Labeling Fishery Products: What the Regulation Requires and the Most Common Mistakes

The label of a fishery or aquaculture product sold in the European Union must show, at minimum: the commercial designation of the species, its scientific name, the production method (caught or farmed), the catch area or the country/zone of farming, the fishing gear category when the product comes from a catch, and whether the product has been thawed. On top of that come the data common to any packaged food: batch, expiry or best-before date, and storage conditions. Meeting this isn't optional and doesn't depend on company size — it applies just the same to a small workshop as to a large production plant.

What does vary a lot is how easy this is to get right day to day. When every one of these fields has to be filled in by hand for each label print run, the risk of forgetting one, copying the wrong batch, or using an outdated template grows with production volume. And incomplete or incorrect labeling isn't a minor detail — it's the first thing any inspection checks, and the first thing a customer sees when they open the box.

The mandatory data on a fishery product label

Summarized, the data that EU consumer information regulation requires for fishery and aquaculture products are:

• Commercial designation of the species (the name it's sold under) and its scientific name.
• Production method: caught at sea or in fresh water, or farmed (aquaculture).
• Catch or farming area: the FAO zone for caught products, or the country of farming for aquaculture.
• Fishing gear category, when the product comes from a catch.
• "Thawed" indication, if the product was previously sold frozen and is now offered defrosted.
• Batch and expiry or best-before date, as with any packaged food.

Not all of this data is generated at the same point in the process — species and catch area usually come from the origin (fish market or supplier), while batch and expiry date are generated by the company itself when packaging or processing the product. Getting the final label to correctly combine both sources of information is exactly where the manual process fails most often.

"Thawed" and other mentions that get overlooked

The "thawed" indication is one of the most frequently forgotten, especially when the same product can be sold fresh or frozen depending on the order. If the product was frozen and is then sold defrosted, that indication is mandatory — and leaving it out, even unintentionally, is a regulatory non-compliance, not a cosmetic labeling detail.

Labeling for toll-processed products

When a product goes through toll processing — it leaves the company, is transformed at a third party's facility, and comes back for sale — the final label still has to correctly reflect the real origin of the raw material, not just the point where the last process took place. This requires batch and origin information to travel with the product throughout the entire toll processing flow, rather than being reconstructed from memory at the end.

Common labeling mistakes and their consequences

The most common failures usually aren't due to not knowing the regulation, but to how information is managed day to day:

• Using an outdated label template that doesn't include all the mandatory fields for that species or presentation.
• Copying the batch or expiry date from the previous print run by mistake when printing a new batch.
• Not reflecting the change from "fresh" to "thawed" when the same product's sale format changes.
• Inconsistency between the label and the internal traceability records, so that during an inspection the data doesn't add up.

Any of these mistakes, even a one-off, exposes the company to a non-conformity finding during an inspection and, more importantly, to a loss of customer trust if the inconsistency is noticed.

How to digitize labeling without losing regulatory control

The most reliable way to avoid these mistakes is for the label to be generated using already validated batch data — species, origin, expiry date, fishing gear — instead of being written from scratch every time. In La PesquerApp, the label editor pulls directly from the batch data already registered in the system (including full traceability back to the purchase or catch), so every printed label reflects what's actually in that box, not what someone remembers or copies from the last one.

If you'd like to see how labeling connected to your production's real traceability works, you can request a demo.