There is a sardine shortage. Kind of...
That sounds like a dodge, but it's probably the most accurate place to start. There's no single global sardine stock, no single sardine fishery, and no warehouse somewhere that tells us how many sardines the world has left. What we're seeing instead is pressure in several important fisheries and, more importantly for anyone buying canned sardines, serious disruption in the places that supply a disproportionate amount of the world’s conservas.
Morocco is the clearest example. Portugal and Spain are major players and have their own constraints. Climate and recruitment are part of it, along with fishing limits. So are fish size, season, competing buyers, cannery capacity, labor, freezing, the fresh market, fishmeal, shipping, packaging, and the simple fact that a sardine swimming in the ocean isn't automatically a sardine available to put in a can.
There Is No Global Sardine
When someone says sardines are scarce, the first question should be: which sardines, and where?
A lot of the tins we sell from Portugal, Spain, and Morocco are built around the European sardine, Sardina pilchardus. But “sardine” is also a market name applied to several small pelagic fish around the world. We wrote a guide to explain the differences in sardines, pilchards, brislings and sprats.
Those fisheries don't rise and fall together.
A bad year off Morocco doesn't mean every sardine fishery on earth had a bad year. A Portuguese quota reduction doesn't tell you what is happening in the Pacific. And a strong landing season somewhere doesn't necessarily help a cannery several hundred miles away that needs a particular species, size, and condition.
The current shortage on the conservas side is better understood as a supply problem concentrated in some of the places that are relevant to canned sardines.
Enter Morocco. Its canning industry describes the country as the world’s leading exporter of canned sardines, with dozens of companies and production facilities tied to the trade. When Moroccan raw material tightens, the effect doesn't stay in Morocco. (Unicop)
Morocco Is a Main Character
The numbers coming out of Morocco have been rough.
Industry figures citing Morocco’s National Fisheries Office reported sardine landings falling from roughly 965,000 metric tons in 2022 to about 525,000 metric tons in 2024, a decline of roughly 46 percent. More recent industry figures put 2025 sardine landings at about 403,000 metric tons. (Le Nouvelliste Maroc)
That's not a small adjustment for a country whose canning industry is built heavily around sardines.
The Moroccan canned-fish industry has said reduced raw material has left production lines idle and pushed factories into shorter operating schedules. The problem isn't simply that processors would like cheaper fish. There are plants, workers, equipment, export contracts, and customers built around a volume of sardines that has become much harder to guarantee. (LeDesk)
Morocco responded in 2026 by restricting exports of fresh, refrigerated, and frozen sardines for twelve months. The important detail is that this was not simply a ban on canned sardines leaving Morocco. The measure was aimed at keeping more raw fish available inside the country and relieving pressure on domestic supply and prices. (LeDesk)
That distinction is telling. Everyone wants the same fish.
Catching More Sardines Does Not Necessarily Mean More Sardines for Canning
In September 2026, Moroccan industry figures described what they called a paradox: sardine landings during the period they were examining were up 68 percent, while deliveries of sardines to canneries were down 32 percent. The share reportedly reaching canneries fell from around 30 percent in 2025 to 17 percent in 2026. (Médias24)
So the boats can catch more fish and the cannery can still have less fish.
Once sardines are landed, several buyers may be competing for them. They can go to the fresh market. They can be frozen. They can go into cans. They can be reduced into fishmeal or fish oil. Different buyers have different margins, different infrastructure, and different abilities to pay.
That competition isn't new. FAO has documented the same basic tension in Morocco for years: sardines moving among canning, freezing, fresh consumption, and reduction depending on landings, quality, capacity, and price. (FAOHome)
When supply gets tight, those competing uses suddenly become much more visible. A cannery doesn't own the fish simply because the fish would make a good sardine tin.
And Not Every Sardine Is a Cannery Sardine
A cannery does not just need sardines. It needs sardines that work for its process.
The cannery is looking for more than a sardine. Size, condition, fat content, handling, and how far the fish has to travel all affect whether it works for the pack they want to make. A fish that is perfectly fine for the fresh market or another use may not be right for a small tin of neatly packed whole sardines.
This gets especially important with premium conservas.
