On a wall of tour merchandise at a concert venue is a laminated sheet of paper with a photo of tinned fish selling for $20. It’s a simple can of Fishwife-brand smoked rainbow trout with olive oil, garlic and salt, but one thing stands out: The box is signed by singer-songwriter Audrey Hobert.
“There’s a whole ecosystem of Fishwife trout in me,” Hobert said in an email.
Fishwife x Audrey Hobert launched in June, after Fishwife CEO Becca Millstein said she noticed Hobert talking about the brand in several interviews, with one calling it her “dream collab.”
“Musicians love Fishwife, and it’s funny because they don’t really post about it, which I wish they would, but the amount that I hear of famous musicians having it in their tour buses, having it in their recording studios, it is so many more people than I ever could have imagined, and everyone brings on tour with them. Why not sell it on tour? No one’s ever done it before,” Millstein said.
Yes, it’s “bunker food,” but the appeal is real, beyond the aesthetically appealing packaging and social media hype; the shelf-friendly protein has also gained popularity for being chock-full of nutrients. Tinned fish are rich in vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids — both of which are beneficial for human health but can be difficult to find in other foods — as well as a good source of protein.
After the launch of the company in 2020, Millstein said, sales have been “cuckoo bananas,” growing more than 150% each year.
“It’s ready to eat; it’s shelf-stable. I mean, we all know that it’s like bunker food, but at the same time, the product offerings that existed were just not super exciting at all, basically a totally commoditized category, almost all tuna, and didn’t have any of that sort of whimsical beauty.”
Vasco Motta, commercial director of Jose Gourmet, a Portugal-based canned fish company that started in 2015, said the products have seen a worldwide boom since around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The company and its four sister canned fish brands export their products to more than 40 countries worldwide, and Motta said the US plays an “important role” in the companies’ growth, especially due to social media trends surrounding canned fish.
“I think some interesting trends that came again from United States, like the tinned fish date nights, canned fish dinners. Many restaurants, interesting restaurants with a good position on social media, include tinned fish in the assortment and in the menus,” Motta said.
TikTok trends aside, here’s what you need to know about tinned fish.
Chief among canned fish’s health benefits are those from the omega-3 fatty acids that it provides in spades. Omega-3 fatty acids are unsaturated fats — the healthy kind of fats that the body needs — which reduce inflammation.
“Really, fish is the best source for omega-3s,” said Dr. Bonnie Patchen, a registered dietitian and postdoctoral research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Patchen studies how omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D — another nutrient that fish is rich in — are associated with better lung function and lower risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema.
Fish is also healthy because it provides essential nutrients, like vitamin D, that are less common in other food sources, according to Dr. Nate Wood, director of culinary medicine and an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine.
Vitamin D and calcium — both in high supply in tinned fish — bolster the strength of teeth and bones.
People may not realize it, but “when you’re eating the sardines, you’re eating the bones,” Wood said. “Because of that, you are consuming a lot of calcium.”
However, consumers should also be mindful of the potential high salt content in canned fish, as well as the amount of mercury in bigger fish like tuna, the experts noted.
For those concerned about sodium, Patchen recommends swapping fish packed in brine, like anchovies, for fish packed in water, like some canned tunas.
“Some tinned fish is going to be really salty, some tinned fish probably is not going to have that much salt, so that’s something I would certainly look at for people who have high blood pressure or heart disease,” Wood said. He also noted that the sauce that the fish are packed in may introduce additional excess salt.
For those concerned about mercury content, sticking to smaller fish is the best bet.
“Smaller fish that don’t eat larger animals tend to have less mercury,” Patchen said. “Tuna is one of the higher mercury-containing of the canned fish, but things like salmon, sardines, anchovies actually have pretty low levels of mercury.”
In addition, different types of tuna contain different amounts of mercury: Skipjack tuna — often labeled “chunk light” — are smaller fish and therefore often carry less mercury, while albacore tuna are larger fish and carry more mercury, Wood said. Eating a can of any tuna a week probably does not carry enough risk for concern, although people who are pregnant may want to be even more mindful of mercury consumption, he noted.
The benefits of eating canned fish are practically the same as eating fresh fish. The advantage of fish from a can lies in its convenience factor.
“Buying fresh fish or preparing fish can be daunting for some people, whereas the tinned fish is a really easy way to get” the health benefits, Wood said.
“There’s a lot of questions in nutrition about differences between fresh versus frozen and canned products,” Patchen said. “With fish, most of the nutrition is pretty stable across those processes, and in terms of processing itself, the canning process is not generally transforming the fish all that much. So it is a relatively minimally processed food that maintains a lot of the nutritional punch of fresh seafood.”
Patchen recommends eating canned fish in the same quantities as generally recommended for fresh fish: two to three servings per week.
Wood’s favorite tinned fish is smoked mackerel, but he uses anchovies and tuna most frequently in his own household cooking.
In pasta sauces, “you can sneak in a few anchovies to the pan, and they kind of melt away into the sauce and provide a lot of umami,” Wood said. “That way you can get a few omega-3s in your dish too.”
He also encourages people to try canned salmon and sardines, which can be mixed into salads or tossed with pasta.
But for him, the “classic way” to eat sardines is “on crackers with mustard and hot sauce, which is how my grandpa taught me to eat them.”
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