Shark’s fin products will no longer be sold at over 100 FairPrice outlets by the end of March this year. The retailer will cease selling shark’s fin products at all its retail outlets, which include FairPrice supermarkets, FairPrice Finest, FairPrice Xtra hypermarkets, Cheers and FairPrice Xpress petrol stations, and FairPrice Online.
NTUC FairPrice CEO Seah Kian Peng told Today that it has been looking into the area of shark’s fin products for the last few months, “in our commitment to be a socially responsible retailer.”
“FairPrice has always focused our efforts on social sustainability by reaching out to the less privileged in the community, helping them to have access to daily needs but, at the same time, we recognise that there are other areas of sustainability such as environmental sustainability that need to be addressed,” he said.
FairPrice will no longer be extending new commitments for shark’s fin products but will honour current commitments to its suppliers. “In other words, this will be the last Chinese New Year in which customers can buy shark’s fin products at all our stores,” said Mr Seah.
This announcement comes after an incident in November last year when an employee of Thern Da Seafood, a supplier of shark’s fin products to FairPrice, made disparaging remarks about divers who were against shark finning on his Facebook page. This sparked an online protest, with many raising their concerns on the wall of FairPrice’s Facebook page.
FairPrice said on its Facebook page yesterday that all its suppliers are required to clear joint promotional materials and messages before implementation. In this incident, the supplier had not complied with the standing instructions.
Stating that it takes the matter very seriously, FairPrice will be withdrawing all products from Thern Da Seafood across all their stores, it said.
Cold Storage ceased the sale of shark’s fin products in October last year. When contacted, a spokesperson for Sheng Siong, which operates 25 stores in Singapore, said that they do not have concrete plans to do so at the moment.
