Bryan Boches: Co-Founder & CEO of Safe Catch

Episode 833

Can one personal frustration — and a simple question — actually lead to changing an entire industry standard?
On today’s episode, we welcome Bryan Boches, CEO and Co-Founder of Safe Catch — the only seafood company in the world that tests every single fish for mercury. What started as a deeply personal moment — when Bryan’s pregnant wife was told to eliminate tuna from her diet due to mercury concerns — quickly turned into a much bigger realization: why wasn’t anyone solving this problem at scale?
Instead of accepting the status quo, Bryan set out to fix it. After developing breakthrough proprietary technology capable of screening every fish for mercury, he approached major seafood companies — and was met with resistance. So he did what great founders do: he built his own brand. Today, Safe Catch is in over 19,000 retail locations, setting a new benchmark for transparency, safety, and accountability in seafood.
In this episode, Bryan shares what it really takes to challenge a legacy industry, the uphill battle of introducing higher standards into an established supply chain, and why incumbents often resist meaningful change. We discuss the science behind mercury testing, how to educate consumers without creating fear, and what it means to build trust in a category where transparency hasn’t always been the norm. Bryan also opens up about the realities of scaling a mission-driven business, navigating retailer relationships, and staying committed when others won’t follow.
If you’re interested in building with purpose, disrupting entrenched industries, or turning a personal problem into a scalable solution — this episode is for you. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be, we just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin Show. Today. I’m joined by Bryan Boches, who is the co founder and CEO of Safe Catch. And if you have not heard about Safe Catch, get ready. This is such a cool company. I’ve known Bryan for a while, and we’ve been trying to get this scheduled, and I’m super, super excited that we could finally do it. So he is taking on the seafood industry, and I’ll let him talk all about it. But Bryan didn’t set out to disrupt seafood. Initially. He got pulled into it when his pregnant wife was told to stop eating tuna because of mercury, and then a few other things happened alongside that. But instead of shrugging and moving on, he did something most people and frankly, most big companies won’t do, he asked, Why is this still a problem, and why is no one taking the time to fix it? So he built the solution. Bryan and his co founder and team developed technology to test fish for mercury and not batches, not samples every fish, and when the big seafood players didn’t want anything to do with it, what did he do? He just kept going. So today we’re going to talk all about Safe Catch and all of the distribution that they’ve already gotten, but the new standard that they’re setting for transparency in an industry that really should be much more caring about health, because I think a lot of been a lot of people have really been caught off guard by mercury poisoning, and maybe some People don’t even really understand it. But Bryan is here to shed some light on this and talk to us all about Safe Catch. So Bryan, welcome so excited you’re here.

Bryan Boches 2:29
Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here as well. And yes, it’s been a long journey for Safe Catch, working with companies after 10 years, you know you’re the overnight success. It always takes longer than you think.

Kara Goldin 2:42
Well, the best, best companies, and Bryan and I met through YPO, actually, we are in forum together for years, and really, really excited to be doing this and let letting the world know more about Safe Catch and everything that they’re doing. So for for people who are not familiar with Safe Catch, can you describe it your elevator pitch on what is Safe Catch and why it matters?

