Sole of Discretion - Your Ethical Fishmonger
Sole of Discretion is an ethical fishmonger selling quality, local fish.
We are a Community Interest Company owned by the fishers that land to it. We are 100% committed to ethical, quality fish, and so buy only from static gill or trammel netters and hand liners fishing mostly out of Plymouth. We never buy from bottom trawlers or from boats over 10 metres.
Our fishers receive a fair price, agreed in advance, and set on a 3-month basis. Our aim is to create a market mechanism for rewarding those fishers that do little damage to the marine ecosystem and deliver a quality product.
Our fishers land late in an evening, or early in the morning, we pack and process during the day usually into 300gm fillet packs, and courier it to customers for next day delivery. It’s hard to beat that freshness, and because we use only static nets or hand liners, the quality is unbeatable. We trace back to each boat, and all our retail packs state the name of the fisher and method of catch. We also blast freeze our fish - this is an integral part of our ethos: the small-scale fishers are often unable to get out in poor weather, so in order to meet customer demand and be able to continuously supply, we sell their fish frozen when they are not able to get out to sea. In blind tastings, blast frozen, freshly landed fish tasted really good compared to fresh fish that is a few days old, in fact, many people preferred the frozen!
We have recently been audited by SALSA and the Soil Association, and are the UK’s first wild fishery permitted to use their logo.
We also work with Exeter University’s marine biology department to help verify the science behind what we do, and videos and links to their research is publicly available.