SICA Success Stories: 100% Great Lakes Initiative

As we gear up for the 2026 Seafood Industry Climate Awards (SICA), we're bringing back our SICA success stories to highlight where our previous award winners have been making an impact, and to understand exactly how the SICA award helped fuel that success. 

We caught up with 100% Great Lakes Fish’s Program Manager, John Schmidt, to see what they've been up to since winning the 2024 SICA Award. As a quick background, 100% Great Lakes Fish, an initiative of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers, was selected as an award winner for its work driving 100% utilization rates across Great Lakes fisheries. 

For most wild-caught fish, only the fillet, roughly 40% of the fish by weight, becomes food. The remaining 60%, heads, frames, skins, viscera, and scales, has historically gone to low-value uses or ended up in a landfill. 100% Great Lakes Fish is tackling this problem head-on, creating more value for fishermen, easing pressure on fisheries, and cutting down on waste sent to landfills. To date, roughly 90% of commercial operators across the Great Lakes have signed on to the 100% Great Lakes Fish Pledge, committing to end landfilling of their byproducts by the close of 2025. 

“Those materials aren't waste, they're actually raw materials that can support new products, create new revenue for processors, and strengthen the regional economy.”  - John Schmidt, Program Manager, 100% Great Lakes Fish 

Valorization: Waste to Value  

So what has 100% Great Lakes Fish been up to since winning the award? Quite a lot. One of the main deliverables from the grant was a toolkit that helps processors understand the economics of side value streams for their byproducts. Plug in your monthly weight of skins, viscera, heads, and other materials, and the toolkit models out exactly how much value you can unlock, and which end markets make the most sense for your volume and material type. 

The toolkit has already helped processors throughout the Midwest and Canada think more seriously about extracting value from byproducts once headed for the landfill. Material once considered waste is being upcycled into pet treats, fish leather, and other high-value products. The grant also supported a handful of prototypes, including several types of fish leather and a food-grade milt product (milt is popular in East Asia and parts of the Nordic countries), developed from cisco and lake herring into a dip, a tempura preparation, and a pickled product. 

“We had a major seafood processor tell us the toolkit really got them thinking about pet food. They've since signed agreements with pet food companies to take that material and divert it from the landfill”  - John Schmidt, Program Manager, 100% Great Lakes Fish 

Widening the Net: 100% Sport Fish

Through its raw material mapping work, 100% Great Lakes Fish learned that recreational anglers pull roughly the same volume of fish out of the Great Lakes each year as the commercial fishery, meaning any solution that ignores the recreational side is missing out on nearly half the opportunity. That insight led to a new initiative, 100% Sport Fish, which works with fish cleaning stations, run by municipalities, marinas, and state agencies, to move them toward a full-utilization model. 

Many cleaning stations rely on costly grinders that jam easily and send fish waste into the municipal water system, contributing to nutrient loading in the lakes. Simple fixes, like adding refrigeration instead, cut costs, ease the burden on station operators, and create a more pleasant experience for anglers. One partner station is already using this approach, repurposing decommissioned freezers from a former football stadium as low-cost cold storage. 

Global Recognition

Another notable accolade for 100% Great Lakes Fish: they were named a recipient of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Blue Transformation Leaders Award for Sustainable Aquatic Food Systems, honored at a ceremony in Rome. We are incredibly proud of this recognition for a past SICA Award winner. It's a great reminder that SICA continues to support programs that are truly moving the needle, both here at home and on the global stage. 

Looking Ahead

Zooming out, the long-term vision for 100% Great Lakes is clear: full utilization becomes standard practice across recreational fishing, commercial harvesting and processing, and aquaculture throughout the Great Lakes. The team draws inspiration from Iceland, which pioneered the 100% fish model starting in the 1980s and has grown the value captured per fish from roughly $10 to 100x that over four decades, when accounting for all byproducts. As the only group doing this work in a freshwater environment, 100% Great Lakes Fish is increasingly being looked to as a model elsewhere 

The SICA Award helped 100% Great Lakes Fish turn strong research and a growing coalition of partners into tools the industry can actually use, unlocking new value from the Great Lakes fishery while keeping waste out of landfills. 

Stay tuned for our next SICA Success Story! Want to support work like this? Click the donate button below.