Bryan Boches 3:12
Sure. So we’re the only company in the world in the seafood space that addresses the mercury problem in fish. So there’s this high variance of mercury in fish, whether the fish is large or whether the fish is small, the mercury can vary widely. So big fish tend to have more, small fish tend to have less, but we see big fish that test low and we see small fish that test high. And so the consumer has no way to protect themselves, because all things like tuna and salmon, for what we sell, it’s, are all wild. Every tuna is a wild fish, and so they travel 1000 miles. There’s, there’s no way for us to predict based on their size or location how much mercury they have. So if you want to protect women, kids, women are gonna get pregnant from mercury and fish, the only way to do it is to test the actual fish that you’re going to, you know, either can or serve to the consumer. And so that’s what we did. We created a technology that can screen individual fish rapidly, we’re talking in seconds, and then give you a result to parts per million. And so by doing that, and our equipment is equivalent to a lab, the US Lab based equipment that’s been certified. So we thought, okay, initially, the company thought, hey, we’re just going to go out and do this for all the big seafood companies. So we went to all of them and said, We can solve this mercury problem for you. And they said, there’s no problem. You’re the problem. Do not talk about this. Go away. The last thing we want to do is test our food. And so, you know, so that we we, then we started certifying for some restaurants. But then nobody wanted a fish not to pass. So if you didn’t pass a fish, everybody’s mad, because the fish have already arrived at the dock, and they want to have them all served. So. Then it was, we can’t set the kind of standards we want. So in the end, we just said, we have to be our own brand with our own standards. So what we do is we test the fish before we ever buy the fish, so that every fish we look at has to have sustainability. It has to meet that has to meet a salt content, and it has to meet our test for mercury. We’re the only ones in the world screening individual fish to a Mercury limit. Sometimes one out of two fish don’t pass, and we’re not buying them in a certain lot. And so that’s how we just eliminate that problem for for people who are at risk. And so we really focused on pregnant women and young kids. And the big problem you have during pregnancy is you’re told, basically, eat fish. So my wife’s told, like, you got to eat fish. All these studies show higher IQ for your baby if you eat fish and you can the fish, pills don’t work, and if you take the pills, don’t get the benefits from the studies. But then they tell you the same time, oh, don’t eat the fish, because high mercury could cause lower IQ. And you’re like, wait, what do I do? And they’re like, eat fish. Don’t eat fish. And and so everybody’s confused. They and so our OB was like, maybe just don’t eat the fish. You know, maybe don’t. And so you get all these people who stop eating fish, which is, even if it’s untested, the best thing you could be eating. And because there’s there, just don’t know what to do. Like, your risk, all your risk things are on, and so we eliminate that, because we go in, we’re basically taking out that whole bell curve of high mercury that could happen in a fish. So when you look at, say, tuna, for example, where people get about 40% of their mercury exposure from just eating canned tuna, the and tuna you can go from so our our average is about 40 times below what the fish could have in it. And so you buy another can of wild tuna, and we just did a test of competing brands, and we are finding, we’re finding fish that are 30 times higher than our average. So that means you at one can you’ve got 30 weeks of mercury, and you don’t want that kind of Spike, because that’s where the problems come up. Our bodies naturally process heavy metals like mercury, so we get rid of about half of it in three months and the other half in a year. But if you’re bioaccumulating or you get a spike, that’s where you can cause problems, and so we just eliminate that so that you’re never getting exposed to these higher levels. I think part of the reason this has come about is that since coal fired power plants got introduced, we’ve seen a two to 3x rise in mercury levels in the ocean, and then it by the plankton and it goes up the food chain to the fish.

Kara Goldin 7:42
So, so interesting. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna back up a little bit and even ask you a little bit more. So mercury poisoning sounds really bad, right? I think everybody would agree, but I don’t think many people really understand it. And you touched on it a little bit. But how do you know if you have it, right? I mean, so many people probably are walking around with it and functioning, but don’t really know what the signs are. I mean, what 100%

