Film Turns Tide for Dolphins at StarKist Tuna : Environment: A rock ‘n’ roll executive carried the public’s message: ‘People just want to let the dolphin alone.’

Over salads, Weight Watchers entrees, dry crackers and talk of racehorses, two corporate chieftains met at lunch last December to discuss the fate of the world’s dolphins.

Two hours later, Jerry Moss, chairman of A & M Records Co., had become a catalyst to Anthony J. F. O’Reilly, chairman, president and chief executive of giant H. J. Heinz Co., who was pondering a change of policy for Heinz’s subsidiary, StarKist Seafoods Co., the Long Beach-based tuna canner.

The new policy, announced Thursday to a surprised industry and jubilant environmentalists, is to no longer market tuna caught in ways that injure dolphins.

The other big U.S. packers, Bumble Bee Seafoods and the Van Camp Seafood Co., which markets Chicken of the Sea brand, scrambled to join StarKist, the world’s largest tuna canner, with similar announcements of their own.

Environmentalists had pressured the tuna industry for years, with tactics that included a boycott of canned tuna that began in the early 1970s. Greenpeace estimates that 7,000 telegrams have been sent in protest in recent years. Still, the tuna packers had always resisted an outright ban on practices that killed as many as 100,000 dolphins a year.

As more and more consumers complained, however, StarKist executives began about a year and a half ago to consider the matter seriously, according to Erik Bloemendaal, general manager of quality and communications at StarKist.

“We were monitoring consumer reactions,” recalled Bloemendaal, “through focus groups, phone calls and as just plain people who heard (complaints) from people we talked to.”

But business considerations gave the company pause.

“The risk in our business is always can we obtain fish? Where are we going to get them from?” said Bloemendaal.

Meanwhile, early in 1988, Samuel F. LaBudde, a determined biologist and photographer supported by the San Francisco-based environmental organization Earth Island Institute, had returned to the United States with five hours of surreptitiously shot video footage of something the public had never seen--dolphins being killed during tuna fishing.

An 11-minute edited version, in which dolphins squealed in pain as they succumbed--in some cases being ground up alive in the gears of the nets--was first aired in March, 1988, to horrified audiences. It made the issue terribly real to millions of Americans.

Jerry Moss, the rock-and-roll producer and a member of Earth Island Institute himself, saw the videotape in June, 1989, and he decided at once to support an organization formed in part by his wife, Ann, called the Dolphin Connection. Moss made A & M’s sound stage available the following November for an evening of consciousness-raising in the entertainment world on the plight of the dolphins.

Moss also suggested lunch to a man he’d first seen on an interview show on late-night TV in Tokyo, H. J. Heinz CEO O’Reilly.

“I’m always impressed when someone does a good interview,” said Moss, chuckling. “But seriously, I was impressed with his approach to leadership. . . . He was able to respond (to the interviewer’s questions) in a very generous manner, he wasn’t holding anything back.”

Robert S. “Bobby” Shriver, son of Eunice and Sargent Shriver, and a friend of the Mosses, acted as an intermediary in contacting Heinz.

Ted Smyth, Heinz vice president for corporate affairs, eventually got back to Moss, and the three sat down to lunch at the company’s corporate headquarters in Pittsburg last December.

By that time, O’Reilly was painfully aware of the effect on consumers of the LaBudde video.

Moss and O’Reilly developed a rapport in part by talking horses. O’Reilly raises racehorses in Ireland; Moss has a respected horse running at Santa Anita.

Weight Watchers entrees were served because that company is also in the Heinz family.

As for dolphins, O’Reilly wanted to know Moss’ sense of the level of public concern, as Smyth remembers the conversation. And weren’t environmentalists aware that StarKist was reducing the number of dolphins killed every year?

Moss, in what Smyth described as a “lucid, non-aggressive, not anti-business way,” responded that “people just want to let the dolphin alone, period, and they’re willing to pay the extra cost to do that,” Smyth said.

Moss also made the point that while many of the world’s problems were extraordinarily complex, this was one that Heinz, with its international market position, could solve in one move.

By the new year, Heinz, reflecting O’Reilly’s personal slogan, “Facts Are Friendly,” had decided to take definitive action.

Just 10 days before the Thursday press conference, StarKist quietly checked the basics of its plan with environmental groups, to make sure it had addressed all the issues.

As word spread among the organizations, reported Smyth, “We’ve had people weeping over the phone at the Long Beach office, thanking us.”