When you open a tin and see six or eight clean fish laid down neatly, that did not happen because somebody bought a random pile of sardines at the dock. The producer had specifications before the fish ever reached the table.
That makes the usable supply smaller than the headline catch number.
A country can land 100 tons of sardines without producing 100 tons of sardines suitable for the cans a particular producer needs.
Sardines Are Wild Fish. Recruitment Is Never Guaranteed.
Sardines can produce enormous populations, but small pelagic fish are notoriously variable.
One strong year class can eventually put a lot of fish into a fishery. Several weak recruitment years can do the opposite.
Recruitment is the point at which young fish survive long enough to become part of the population available to the fishery. With sardines, that process depends heavily on what happens to eggs and larvae in their first months of life.
Off Iberia, researchers have found that sardine recruitment is tied to a complicated combination of sea-surface temperature, food availability, water movement, rainfall, plankton blooms, and the ability of young fish to remain in suitable coastal habitat. A 22-year analysis found sea-surface temperature to be an important driver in both northwestern Portugal and the Gulf of Cádiz, while the exact combination of favorable conditions differed between the two regions. (ScienceDirect)
That is one reason sardines are difficult to talk about with a simple sentence like “there are too many boats.”
Climate Change Does Not Mean “Warm Water Equals No Sardines”
Climate is part of the equation, but it is only one of several forces shaping what happens in a sardine fishery. There is evidence that environmental change affects sardine recruitment. There is also evidence that those effects vary by region, season, and life stage.
For the Iberian sardine stock, researchers have associated stronger recruitment in some areas with cooler conditions and better plankton availability during important larval periods. Ocean currents also matter because larvae need food and need to stay in habitat where they can survive. Push them offshore at the wrong time and a productive spawning season can turn into a poor year class. (ScienceDirect)
None of this gives us a thermostat setting for sardines.
The ocean is moving water, temperature, food, predators, spawning adults, eggs, larvae, and currents all at once.
Climate change is changing that system, but it would be misleading to look at a warm year, a low catch, and draw a straight line between the two.
Portugal and Spain Show Why “Shortage” Needs Context
The Iberian fishery tells a somewhat different story from Morocco.
Portugal and Spain jointly manage the Sardina pilchardus stock in ICES areas 8c and 9a under a multi-year management plan that includes catch rules and protections for juvenile fish.
For 2025, Portugal’s sardine landing limit was 34,406 metric tons. For 2026 it was set at 33,446 metric tons, a reduction of 960 tons. Portugal retained 66.5 percent of the jointly established Portugal-Spain catch allowance. (Diário da República)
That is a reduction, but it isn't the same story as Moroccan landings dropping by nearly half between 2022 and 2024.
Portugal also controls daily landings and can impose real-time closures when catches contain too high a proportion of juvenile sardines. The point of those restrictions isn't to create scarcity for its own sake. They are an attempt to keep today's catch from becoming tomorrow's bigger problem. (Diário da República)
Tighter fishing limits don't necessarily mean the stock is failing. But once the whole situation gets called a “sardine shortage,” those very different conditions start getting treated as the same thing.
Fish Size Can Become a Problem Before Fish Numbers Do
There is another thing worth watching: the age and size structure of the catch. Imagine a sardine population produces a strong year of young fish. That is good news biologically. It might not solve the cannery’s problem this year. Those fish still have to grow.
Portugal’s management rules specifically allow for closures when juvenile sardines below 13 centimeters make up too much of a catch. That is a conservation measure, but it also illustrates something practical for the canning trade: a lot of young fish in the water does not immediately create a lot of commercially useful sardines. (Diário da República)
Recovery happens on the fish’s schedule. The factory cannot speed that up.
Season Matters More Than We Usually Admit
Sardines change with the season. Their fat content, feeding, spawning, and location all shift over the course of the year, while weather and ocean conditions determine when boats can get out, where the schools form, and whether they can be fished economically.
A cannery may want sardines during a particular part of the season because that is when the fish have the size, fat, and condition the producer wants. That means annual tonnage can conceal a lot.
Two years can finish with similar total landings and still give a cannery completely different results depending on when the fish arrived and what they looked like when they got there.
Anyone who works with agricultural products already understands this. A hundred pounds of tomatoes isn't always the same hundred pounds of tomatoes. Fish are no different.
