Emily De Sousa is an award-winning Portuguese-Canadian fisheries scientist and digital strategist, revolutionizing the seafood industry with her unique blend of expertise. She combines her scientific background in fisheries with her marketing and digital communication expertise to share the world’s seafood stories through radical transparency and authentic storytelling. She is the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Strategist at InnaSea Media, a female-founded media agency specializing in creative communication solutions for the seafood industry. In this role, she also created the first-ever global influencer marketing program exclusively for seafood companies. Emily is also an engaging content creator.
She created her own seafood travel and lifestyle brand: Seaside with Emily, which is described as “a seafood lover’s guide to the world”. The brand acts as an online education platform where Bill Nye meets Anthony Bourdain, teaching followers about healthy oceans, sustainable seafood, and culinary adventures focused on the rise of ‘Pescatourism’. Through her work as a content creator, she pioneered a signature framework to connect consumers with the seafood industry, known as On-Site with the World’s Seafood Producers™. Through this innovative method of content creation, Emily dives deep into seafood science and pulls back the curtain on global fisheries and aquaculture to show people exactly how their seafood is produced.
Emily completed her master’s degree at the University of Guelph with a focus on small-scale fisheries in North America and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on seafood supply chains. She has since gone on to work with businesses and NGOs at every step of the seafood supply chain, in wild fisheries and aquaculture, as well as consulting for international bodies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
Her work has been recognized globally; she has been the recipient of the Canadian Science Policy Centre’s Youth Excellence Award for her policy proposal on eliminating seafood fraud in Canada. She has also been the recipient of a Leadership for Climate-Resilient Fisheries Fellowship from Sustainable Ocean Alliance and the Environmental Defence Fund, a One Young World Ambassador Scholarship to participate as a youth delegate in the Our Ocean Conference, and has been featured in Good Morning America as a sustainable seafood expert.