Global Seafood Alliance CEO Wally Stevens retiring, to be replaced by Brian Perkins

Global Seafood Alliance CEO Wally Stevens announced on 16 December that he will retire at the end of the month.

Stevens joined the GSA – the creator of the Best Aquaculture Practices and Best Seafood Practices certifications – as its executive director in 2007. At the time, it had just 100 companies certified to the BAP standard.

Today, the number of certified processing plants, farms, hatcheries, and feed mills certified has grown to over 3,000, according to GSA. More recently, he helped the organization expand its mission to include wild-capture fisheries, which included changing the organization's name from the Global Aquaculture Alliance.

“It has been an honor to work with such professional, passionate, devoted, smart women and men here at the Global Seafood Alliance and throughout the industry,” Stevens said in a press release. “We have done good for society globally through our education and advocacy work as well as by providing third-party assurances through certification for farm-raised seafood, and more recently, for wild-caught seafood. The challenges that lie ahead will be best addressed by our associates at GSA, working collectively and collaboratively with others to find solutions.”

GSA President and Founder George Chamberlain said Stevens was “exactly the force that GAA needed in 2007 to energize it, centralize it, and embolden it to stretch for goals that we thought were beyond our reach.”

“What a blessing it has been to work with him,” he said.

Replacing Stevens will be Brian Perkins, who joined GSA on 1 March as its chief operating officer. Prior to his role with GSA, Perkins served as the American regional director for the Marine Stewardship Council. He will assume the role of CEO of GSA on 1 January.

“It’s been an honor to work directly with Wally for the past nine months. His leadership and passion for the seafood industry are evident in the way GSA carries itself as an organization,” Perkins said. “We have a great team here at GSA, and I look forward to working with them to take the organization to even greater heights.”

Stevens’s retirement caps off a five-decade career in the seafood industry, where he has held leadership positions in  large, publicly traded companies as well as start-up salmon farming operations. He has also been a volunteer with the National Fisheries Institute for years, and co-founded the organization’s Future Leaders program in 1998. In 2018, he received the GSA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which was renamed the Wallace R. Stevens Lifetime Achievement Award in his honor.

Photo courtesy of the Global Seafood Alliance