Fresh Fish and Canned Fish Compete With Each Other
People sometimes assume canning gets whatever the fresh market does not want.
Good canneries don't work that way. They need good raw material too.
When sardines become scarce and fresh prices rise, canneries have to compete with people who want to sell those same fish fresh. Morocco's recent price pressure illustrates exactly that problem: reduced availability has pushed sardine prices higher in domestic markets while processors simultaneously report difficulty securing fish. (Le 360 Français)
That creates a difficult calculation. Pay more for fish and the finished tin gets more expensive. Don't pay more and somebody else buys the fish.
Freezing Changes the Market Too
Freezing gives sardines another exit. A frozen fish can move through different markets and can potentially travel much farther before it is processed or eaten. When international buyers are willing to pay, freezing competes directly with domestic processors for raw material.
That is part of why Morocco's 2026 export restrictions focused on fresh and frozen sardines. Restricting those exports was a way of keeping more raw material inside the country rather than trying to regulate the finished can after the fact. (LeDesk)
Again, this is why “there are fewer sardines” doesn't fully explain an empty production line.
Sometimes the sardines exist. They are simply going to a different market.
Fishmeal Is Part of the Equation
Small pelagic fish also have industrial value.
Sardines, mackerel, anchovies, and related fish can be reduced into fishmeal and fish oil, which are used heavily in animal and aquaculture feeds.
This creates one of the stranger realities of the sardine economy: a fish can compete simultaneously as inexpensive human food, premium conservas, frozen export product, and industrial raw material.
Historically, Morocco has moved substantial quantities of small pelagics into reduction, particularly when fish couldn't be absorbed by other markets or processing capacity. (FAOHome)
Moroccan canning interests have recently pushed for limits on the use of whole sardines for fishmeal precisely because the industries are competing for the same resource. That position comes from the canning industry and should be understood as such, but the fight itself tells you how valuable the raw fish has become. (Le 360 Français)
Then the Sardine Has to Reach the Cannery
Fish are perishable. Painfully so.
The longer sardines sit, the harder they are to keep in good condition. Time, temperature, handling, distance, and transport all start working against the fish.
If sardines are landed hundreds of miles from a cannery, having plenty of fish at that port doesn't magically solve the cannery's supply problem.
Morocco has dealt with this for decades as sardine landings shifted geographically and processors had to move fish from southern ports toward established processing centers. FAO has documented the additional transport cost and quality problems this creates. (FAOHome)
We tend to think about seafood supply as a fishing problem. Very often it is a logistics problem.
Canneries Cannot Be Turned On and Off Like a Light
There is another consequence of several bad years that is harder to see from the grocery shelf. People leave.
If a cannery runs fewer days because it cannot get enough fish, workers find other jobs. Skilled labor becomes harder to retain. Suppliers lose business. Maintenance gets deferred. Lines sit idle.
Then a stronger fishing season arrives and the plant may not immediately be able to return to full production.
That is exactly what Moroccan processors are warning about now. Industry representatives have said that even improving catches will not instantly solve production because years of irregular work have made retaining and remobilizing labor more difficult. (Médias24) Sometimes fish can recover faster than the workforce.
The Can Costs Money Too
Even when the sardine is available, the fish is only one part of the finished price.
There is olive oil. Tomato. Spices. Labor. Electricity. Water. The can itself. Cardboard. Labels. Freight. Warehousing. Import costs. Currency.
Metal packaging has historically been a major expense in sardine production. Add higher wages, transportation, energy, and oil prices, and a producer can face a higher finished cost even if the price of raw sardines stays still. (FAOHome)
So when a tin goes from $7 to $9, it doesn't necessarily mean the sardine became 28 percent more expensive. There are a lot of variables in that number.
The Premium Sardine Market Has Unique Problems
There is also more demand for good sardines than there used to be. That is good for the category until everybody starts chasing the same fish.
The modern conservas market has created customers willing to pay for larger fish, smaller fish, hand packing, better olive oil, specific origins, particular preparations, vintage tins, limited runs, and recognizable producers.
Those products don't draw from an infinite pool. If a cannery has traditionally packed a particular size of sardine during a certain window of the season, it cannot necessarily double production because American customers discovered the brand.
