How Fresh Is Supermarket Fish? The One Thing The Label Won't Tell You

Stand at a supermarket fish counter and try to find out when your fish was caught.

You can't. Not because anyone is hiding it, but because nobody has to tell you.

That single gap is the whole story of why fish at home so often disappoints. Not the cooking. Not the recipe. The days.

What a supermarket fish label has to tell you

UK law is actually quite demanding about fish labels. Under the Fish Labelling Regulations 2013, a pack of unprocessed or lightly processed seafood has to carry six things:

• The commercial name of the species
• The scientific name (this one is allowed to sit on a poster rather than the pack)
• How it was produced: caught at sea, caught in fresh water, or farmed
• The catch area, meaning the broad FAO fishing zone
• The category of fishing gear that caught it
• The word "defrosted", if it was previously frozen

Read that list again. It tells you what the fish is, where in the ocean it came from and what kind of net was used. It does not tell you what day it came out of the water.

Here is the part that stings. The catch date does exist. Business to business traceability rules require the date of catch to travel with every lot of fish through the supply chain, along with the vessel's name and licence number, the ICES area and the landing details. The Marine Management Organisation is clear that seafood must be traceable at every stage, from the catching vessel to the final consumer.

So the date is recorded. It is passed from boat to merchant to processor to retailer. And then, at the last step, at the counter, it quietly stops. The one person who is about to eat the fish is the one person who never sees it.

So how old is supermarket fish?

Nobody can give you an honest average, and we are not going to invent one. What we can do is tell you what the science says about the clock.

The standard reference on this is the FAO's Quality and Quality Changes in Fresh Fish, still the textbook decades on. Its figures for cod and haddock on ice put shelf life at 9 to 15 days. That is shelf life, meaning the point at which fish stops being sellable. It is not the point at which fish stops being good.

The same work tracks fish through four phases as it sits on ice. Phase one is very fresh, sweet, faintly seaweedy. Phase two is where the character drains out of it and the flesh goes neutral. Phase three is off odours and a texture that has gone either soft and watery or tough and dry. Phase four you would not want on your plate.

And the line that matters most, on cod, haddock, whiting and flounder: the sweet taste is at its peak two to three days after catching.

Two to three days. Not two to three weeks.

Temperature does as much work as time. Packed cod holds for 14 days at 0C, six days at 5C, three days at 10C. Every hour spent slightly too warm on a pallet, in a van, in a chiller, comes off the good end.

Meanwhile the industry is working hard in the other direction. Seafish, the UK seafood authority, has been trialling shelf life extension technology that can add up to six extra days to fish like salmon, cod and prawns. That is a sensible answer to food waste and we are not sniffy about it. But it should tell you something about the length of the chain that six extra days is a prize worth chasing.

This is not a fresh versus frozen argument

Worth saying plainly, because it would be easy to turn this into a cheap shot at freezers, and it would be wrong.

The UK's largest freezer trawler, the Kirkella, fishes trips of around 60 days. On board, the first fish reach the freezers 40 minutes after being caught, then sit at minus 28C. Judged on the clock, that fish is fresher than something landed chilled a week ago and trucked around the country. Frozen at sea, done properly, is one of the great pieces of engineering in food.

We sell frozen ourselves and we are proud of it. If you want the longer version of that argument, we have written about the myths around frozen fish separately.

The problem was never the freezer. The problem is not knowing. A label that says "caught at sea, North East Atlantic, trawl" is telling you almost nothing about what is going to happen in your pan tonight.

Why it's always the same five fish

There's a second thing the counter does to you, and it's quieter.

Research published in Nature Food in January 2025 found that five species, cod, haddock, salmon, tuna and prawns, account for around 80% of all the seafood eaten in this country. The same work found that between 60% and 80% of the seafood we consume is imported. Up to 1975, almost 90% of British demand was met from British waters.

Sit with that. We are an island nation with some of the best fishing grounds in the world, importing most of what we eat, from a shortlist of five.

Nothing against cod. But megrim sole, gurnard, coley, brill, ling, cuttlefish, spider crab, hake, red mullet, John Dory. All of it swimming off the South West coast. Most of it landed at Brixham and then sent abroad, because that is where the buyers are.

You cannot buy what you are never shown. The counter narrows the sea down to five options, and then we all wonder why fish at home feels a bit samey.

One more thing worth knowing, and we will flag its age honestly: a study of 386 white fish samples from six major UK supermarket chains, published in 2014, found 5.66% were not the species on the label. Fillets came out clean. It was the battered, breaded and pre made products where the substitutions turned up. That data is over a decade old and retail has tightened up since, but it makes the point about how long a chain gets before it reaches you.

Fifty yards from the auction hall

Here is how we do it, and it is not complicated. It is mostly geography.

Our unit in Brixham sits fifty yards from the auction hall. Not in the town, not down the road. Fifty yards.

Tommy, our fishmonger, buys on that floor. He is not buying volume, he is buying specific fish from specific boats: the ones that have been out for short trips, and the ones with skippers who handle their catch properly. That second part is the whole game and it does not show up on any label. Two identical looking fish, same species, same day, same grounds. The one that was iced and stowed with care by a crew who take pride in it eats like a different animal.

Mitch Tonks, who started all this back in 1996, has spent a working life around that. It is why the business exists.

We can collect our fish before the auction has even finished. Walk it up to the unit. Start cutting and packing while the hall is still going. Order before 2pm and it is with you the next day, which is often the same day it was sitting in the auction hall. We deliver Tuesday to Saturday.

No warehouse in the middle. No week in a chiller. No wondering.

What to ask before you buy fish, anywhere

Not just from us. This works at any counter, any shop, any market.

1. What day was it landed? If nobody can answer, that is your answer.
2. Which boat? Naming a boat is a sign the chain is short enough to remember.
3. What's good today, rather than what's on the list? A short answer means someone is buying to a plan. "Whatever came in" means someone is buying with their eyes.
4. What's landing that I've never heard of? This is where the good stuff hides, and usually where the value is too.

Freshness is not a feeling or a font on a sticker. It is a date and a temperature. Ask for both. The good thing for you is no questions are needed, we simply show the best of the market every day. If you do want to talk things through though you can give us a call. 

Come and see for yourself

We give new members £10 when you join The Seafood Club. You get first sight of the landings, member offers and the news from the quayside before anyone else, which in practice means you find out what Tommy bought this morning rather than what a buying team decided six weeks ago.

Or go straight to the market and see what has landed today.

Tomorrow's fish are still in the sea. Today's are fifty yards from the auction hall.