Thai Union Group PCL

Mm.

called Thai Union, 55,000 staff around the world, and they want to make a difference.

In fact, the old chair of our board was their first key sustainability manager that really kicked them in about doing the right thing, and they are the outstanding.

So they're the ones we fame.

I've been in the US also twice already this year, so we are much deeper involved in, in the management of Red Lobster.

That is Thai Union's finance chief on an investor call back in 2022.

The company is one of the biggest producers of seafood products in the world, and as of 2020, they owned a controlling stake in the iconic American seafood chain, Red Lobster.

There's nothing particularly unusual about a seafood supplier owning a seafood restaurant.

But check out what happened next.

Red Lobster is where America goes for seafood.

In 2022, Thai Union started firing some of Red Lobster's long-standing managers and installed their own executives, including Paul Kenny, as CEO.

Kenny then ended Red Lobster's relationship with two of its shrimp suppliers, leaving Red Lobster to buy all of its shrimp from a single company.

And using diverse approaches to LCA and PCF with, based on supplier maturity to get supplier-led PCFs and to achieve transparency and reporting and supplier engagement goals from Sai.

And a lot of companies can be thinking, "What do you do if you don't have a 30-year history of doing LCA like U- Unilever does?" And so we, in our business group at aiTrack, we work with our clients to achieve PCF at scale, LCA at scale with clients like HPE and Thai Union and Levi's.

It really starts with collecting and structuring data, getting your data in order, your internal activity data, not so much supplier data.

This approach can work whether or not you can get suppliers to respond to requests, or it also allows you to have a consistent roadmap when data from suppliers is inconsistent or variable.

Now on to our final story, which I'm gonna actually have with a snack.

Lauren, we couldn't get together this week, but I'm still gonna eat these Thai Union snacks without you [laughs].

How dare you?

Well, I don't, I don't know when I'm gonna see you again.

If you are normally going to the grocery store and buying your sushi, I think somebody would, that, like that, would be comfortable with buying it then from a convenience store like Wawa.

But I didn't know this.

Some sushi roll products, including their tempura shrimp roll, uses Thai Union products as part of a partnership that they established in, in 2018.

So that goes perfectly-

So why did that deal become permanent at that time?

Yeah, so it was the decision of the former interim CEO, Paul Kenney, who is an Australian, uh, citizen and spent a long time in Thailand and, uh, became very closely affiliated with Red Lobster's, uh, uh, owners at the time, Thai Union.

And, uh, that's a big question that we were trying to answer here.

Like, why did he choose that? A lot of people internally told him, "Don't do it."

Who is he? What did he do at Red Lobster?

Well, this is a good question.

So Paul Kenney is a very successful Asian restaurant executive, and he was part of this consortium called Seafood Alliance that partnered with Thai Union to take full control over Red Lobster in the early 2020s.

I think the deal closed in August 2020 and they took full control.

This looks like dried calamari snacks, this one.

And this is all from Thai Union.

I had no idea that they had this extensive line of snacks.

And then more fish-o.

Yeah.

2016, Thai Union, T-H-A-I as in Thailand.

Thai Union is a global seafood supplier.

They bought 25% steak in Red Lobster from Golden Gate Capital.

So you got this big seafood supplier that gets involved.

In 2020, Thai Union takes over the whole thing.

They kind of, Golden Gate Capital has gotten everything they want out of it.

A lot of times when private equity gets in, man, it's not a good sign.

That's only because Thursday's field trips.

And we can talk about that next week too, because I'm going on the Thai Union field trip and I'm very excited about it.

So I can't wait to talk about that.

But this year was a milestone for the summit as it represented GSA's 25th installment of the Responsible Seafood Summit, formerly known as the Global Outlook for Aquaculture Leadership Summit or GOAL.