Imagine two ice cream trucks that roam your neighborhood selling identical treats on hot summer days. The only difference is that one of them charges twice as much for its ice cream and markets it as “cyanide free.” The implication is that the other truck’s offerings are cheaper because they contain a highly toxic chemical that could jeopardize your children’s health, prompting you to pay an extra $3 for a snow cone.
While that example is fictional, it illustrates a very real absurdity in how some seafood is marketed in the US. In an era when consumers are increasingly health-conscious, Safe Catch Tuna has carved a niche as the self-proclaimed guardian of seafood safety, promising low-mercury tuna through rigorous testing and premium pricing. Its marketing hinges on a radical and disingenuous narrative: every fish is tested, standards are ten times stricter than the FDA’s, and the product is “safe for pregnancy.”
But a closer look reveals a troubling strategy—amplifying public fear about mercury far beyond what science supports, monetizing that anxiety with inflated prices, and actually discouraging healthy seafood consumption. Simply put, Safe Catch’s approach distorts risk, lacks transparency, and invites long-term harm to public health by alienating consumers from one of the most nutrient-dense options available: seafood.
Promoting mercury myths
The science on mercury in seafood is unambiguous. The FDA and EPA’s joint seafood advisory encourages fish consumption, even for sensitive groups like pregnant women and children, emphasizing that low-mercury fish like skipjack tuna offer significant nutritional benefits that outweigh minimal risks. Mercury toxicity is dose-dependent and cumulative, not a binary threat. For most adults, consuming several cans of skipjack weekly falls far below harm thresholds, and it’s all but impossible for consumers to eat enough canned tuna to even approach the mercury limits established by food safety regulators.
The FDA’s action limit for mercury is 1.0 ppm, yet Safe Catch’s Elite skipjack averages 0.04 ppm, well within safe bounds. Other brands, like Wild Planet or Bumble Bee, offer comparable skipjack with similar mercury profiles. Even overly cautious activist groups like Consumer Reports are skeptical of Safe Catch’s marketing, noting that “the differences in average mercury levels between the Safe Catch cans we tested and those from most other brands were very small.”
Yet Safe Catch exploits the public’s difficulty in assessing low-level risks, framing mercury as a looming danger requiring their intervention. This fear-mongering solves a “problem” already addressed by existing public health guidelines, positioning their product as a necessity rather than a choice.
Black box testing
Safe Catch’s cornerstone claim—“we test every fish for mercury”—sounds groundbreaking but crumbles under scrutiny. Their proprietary testing method, touted as ensuring mercury levels ten times stricter than the FDA’s limits, lacks independent validation. No peer-reviewed studies document the method’s accuracy, and Safe Catch does not disclose critical details like sampling error rates, false negatives, machine calibration, or chain-of-custody protocols—any of which could distort test results.
The FDA’s standards are based on decades of clinical data, balancing safety with practicality, yet Safe Catch’s arbitrarily stricter limits lack justification in human health outcomes. Without third-party audits or endorsements from bodies, consumers are asked to trust a black box. The National Advertising Division (NAD) in 2021 illustrated why that trust is undeserved, criticizing key aspects of Safe Catch’s marketing, like mercury levels “8x lower than albacore” and graphics implying competitors’ products are unsafe.
Identical tuna, “added” value
This sort of scare-based marketing comes at a steep cost, at least to the public. Safe Catch charges two to three times more per can than competitors—$5–$7 for a 5oz can versus $2–$3 for Wild Planet or Bumble Bee. The nutritional profile is nearly identical: high protein (40g per 5oz can), Omega-3s, and no additives in plain varieties. The added “value” is purely psychological, akin to the benefit of avoiding food dyes or any of the other health gimmicks amplified by RFK, Jr’s increasingly disreputable MAHA Commission. Much like the MAHA report, Safe Catch’s marketing is often based on non-existent science.
Consider another example. Safe Catch claims its hand-packed, slow-cooked process retains natural oils, but so do other premium brands. This is virtue-signaling product premiumization, capitalizing on consumer anxiety rather than delivering tangible dietary benefits. For budget-conscious families, the price gap is a burden, especially when the mercury risk Safe Catch targets is negligible for the vast majority of consumers.
Worse, Safe Catch’s messaging may harm public health. Multiple studies show that mercury fears reduce seafood consumption, even though regular seafood consumption improves cardiovascular health and cognitive function. This is often because seafood-related nutritional advice “offered to pregnant women tends to be confusing,” as a 2017 study put it.
By emphasizing mercury risks without citing good data, Safe Catch contributes to nutritional uncertainty. Their language—“safe for pregnancy,” “mercury tested,” “trusted by doctors”—implies competitors are dangerous, subtly discouraging seafood intake altogether. This marketing practice is so dubious, that some jurisdictions simply outlaw it in food advertising.
Conclusion: solution in search of a problem
The best that can be said for Safe Catch is that it sells a solution to a statistically improbable problem. Mercury in skipjack tuna is not a public health crisis; it’s a managed risk with clear guidelines. By distorting consumer understanding, Safe Catch risks alienating people from seafood’s benefits—high protein, Omega-3s, and affordability. The brand’s opaque science, premium pricing, and fear-based marketing do more to exploit anxiety than advance food safety. Consumers deserve transparency, not panic, and seafood deserves to be celebrated, not vilified.