Thank you. Have a good day in Atlanta. Have a good night. 

Melanie Avalon: Thank you. I will. Bye.

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