Rafiul Ahmed: Every Consumer Has a Story. Here is How I Started Listening.

Growing up in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, I was basically a city kid who needed the ocean to breathe in every vacation. Every chance I got, I traveled, and the coastal trips were always the closest to me. Nothing captured me quite like Cox’s Bazar, the longest natural sea beach in the world. Standing at that shore, watching the sunrise bleed into the water and fishing boats come in heavy with the morning catch, I always felt like I was witnessing an entire industry. The markets, the fishermen, the smell of salt and fresh catch, it was all one living thing. And wherever I traveled, food was always a big part of it. But seafood was never just another meal to me. It was the place itself, served on a plate.

Not once did I imagine that this part of my life would someday connect to my professional journey.

When I enrolled in the M.S. in Applied Economics program at the University of Maine’s School of Economics, I came in with broad interests in environmental and energy policy. Aquaculture industry or Seafood markets were not really on my radar. But research has a way of finding you, and I soon found myself working on a NOAA-funded project asking something deceptively simple: why don’t more Americans eat more seafood?

The numbers actually made the question very intriguing. U.S. per capita seafood consumption is just 19.7 pounds per year, which is more than 50% lower than for other proteins, and according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (2023), nearly 90% of Americans fall short of the dietary guidelines recommended weekly intake of 8 oz. Yet surveys show that 74% of consumers wish they ate more seafood than they already do (ASMA, 2024). So, the demand exists. Something is getting in the way. And the gap is exactly where economics lives, and it became the center of my research.

My research, co-led with Melisa Uyar, Dr. Caroline L. Noblet, and Dr. Keith S. Evans from the UMaine School of Economics, analyzes survey data from over 7,000 respondents across two samples – the Northeastern region and seven major U.S. metropolitan cities. We constructed a multi-dimensional Consumption Barriers Index across three key barrier categories: Price, Knowledge, and Preference. Using these, we identified distinct and diverse consumer groups.

The core finding is that barriers are not uniform. A consumer who can’t afford seafood faces a completely different problem than one who doesn’t know how to store it safely, or one who simply never grew up eating it. A one-size-fits-all marketing strategy won’t move the needle. Targeted interventions, whether public education, supply chain innovations, or cooperative purchasing models, have to be built around the actual people on the other side of the data.

A second strand of our research asks a different question about Maine tourism: Does visiting Maine change how people think about and spend it on Maine-produced seafood? It does. From our preliminary results, we found that visitors to Maine spend about $13 more per month on seafood groceries for home preparation and $19 more per month at restaurants than non-visitors. They also rate Maine’s seafood and marine environment higher than those of the other coastal places they have been to.

Tourism is not just an economic driver for Maine; it is becoming a gateway to building long-term seafood consumers. Maine has a very unique reputational asset that it has not yet fully leveraged. We believe the long-term success of the seafood and tourism industries would depend on effective mutual stakeholder collaboration.

Beyond the NOAA project, my research extends to a related but unsettling question: what happens when people are already fishing but afraid to eat what they catch? As part of a collaborative study with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, I contributed to the UMaine Angler Survey 2024, a statewide look at how awareness of environmental contaminants, particularly PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), is quietly reshaping the consumption habits of Maine’s freshwater anglers. The findings pointed to a growing tension between people’s relationship with Maine’s waters and their confidence in the safety of what those waters produce. Across both projects, the same underlying question kept surfacing: how do environmental risks shape people’s food choices, and what does that mean for the communities and industries that depend on those choices?

I am finishing my M.S. and looking ahead to doctoral work in environmental economics in the near future, but the questions that brought me into this field feels more urgent the deeper I go, not less. Every individual is a consumer, and every consumer carries a unique story about what they eat, what they fear, and what they trust. Understanding that complexity and translating it into insights that actually reach the people making decisions is what keeps me in this work.

The sea has always made me wonder. It still does, just now with data and direction behind the wondering.