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The sustainable seafood movement is over a decade old. It has done much to raise awareness regarding improper production and harvest of seafood and to derive a course to lessen the deleterious environmental impacts of this industry. Certification has been a key tool, yet few programmes have demonstrated comprehensive improvements. Here, the degree of aquaculture improvement through the implementation of certification was assessed using data from the Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA) Best Aquaculture Practice (BAP) shrimp standard. An examination of 323 audits from 192 farms spanning 2005–2012 showed that overall, 35% of the farms were conditionally certified, indicating they had to improve prior to being certified. This version of the BAP shrimp farm audit had both compliance and scored components. Out of the 28 critical points, only six were in full compliance by all farms during all audits and hence provided no value to determine farm performance. Farms that passed the audit without compliance issues had a greater aggregate scored value than those that farms with noncompliances. However, performance‐based metrics exhibited few differences between the compliant and noncompliant farms. Overall, issues pertaining to water quality were a leading cause of farms being scored as noncompliant, although they were distributed among the seven different water quality parameters. Certification systems have not been designed specifically to demonstrate adherence to continual improvement. Because of this, and the multitude of factors with which a fully compliant farm needs to acquiesce, the specific means by which certification improves aquaculture and the overall value of improvement will remain challenging to demonstrate.

Globally, seafood is an important protein source because it is a nutritious food source produced with relative efficiency compared to other proteins. Because of problems related to overfishing and deleterious environmental impacts, over the last decade, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have increased their focus on seafood sustainability while businesses have incorporated this issue into their corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Sustainability is a concept that can be addressed in terms of scale of issues considered (narrow vs. broad) as well as the scope of how they are measured (undemanding or demanding). Currently, the message of seafood sustainability is becoming complicated in that the journey toward sustainability is being referred to as having achieved a state of sustainability. In addition, companies making a "sustainable" declaration are often at different points in the "scale/scope" arena. As a result, buyers, retailers and consumers have difficulty differentiating between these products. Furthermore, they often assume that a "sustainable" product has no further need for improvement, when in fact this is rarely the case. This change in reference from a continual process (a journey) to a static point (it is sustainable) limits further advances in seafood sustainability and the drive for continual improvement. Herein, the "Law of the Minimum", growth toward an end goal will occur until one factor becomes limiting, OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2012, 4 2039 is adopted as an analogy for sustainability. By refocusing the sustainability discussion on a progressive series of challenges to be met, the discussion will return to the journey as the central point. Doing so will help refresh the dialogue around seafood, and to create new opportunities for improvement.

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