Bryan Boches 8:09
right people? And unfortunately, mercury poisoning doesn’t, or just too much mercury, it doesn’t show up in an acute way. So unless you’ve, did you know, unless you’ve gotten so much that your hair is falling out or you can’t remember anything, it doesn’t show up. And so what, what the effects are is it’s a tax on your immune system. It’s a tax on your recovery. So if you’re an athlete and you’ve got and you’re accumulating heavy metals, you’re not going to recover as fast. And if you can’t recover fast as an athlete, you can’t build muscle. So like elite athletes know this, and so they get concerned if you’re a parent, like if you’re a developing child or a fetus, it affects your brain development. And so that’s why they’re really worried about Mercury spikes, and that’s why the EPA and the FDA warn women who are going to get pregnant in the future, who are pregnant or young kids, because for a developing brain, high mercury can really impact, generally speaking, like mercury is a thing that just or heavy metals themselves, they can lead to cancers, they can lead to other problems. So, so when we got this, all got started because my next door neighbor’s wife had mercury poisoning from eating a diet that was giving you points for eating clean things like fish. And she was eating a tuna a tuna salad every day, or not every day, but most days, and thinking she was eating really clean, and she started to have neurological problems, and they had no idea back then what it was. They weren’t testing for things like mercury. And the funny thing is, she was cutting everything out of her diet, but the fish, because she thought, like, well, the fish can’t be the problem. And then, you know, and they figured it out. They tested for mercury, figured out it was just the fish. And that’s when we thought, we can solve this problem. This is not a hard problem to solve, and and we’ve solved it. The hard problem is to get the information out to consumer, you know. So. Like, we don’t, you know, we don’t charge more because we’re doing this basically the same price. Fish, same price. And so a lot of people get confused, because it’d be like, you go to the store and you could buy organic or conventional, and you look at the two raspberry tins and they’re both the same price, you’re like, wait, what’s the trick? You know, almost everybody would pick up the organic. We can prove that we’re lower than than the other brands, that they’re the only one. We say we’re the lowest Mercury we’re the lowest Mercury limit. We’re the only brand to test every fish. And trust me, we’ve been tested on those claims,

Kara Goldin 10:33
and I know you have and and I want to get into that too. But So you start out as a technology company, and you mentioned you went around and talked to all the big guys out there, and then you decide to build the brand. So that’s a big step, right? I mean, you’re not, you’re not the B to B company anymore. You go into a B to C, and you’re going to build this consumer product and do it yourself. I mean, it sounds easy, but insane, right? And so what were those first steps that you took, and did you think it was going to be a short term thing that you could just go and build this brand and then maybe others would jump on instead of actually building it as you have today?

Bryan Boches 11:20
I remember going to the first people around investment and saying, you know, in pitching their life. So what do you know about fishing? Nothing. What do you know about food? Have you ever sold food before? No, do you know who the CO packers are the boats? No, don’t know any of that. So it was, it was laughable, because, like, I don’t know anything. I just know that we can test the fish, and we’ve built a technology that doesn’t exist in the world today. And so my thought process was, look, this tech is really, really difficult to build. We basically are now addressing heavy metals in the food supply. Most people think about pesticides. Heavy metals are much more dangerous. And so that’s the goal of our of our company, and we started out in seafood, but the but the to answer your question like it was, you know? And then I would go to people who are in food companies, like yourself, actually in food and beverage, and I’d say, tell me all the mistakes you made. And nobody can remember all their mistakes. So then you would make a huge mistake, right? You just make it really dumb error. We the first major error we made is we bought used UPC codes, and so we had UPC codes that we could just put right on. Seems so great at the time. It’s great until you get to one of the majors and they say, oh, you can’t do that. You have to, you have to go to clean UPC codes. You can’t use something that’s been repurposed and to change all your UPC codes overnight. Absolute nightmare. So, but then you go back to somebody who then you ask those questions of and they go, oh, yeah, that happened to me? Or like, and you’re just like, What did you tell me? Like, there’s no way to tell you all the all the pitfalls you just have to go through that.

Kara Goldin 13:02
That’s That’s hysterical. So today, you’re in over 19,000 stores. And is that right?

