How Wild Planet turns canned fish into a weekly habit
Canned fish is moving from the can you reach for when there is nothing else into a weekly high-protein habit, and Wild Planet, the pole-and-line tinned-fish brand, treated that shift as a recipe problem. Its recipes now surface on Google for everyday dishes like canned mackerel pasta, a small marker of how far the strategy has come.
Wild Planet publishes new recipes through Recipe Kit at a pace of roughly six a month, building a live library of 494 recipes since adopting the platform in 2021. Recipes are organized around Wild Planet's core product lines, tuna, mackerel, sardines, or salmon, giving each of those lines its own set of ways to end up on a plate.
The challenge
Bill Carvalho founded Wild Planet Foods in 2004, though the turn that defined the company happened three years earlier. He was already running a family seafood business out of Northern California when a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's exhibit on ocean depletion changed what he was willing to sell. He rebuilt the business around fish caught pole and line, troll, and handline, methods that take one fish at a time instead of netting by the ton, specifically to cut the bycatch that comes with industrial fishing. That sourcing standard is the one genuinely distinctive thing about the brand: Wild Planet pays fishermen more to fish this way, and its cans are still packed raw in the home-style method that traces back to the original family fishing operation.
Canned fish is a category with an image problem. For a lot of shoppers it is emergency food, the can you reach for when there is nothing else, not something you plan a meal around. The commercial challenge is not getting someone to try it once. It is getting them to buy it on a weekly rhythm.
The Wild Planet Foods homepage (live, July 2026)
A sustainability story sells the first can. It does not by itself build the habit of reaching for tuna, mackerel, or sardines every week, and a shelf-stable, mission-driven brand needs that habit to survive past the first purchase. Recipes give the sourcing story somewhere to live inside something a shopper actually wants to read, while separately doing the work of making the can a routine ingredient rather than a values purchase made once and forgotten. That is a frequency problem, and frequency problems are exactly what a good recipe hub solves.
The system: naming recipes after the outcome, not the ingredient
Wild Planet's recipes do not treat canned fish as a compromise. They treat it as the fastest way to hit a protein target, which is the conversation a large part of their audience is already having with themselves. Their High-protein Game Day Nachos make albacore tuna the star of a snack nobody expects to be good for them. Their Dill Pickle Air Fryer Tuna Melt takes five minutes and adds crushed edamame for an extra protein boost. Their Mango Chili Tuna Salad uses skipjack as a clean protein base for a bright, fast lunch. Each one answers the same question: what is the quickest high-protein thing to make right now, and the answer is a can of Wild Planet already in the pantry.
One recipe shows the pattern most clearly. As of July 2026, Wild Planet's Lemon Garlic Mackerel Pasta sits in Google's top 20 for "canned mackerel pasta", a specific, intent-heavy search a shopper runs with a can already in the pantry and no plan for it. It gives the mackerel line, often the harder sell in a tinned-fish range, a genuinely appealing weeknight home, and it does that by leaning into a format, easy weeknight pasta, that was already searched for on its own.
The recipe card on Wild Planet's lemon garlic mackerel pasta recipe (live, July 2026)
The recipes also do quiet work for the brand's sustainability story. Wild Planet leads with how its fish is caught, and that message can be hard to land on a product page where the shopper is focused on price and flavor. A recipe is a softer place to make the case. Someone who arrives for a five-minute tuna melt and leaves having also absorbed that this particular tuna is sustainably sourced is a warmer, more loyal customer than one who only saw the claim on a label.
How Recipe Kit supports the system
The recipes we reviewed, including Lemon Garlic Mackerel Pasta, are tied back to a product line, tuna, mackerel, sardines, or salmon, through Recipe Kit's product linking, so a shopper who lands on the recipe is one click from the mackerel it calls for. Recipe Kit also publishes recipes with structured, schema-marked HTML, the kind of page Google is more likely to surface for a specific dish search than a generic product listing. That structured data is part of what helps these pages surface in search, which is the core of recipe SEO on Shopify: give a search engine a real recipe to index, not just a can on a shelf.
The publishing cadence, roughly six new recipes a month for the better part of a year, is steady enough to have built a 494-recipe library without ever becoming a one-time content push.
In their words
Your Lemon Garlic Mackerel Pasta and Mango Chili Tuna Salad recipes both sit in Google's top 20 for their dish names. Walk me through how those recipes get made: who writes them, how you pick the trend format to build around, and whether the recipes close the gap on the harder tins like mackerel.
[Awaiting Wild Planet's answer. This section fills in once the team has reviewed the draft.]
Fish is the category people are most nervous to buy online sight unseen. Do you find recipes change what people are willing to order?
[Awaiting Wild Planet's answer. This section fills in once the team has reviewed the draft.]
How do recipes fit into the bigger picture of growing Wild Planet?
[Awaiting Wild Planet's answer. This section fills in once the team has reviewed the draft.]
Lessons for meat and seafood brands
- Solve for frequency, not just trial. If your product gets bought once and forgotten, recipes that give people a reason to reach for it every week are worth more than another discovery campaign.
- Name recipes after the outcome, not the ingredient. Wild Planet's High-protein Game Day Nachos and Dill Pickle Air Fryer Tuna Melt lead with what the eater gets, protein, speed, a five-minute dinner, instead of just "tuna recipe." That naming pattern is copyable in a single sitting.
- Give your hardest-to-sell SKU its own recipe hub. Wild Planet built its Lemon Garlic Mackerel Pasta specifically around the mackerel line, the harder sell in a tinned-fish range, instead of only publishing more tuna content.
- Publish on a real cadence, not in bursts. Roughly six new recipes a month for the better part of a year is what built a 494-recipe library. That is a schedule one person can sustain, not a one-time content push.
For the full argument on why recipes are an owned channel worth building, read our recipe content marketing playbook.
More seafood stories from the case study library: how Sizzlefish pairs every seafood box with a recipe library, how Premier Catch's recipe library compounds without weekly publishing.
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