An opened tin of sardines in olive oil on a weathered blue wooden dock beside a coil of rope and a folded fishing net, a plain closed tin and a lemon half, with the sea out of focus behind

There Is a Sardine Shortage in the News

Published 11 Sep 20267 min read

The sardine shortage in the headlines is Morocco's; the sardines in a good tin come from a fishery that ran out of quota on August 1 because it was catching them faster than ever. The Pantry Pulse, 11 September 2026.

For a week the food press has been passing around a report from Fortune with a headline about America's favorite tinned fish shrinking by nearly half, and if you have bought a tin of sardines from us in the last year you may have wondered whether to stock up. The report is accurate. It is also about a different fish. The sardines that are disappearing are Morocco's, caught for freezing and for the mass market; the sardines in a Portuguese or Spanish tin come from a separate fishery, on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, that has spent 2026 doing the opposite of running out. Here are both stories, and the arithmetic that explains why the price of a good tin barely notices either.

The shortage that is real

Morocco is the world's largest sardine supplier, and Fortune reports that its landings fell by nearly 46 percent between 2022 and 2024. Two pressures are compounding. Sardines are unusually sensitive to water temperature, and warming seas are moving the shoals farther from the coast; and the war in Iran, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to shipping this spring, has pushed fuel prices up just as the boats have to travel farther to find fish. Rashid Sumaila, the fisheries economist at the University of British Columbia quoted in the piece, called it a double whammy. Morocco's frozen sardine exports have collapsed from about 70 percent of its small-pelagic exports in 2020 to roughly 23 percent in 2025, and the country has banned frozen sardine exports to protect domestic supply. That is the fish behind industrial canning, fishmeal and the cheapest tins on a supermarket shelf, and there will be less of it at a higher price.

The fishery behind the tin

The sardines in a good Portuguese or Spanish tin are Sardina pilchardus from the Iberian stock, fished by Portugal and Spain under a joint management plan and canned in Matosinhos, Setúbal and the Galician rías, the towns our Portugal guide and Galicia guide describe. Its 2026 has looked like this.

The total allowable catch was set at 50,294 tonnes, split 66.5 percent to Portugal and 33.5 percent to Spain. Portugal's fleet reopened on May 4 with 33,446 tonnes, about a thousand fewer than last year, and fishes until the winter closure that protects the spawning season. Spain's fleet, with 16,848 tonnes, caught all of it and closed on August 1, four months before the year ends, after negotiating an extra thousand tonnes from Portugal to stretch the season. The fish sold at an average of 1.50 euros a kilogram, fifteen cents above last year and fifty cents above 2024. Fewer fish, sold for more money, because buyers wanted them.

Behind those numbers is a recovery. A decade ago this stock was in trouble, and regulators held quotas low for years while the fish came back. Surveys by Portugal's marine institute show the biomass above the threshold for maximum sustainable yield since 2020, with recruitment rising sharply in 2024. In July 2025 the Iberian sardine fishery regained its Marine Stewardship Council certification, covering 317 vessels across both countries, a certificate Portugal's fleet had lost in 2014 over stock management. "Shortage" is the wrong word for a fishery that sold out early at a premium and is fishing on a certified, recovering stock.

The market structure

Iberian sardine is a state-managed fishery, not a commodity. The stock is a single biological unit; the total allowable catch is set jointly by the European Union under the advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, then split by treaty between Portugal and Spain at 66.5 and 33.5 percent. The scientific assessment behind the advice comes from Portugal’s Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera and Spain’s Instituto Español de Oceanografía, whose combined acoustic and daily-egg-production surveys are what tells Brussels the biomass is above its precautionary limit.

Below the treaty, the trade is small and named. Roughly 317 vessels, per the Marine Stewardship Council, land the catch at the Portuguese and Galician ports. The fish is auctioned at the dock the morning it comes in; there is no futures market for sardine, and the price the piece cites, 1.50 euros a kilogram, is the average auction price for 2026 to date, published by the Portuguese and Spanish port authorities and aggregated in the trade press.

Canneries buy at the dock. The Portuguese side is a small cluster of family and mid-sized houses in Matosinhos, Setúbal and Peniche, of which José Gourmet and Ramirez are the best-known abroad; the Galician side is centered on the Rías Baixas, where Conservas de Cambados and Ramón Peña buy from the boats moored across the estuary. There is no listed company in the segment; the largest privately-held cannery groups do not disclose volumes, so quantitative claims about a specific cannery’s share are limited to what the companies themselves publish. What can be said is that the certified segment as a whole covers those 317 vessels and, per MSC, more than half of the Iberian sardine catch.

Two supply chains, one word

	Moroccan sardine (the shortage)	Iberian sardine (the tin)
Fleet and waters	Morocco, Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts	Portugal and Spain, Bay of Biscay to the Strait of Gibraltar
Main use	Frozen export, industrial canning, fishmeal	Fresh market and the conservas canneries
2026 supply	Landings down about 46 percent from 2022 to 2024; frozen export ban in force	TAC 50,294 tonnes; Spain's share fully caught by August 1; Portugal fishing to the winter closure
Price direction	Rising on scarcity and fuel	1.50 euros per kilogram at the dock, up fifty cents on 2024, on demand
Stock status	Declining; climate shift plus overfishing cited	Above the sustainable-yield threshold since 2020; MSC certification regained in July 2025
What changes in December	Nothing scheduled	The joint management plan expires at year end; the 2027 quotas are being negotiated in Brussels now

The December line is the one to watch. The plan that has governed the stock since 2021 runs out at the end of this year, and Portugal has signaled it wants higher quotas in whatever replaces it, citing the recovery and the certificate. Spain wants the same. The EU's precautionary rule will decide how much either gets. That negotiation, not the Moroccan headline, is the news for anyone who eats these tins.

What a tin's price is made of

Here is why neither story moves the price of a good tin much. A standard 120-gram tin holds about 90 grams of sardines once the oil is drained, and a sardine loses weight in the cooking and trimming at the cannery, so call it 120 grams of whole fish per tin going in. At this season's dock price of 1.50 euros a kilogram, that is 18 cents of fish. The tin, the olive oil, the hand-packing our cannery piece walks through, the sterilizing, the label, the shipping across the Atlantic, the importer and the shop are the rest of the price. A fifty-cent rise in the fish price, the biggest in this fishery in years, adds six cents to a tin. Premium conservas are priced on the work and the wait, not the catch, which is the same thing our cocoa piece found about chocolate yesterday.

Where the Moroccan shortage does reach a shelf is the bottom of it. The cheapest tins, the ones that list "sardines, soybean oil, salt" and name no cannery, are the ones most likely to be made from frozen and industrial fish, and those are the tins the Moroccan numbers will reach. Our label guide explains how to tell which supply chain a tin came from by reading its back.

On the shelf

The tinned fish shelf at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, is Iberian and Breton, and ships across the continental U.S. from theambrosianpantry.com. Two houses stand for the fishery in this piece: the Portuguese sardines our José Gourmet guide covers, and the Galician tins in the Cambados guide, from the rías where the Spanish season just closed. A tin of either improves in the cupboard for years, so if the headline made you want to stock up, that instinct is fine; it is just not a shortage you are buying against.

Watch Brussels in December. Then buy the tin you were going to buy anyway.

Sources & Further Reading

Disclosure. The shop stocks José Gourmet and Conservas de Cambados sardines in olive oil among other conservas houses; the two producer guides linked above cover both. We buy from each through their normal wholesale terms. We have no other financial interest in the Iberian quota outcome, in any cannery named, in the MSC certification, or in the Moroccan side of the trade.

Back to blog