Bryan Boches 13:10
That’s right. You’re selling multiple countries now, and and we’re, most importantly, we’re profitable. And, you know, we’re standing on our own. We don’t need, we don’t need more money for people to build a company. And we’re growing at well over 50% kegger. So it’s, it’s, it’s starting to take off it. But we, you know, we went through covid Supply Chain gaps, you know, just, just everything you can imagine, competitors trying to, trying to stop us from being able to to manufacture somewhere a co pack or take our boats away. You know, we’ve elicited a lot of interest. It’s, I didn’t realize seafood is such a sharp elbow game, but we’ve actually, we know we we’ve experienced a lot of slowdowns from people trying to stop us, or suggest that we don’t test or try to, you know, try to attack our claims and so, so it’s been interesting. The first six months when we were operating, three district attorneys showed up at our door, and I was like, we only had one small, little store chain. So how do you even know we exist? No one even knows we’re out here. And they’re like, Yeah, we were referred to you. We know you’re making these claims. We’re shutting you down. Here’s your cease and desist letter. And I thought, This is great. Like, you know if we’re going to get shut down, let’s do in the beginning. And when that was all over, they were they were all customers. They were like, this is fantastic. You guys are really doing this. But nobody could believe that we’re testing each fish. My own lawyer kept saying, you don’t really test every one, right? Like, you know you’re batch testing, or you test once in a while, like, No, we test every one of the fish, every tuna, every salmon, gets tested and and I swear to you my lawyer, three. Times was like, okay, but you’re not really testing each one. So what do you want to tell the DA? I’m like, No, we’re testing them all. So yeah, once we convince people, they’re like, Oh, this is fantastic. Like, this is, you know, thank you. And so it’s been really fun to work in a in a field where you’re you’re helping people eat healthier. It just, it’s great, like, we just solve this problem and and it’s not like we’re saying that other fish aren’t good for you. It’s just we’re saying, like, Look, if you’re in you eat a lot of fish, you’re in one of these categories where you’re susceptible to this, we can solve that problem for you.

Kara Goldin 15:38
So outside of tuna, what else does Safe Catch do besides tuna?

Bryan Boches 15:45
So we sell sardines. We sell salmon, and then we so basically, we’re in, we’re all and we’re selling trout now. And we just went into a new category, which is frozen. So all of our stuff today is shelf stable, meaning, like canned tuna, canned salmon, canned sardines for the sardines for the really little fish. People always ask, well, like, you know, you don’t test every one of those. We don’t we test the batch, because sardines are pretty similar to the batch. Interestingly, there are areas around the world and batches that don’t pass and we can’t take them, so we test to a much lower limit for a sardine. But there are areas that have high mercury, where the even the sardines are collecting more than our tuna for mercury levels, and so we don’t take the batch. And then now we’re in tuna burgers, and we’re in a fish nugget. And so the tuna burgers is our newest, coolest thing that we’re most excited about. It’s a solid tuna Patty has about 70% less fat and 70% more protein than a hamburger and and it took us about three years to actually make this work, because it’s hard to make them hold together. It’s hard to get the flavor profile right. It tastes very neutral, much less fishy than a salmon burger. And that’s that’s going out. It’s an all Sam’s clubs. Now we’ll be in another large distribute, another large box store soon. We’re in raylees, and we’re it’s pretty much rollin out to a number of places. We just launched that a few months ago.

Kara Goldin 17:12
Terrific, and they are so, so good, by the way. So it’s, I know you were just at Expo West recently and and really showcasing everything that you’re doing, but the brand is really taking off. What did you underestimate about building operationally that is just much more complex than you ever thought it would be, I guess, the company overall. But is there something that you really thought, okay, yeah, we can go do sardines, but then you realize this is much harder.

