A Boots spokesperson confirmed the move to Reuters during the final week of the annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), the intergovernmental body responsible for managing the Antarctic krill fishery.

At the meeting, a proposal to establish a marine protected area (MPA) around the Antarctic Peninsula once again failed to gain the consensus needed for adoption, primarily due to opposition from the delegation of the People’s Republic of China. The proposal has been tabled annually since its introduction in 2017.

Retailers Step Up as Governments Fail to Act 

In October 2025, British retailer Holland & Barrett became the first major retailer to commit to ending sales of krill-based products in response to growing concerns about the impact of the krill fishery on whales, pioneering what has since become a growing movement of retailers exiting the krill market. Together with Sea Shepherd Global, the company also launched the Antarctic Krill Pledge, a jointly authored call to action encouraging retailers to end sales of all krill-based products.

Sea Shepherd's Antarctic Expeditions Drive Retailer Action 

Boots’ decision follows heightened scrutiny of the Antarctic krill fishery brought about by four consecutive Sea Shepherd expeditions to the Southern Ocean.

Sea Shepherd Global first communicated its concerns to Boots in November 2025 and began publicly calling on the retailer to stop selling krill oil supplements in January 2026, alongside other non-governmental organizations, including WePlanet. In the months that followed, campaigners noticed that krill oil products were increasingly being listed as out of stock on the retailer’s website.

The markets and outreach campaign, which has resulted in commitments from major retailers around the world — including Germany’s three largest drugstore chains — to stop selling krill oil supplements, is grounded in documentation gathered by Sea Shepherd in Antarctica.

During these annual expeditions, Sea Shepherd repeatedly documented industrial supertrawlers operating among foraging whales inside the proposed marine protected area. Evidence gathered at sea was presented to retailers, including Boots, alongside concerns about weakening regulations governing the expanding krill fishery.

The Sea Shepherd vessel Allankay returned from Antarctica earlier this year after facilitating the work of an independent team of scientists studying the overlap between industrial krill fishing and foraging whales.

The Growing Threat to Antarctica's Food Web 

Krill are a keystone species in the Southern Ocean, converting energy captured by phytoplankton into a food source that sustains whales, penguins, seals and countless other species. Changes in krill abundance can reverberate throughout the Antarctic food web. Scientific evidence suggests that krill densities around the Antarctic Peninsula, where much of the commercial fishery is concentrated, may have declined by as much as 80 percent since the 1970s.

Much of the Antarctic krill catch is processed into krill oil for use in omega-3 dietary supplements, despite the widespread availability of alternatives, including omega-3 supplements derived directly from algae. Unlike krill oil, algae-based omega-3 does not require the industrial extraction of wildlife from the Antarctic food web.

Weakening Protections Increase Pressure on Antarctic Wildlife 

At the end of 2024, a key conservation measure requiring krill fishing activity to be distributed across a wider geographic area expired after governments failed to agree on its renewal. The measure was designed to reduce the risk of localized krill depletion. Without these spatial restrictions, fishing effort can become increasingly concentrated in ecologically important areas, intensifying pressure on wildlife competing for the same prey.

Earlier this year, the Antarctic fur seal was classified as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global authority on extinction risk. Antarctic krill are a critical component of the species’ diet.

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