Tinned fish is having its moment. Sardines have gone from pantry staple to the star of dinner boards, and demand has never been higher. But behind that little golden key on the tin lies a bigger, more complicated story: one about warming oceans, shrinking catches, and a recent decision by the world's largest sardine supplier that is reshaping the entire global market.

If you've ever come to us for a favorite variety only to find it temporarily out of stock, this is the story behind that empty shelf. We think it's worth telling, because it says a lot about why real, provenance-driven food is worth waiting for.

A wild fish, not a factory product

The first thing to understand about a great sardine is that nobody manufactures it. Sardines are wild-caught, seasonal, and migratory. There is no farm, no year-round production line, no way to simply "make more." A cannery, even a legendary one, can only pack what the sea provides that season.

And the sea has been giving less. Off the coast of Portugal and Spain, where many of Europe's finest sardines are caught, stocks have been under pressure for decades. Warming waters, shifting ocean currents, and pressure on the fishery pushed the Iberian sardine to worryingly low levels, with biomass falling dramatically through the 2000s and 2010s. In response, Portugal and Spain now jointly manage the stock under a science-based recovery plan, with strict annual quotas and a months-long winter closure to protect spawning fish.

That recovery is working slowly, but the quotas remain cautious and have actually tightened again for the current season. This is the world our flagship brands live in. When you open a tin of NURI, packed by hand in Portugal, you're eating fish caught within a tightly regulated Iberian season. That's the source of its character. It's also the reason it can never be limitless.

Morocco pulls back, and the whole market feels it

Now add the biggest development of the year. Morocco is the world's largest producer and exporter of canned sardines, and it also supplies enormous quantities of raw frozen sardines to canneries in other countries. As of February 1, 2026, that second part stopped.

Facing a nearly 50% collapse in its own sardine catch over just two years, rising domestic prices, and food-security concerns at home, Morocco banned the export of frozen and fresh sardines for at least a year. Importantly, this is not a ban on canned sardines; Morocco still ships finished tins. What it stopped is the export of the raw fish that foreign producers rely on to do their own tinning. In practical terms: if you want Moroccan sardines now, they have to be tinned in Morocco.

The ripple effect has been immediate. Spanish canneries in Galicia, which sourced roughly 90% of their frozen sardine from Morocco, suddenly lost their main supply overnight. Those producers are now competing for the same Atlantic and Iberian fish that everyone else depends on, which tightens supply, pushes up prices, and adds strain across the entire premium sardine market, well beyond Morocco's own borders.

In other words, a fish that was already seasonal and quota-limited just got a lot harder to source.

So why do we go in and out of stock?

We'd rather be honest about this than pretend otherwise. When a variety disappears from our shelves for a while, it usually comes down to three things working together:

1. Demand outpaces supply. A brand gets discovered, a variety goes viral, or gift season arrives, and a product we expected to last for months clears out in weeks.
2. The fish simply isn't there. This is the one most people don't see. When catches are down, whether because of season, quota, weather, or a supply shock like Morocco's ban, the cans don't get packed. No cannery, however great, can conjure fish that the ocean didn't yield.
3. Importing takes time, a lot of it. We are a direct importer, which means we bring these products straight from the source rather than buying from a middleman. That's what protects the quality and provenance you're paying for. But it also means the pipeline is long: from the moment we place an order to the moment it lands in our warehouse can be 60 days or more.

Stack those together and the math becomes clear. If a popular variety sells out (reason 1) during a season when the fish is scarce (reason 2), even an immediate reorder can take two months to arrive (reason 3). That's not a company that dropped the ball; that's the honest rhythm of real, wild-sourced food.

The upside of scarcity

Here's the way we've come to see it: the same factors that make premium European sardines occasionally hard to find are exactly what make them worth seeking out. A limited season, a protected stock, a small cannery packing by hand: these are features, not flaws. They're the difference between a genuine artisanal product and a commodity.

Our advice? When you find a variety you love in stock, it's never a bad idea to grab an extra tin or two. Sardines age beautifully, and availability can shift with a single season or a single policy change halfway around the world.

We'll keep doing what we do best: sourcing directly, telling you the truth about where things stand, and getting the world's best tinned fish onto your table as fast as the tides and the shipping lanes allow. Thanks for being the kind of customer who cares where their food comes from. It's the whole reason we exist.

Have a question about a specific variety or when it's coming back? Reach out anytime, we're always happy to tell you exactly where things stand.