Bryan Boches 17:45
The global supply chain for seafood is very complicated, and it’s very long dated, you know. So you you have to contract with a with a fleet to boats. Then you’ve got to go have a command. Then you’ve got to bring it over from all this stuff is packed effectively, either in Ecuador or Asia, for the most part. And most, most everybody’s in Thailand. That’s where almost half the world’s tuna gets processed. And so then you’ve got a contract with, you know, ships to bring it over, and then you’ve got to get a truck to bring it here. That, like, early on that we kind of got that down. We knew from the get go we wanted to have an efficient global supply chain that was direct, no brokers, no middlemen, because we knew that if we couldn’t, you know, with the testing cost, if we couldn’t be really efficient everywhere else, that we didn’t want to come in and have to price this so high that people couldn’t afford it. And so that the thing that really surprised us was, probably, like most people, was covid, where we couldn’t get a truck to work. We couldn’t get the container even off the boat. They were putting the containers. They’re dumping them, like in Oakland, off these little, little like areas where the trucks can’t go. And so your container just be sitting there. Like guys, you put my container on a piece of land that nobody can access so but the boats are just trying to get out. And then, you know, container pricing went from 1500 a container to 18,000 and so a lot of companies got killed in that process. And there was also for us, I think one of the hard parts that we didn’t see coming was the competitive reaction. I mean, they were taking they were taking out. They were when you typed our name in, we had competitors putting ads up right on our name, saying, do they really test? How do you know? And just all this kind of throwing sand at and then, is it really mercury in fish? Or is it a real problem, or is it a fake problem? And and we’re like, listen, OB GYN, the FDA, the EPA, they’re the ones putting out the standards. Consumer puts, put out put out Consumer Reports, put out a standard for pregnant women and kids, and we set our limit two times below that standard. You. And so that’s kind of how we developed this, is we used other people’s standards, who are scientists and doctors, and said, Okay, we can, we can accomplish that. And but the industry’s view is sort of like, it’s not real, it’s, it’s all fake, you know, don’t and then, or just we’re, you know, then we have a lot of brands claiming things like we’re tested. We see this all the time on other brands where they say they’re tested, what they mean was they’ll take 12 cans, they’ll send it to a lab, they’ll report the result. Nobody knows what it means for the average consumer, and they’ll say we’re tested, but they’re not screening any fish for mercury and removing the problem from the consumer. They’re giving the consumer a false sense of confidence that they’ve done something to protect the consumer, but they haven’t. And so what we do is we screen the actual fish. If the fish doesn’t pass, we don’t buy the fish, and we don’t can the fish. We don’t know of another brand who screened any fish you know, to any limit, before they buy it. So that’s the only way you can solve this problem today for a consumer, because it’s so variable. FDA and EPA have already put out their own results that about one in five cans spike high in the grocery store if it’s not tested, because there’s no way we’re all buying the same fish. Well, they come in from these global fleets. Nobody’s you know, there’s no magic place. Alaska is not more pure than some other area. We buy from the Pacific, we buy from New Zealand, we buy from all over the world. There’s no like special secret place where you can get better fish. But that’s how marketing works. You know, people market. It’s the wild, it’s this, it’s that. The reality is that the problem is a result of our own man made, you know, coal fired plants and other industrial plants. And what we’re trying to do is just eliminate higher exposures for people who are sensitive populations, and so the people who tend to like, get attracted to us, or older people become more sensitive. There’s links between heavy metals and things like Alzheimer’s and sort of in their just like brain, their sort of mental health. And then you’ve got kids who are developing brains. You’ve got elite athletes who are super sensitive to any kind of recovery time change, because they’re trying to, like, operate at the highest, highest level. But for your average person, like, you know, for me, if I’m going to go out and to sushi and eat, I don’t not eat sushi or not eat, you know, things that aren’t tested, fish is still really healthy choice work. But for some sensitive groups, they really have to either avoid or or change what fish they’re buying. And then, you know, and then for other people, they’re just like, I’d rather not get exposed to this if I have a choice.