At some point the answer has to be no. That is one of the things I respect about the better producers. The fish comes first. The SKU comes second.
Does the American Tinned Fish Boom Matter?
American demand is part of the conversation here, but it would be a mistake to blame TikTok for a sardine shortage. Tinned fish has clearly become more visible in the U.S. over the last few years, helped along by restaurant menus, newer brands, food media, TikTok, and influencers who turned conservas into something people actively seek out rather than ignore in the pantry aisle. That interest is real, and at least some major sardine brands continue to report strong U.S. sales even as raw-material costs rise. (Bon Appétit)
But the American market is only one buyer in a much larger system. Morocco’s current problem is being driven more directly by reduced and irregular landings, competition among the fresh market, freezing, canning, and fishmeal, and the difficulty of getting enough suitable fish into the canneries themselves. (Médias24) Increased U.S. interest can add pressure at the margin, especially for premium tins and specific producers with limited production, but it doesn't explain a 68 percent decline in Moroccan sardine landings since 2022. Social media can make a particular tin disappear from shelves quickly. It cannot create fish that were never landed in the first place.
A Sardine Shortage Does Not Hit Every Tin at the Same Time
This is where things get strange at retail. One brand disappears. Another seems completely unaffected. One tin jumps several dollars. Another sits at the same price.
A producer drops a product for six months. Another substitutes a different size. Another may have inventory packed a year or two earlier and keeps shipping without interruption.
Canned food carries inventory unusually well. That is normally one of its strengths. During a supply problem it also delays the evidence.
The tin you buy today may have been packed before the current shortage became obvious. A distributor may have months of inventory. A producer may have held stock. Another may be running close to the bone.
The shelf does not show you the fishery in real time. Eventually it catches up.
Does This Mean Sardines Are Being Overfished?
Sometimes fishing pressure is part of the problem. But I would be careful with a blanket statement that today's sardine shortage is simply the result of overfishing.
The Iberian fishery is being actively managed with quotas, daily landing limits, juvenile protections, scientific surveys, and a joint Portugal-Spain management plan. Meanwhile, scientific work on Iberian sardines shows recruitment is also strongly influenced by environmental conditions. (Diário da República)
Morocco has a different fishery, different geography, different industrial pressures, and its own management questions. “Overfishing” is an appealing explanation because it gives one problem one cause. The reality is more complicated than that.
Does This Mean Sardines Are Going Away?
No evidence I found supports saying that sardines, as a global category, are disappearing.
The pressure is coming from several directions at once: inconsistent recruitment, tighter raw-material supply, competition among buyers, and management rules designed to keep catches within what the stocks can support.
In Portugal, the government opened the 2026 season with a national limit only modestly below 2025 and said the volume remained sufficient to support both fishing activity and the canning industry. (Government of Portugal)
In Morocco, meanwhile, the canning industry is dealing with a much deeper raw-material problem.
Both things can be true at once.
What I Expect to See on the Shelf
I would expect sardines to become less predictable before I would expect them to disappear.
Certain brands will be harder to keep in stock. They already are. Some producers will pack fewer fish. Some runs will be smaller. Prices will continue to move. Canneries may put more attention into mackerel, tuna, shellfish, trout, or other species when sardine supply doesn't make sense.
We may also see more variation from year to year. That's not necessarily a bad development.
One of the mistakes the modern food system makes is pretending wild food should behave like a manufactured part. Same size. Same price. Same quantity. Every month. Forever.
A sardine fishery cannot promise that. Neither should we.
What This Means for Buying Sardines
I would not panic-buy sardines. But I also would not assume the tin you like will always be available at the same price.
If a producer has a good pack, buy it. If something disappears, try another producer. Try another preparation. Try mackerel. Try sprats. Try horse mackerel.
The whole point of building a good tinned-fish pantry is that there is more than one fish in it. When a favorite sardine finally shows up again, the tin may mean a little more than it did before.
Behind the tin is a whole chain: a season that had to line up, young fish that had to survive, workable ocean conditions, a quota, a landing, a buyer, transport, a cannery, and the people waiting to process the catch. Then somebody has to put the sardines in the can.
The shortage isn't one problem. It's what happens when several parts of that chain get tight at the same time.