Kara Goldin 22:47
So you’re going up against these legacy systems. And you know, for over 10 years now, you’ve been, I would have thought that you would have forced change right in in the industry. But it sounds like they’re, you know, hammering you still with, with, you know, oh, Safe Catches, and really doing this. I mean, it seems like they’re almost refusing to change the way that they’ve done things, because it’s a huge industry, right, that it’s a big ship, literally, that you’re that you’re trying to change right for consumer health. Do you think that time will come when they do and like, how do you view that? That side of the world,

Bryan Boches 23:34
we’re so tiny compared to the global seafood game, and most of the people who are longtime seafood people know, these are old, old school folks around. You know, you know you can eat any fish you want. This is ridiculous. I’ve been eating fish my whole life. I’m fine, that type of thing. And so we don’t really see the industry changing there. It’s really hard also for the incumbent to suddenly kind of shift, like, if you’re, you know, if you’re Coca Cola, as you know, if you’re someone, and you’re, you’re selling your high sugar drink out there, and it’s doing billions in sales, you’re not going, you’re not going to eliminate the product, right? You’re just, you might, you might go and say, Well, maybe I’ll go buy another brand that does this. But this is just another in my whole marketing universe, a little segment of the population, and that’s kind of what we see, is that, you know, we’re still a very small player overall, and and there’s, there’s, there’s focus is still like, well, we’re just going to market fish, we’re gonna market protein, we’re going to market the health benefits fish is still one of the best things you could eat, regardless of whether it was tested. And so we’re just not, you know, for us to be meaningful, we’d have to be a multi billion dollar brand, and we’re not that yet.

Kara Goldin 24:53
Well, you’re meaningful, but you’re you’re meaningful, but you’re not meaningful to we’re not

Bryan Boches 24:59
to do. On their share in their mind,

Kara Goldin 25:01
yeah, we’re

Bryan Boches 25:01
not stealing, yeah, but to your point, I think they’re all They’re definitely aware of us now and but like I said, we, I mean, again, we would test for them. Now, if people came to us and said, Hey, we want you to test for us. That’s always been the goal is, like we could, we could just do this for more people and but no one wants to go that route that’s too disruptive to their own brands. They don’t think it’s needed, and then they’re always trying to capture some of that mind share a different way, you know, by by making different claims on their package that but there’s no one. There’s no other brand that’s going to screen a fish for you and then make sure you don’t get a high mercury fish. So whatever you read on that package, it’s you know, if you want to know what’s in the food, that’s why, when you look at our product, it’s going to have everything on there the app, it’s going to tell you what our limit is. Going to tell you how many times below the FDA it is. It’s going to tell you, we’ve tested every fish. Nobody else can make those claims because they just don’t want to do that work. It’s and so that, you know, today we have a tech advantage, meaning we’re the only ones with the tech to do this. But part of that is because I don’t think anybody else wants to do this. So no one else is inventing this technology for this purpose, because nobody wants to use it. And we know because we spent really the company was geared to be a testing tech company initially, and then when everyone shut their doors, we said, Okay, we’ll be a brand, and we’ll set our own standards. And so the but, yeah, we’ve done everything wrong, to be honest, like we just made every single mistake you can make. It’s, I mean, I don’t, it’s just embarrassing. You know, we’ve stepped into everything you can step in, made all the mistakes, gotten taken advantage of so many times. And you know, but we’re, fortunately mistakes were small enough, so we’re, you know, we could survive each one, and then you don’t make them a second time. It’s, but if people think it’s food so simple, it’s, it’s a little more complicated than it looks, to get a company working and then survive, because everybody’s trying to take your margin away somewhere along the line.

Kara Goldin 27:19
Well, I love it. I love watching the fight that you’ve taken on, and really, from a health perspective, really helping a lot of people and changing lives with with what you’re doing. So it’s more people need to know about Safe Catch for sure. Bryan, thank you so much for coming on and talking all about Safe Catch. Everyone needs to try Safe Catch. And as Bryan mentioned, there’s all kinds of new distribution that’s going on out there. You can also get it online. But thank you so much for leading an industry who eventually will, I think, come in your in your lane. You know, as scary as that also sounds too. I mean, I just think like that’s where the world is heading. More and more people are becoming aware of this, for sure, so Well, thank you again, and thanks everyone for listening until next time on the Kara Goldin show.

Bryan Boches 28:16
Thank you,

Kara Goldin 28:17
thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.

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