Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Fish Tech

Survey: Parasite & Mercury-Free Fish Are Key Attributes of Cell-Cultured Seafood According to Sushi Eaters

According to a report published by cell-cultured seafood startup BluNalu, consumers value the absence of parasites and mercury in cell-cultured seafood, especially among those who frequently eat sushi. The data, sourced from a survey conducted by a market research specialist in 2022 and featured in a comprehensive report by BluNalu this week, displays how consumers prioritize specific qualities of cell-cultured seafood, like BluNalu’s toro tuna.

The survey chart below reveals the answer to the question: “How significant are the following benefits of cell-cultured seafood when deciding whether to order it in a restaurant?” The top four attributes, as ranked by sushi enthusiasts, all pertained to the “clean” attributes of food cultivated beyond our increasingly polluted and climate-affected oceans. The importance placed on seafood being free from parasites, pesticides, mercury, and microplastics suggests the kind of narratives companies like BluNalu should adopt when introducing their products to the market.

Other interesting insights from the BluNalu research compilation include a preference among chefs and food industry experts for the toro portion of the tuna – the fatty belly portion of the fish – when asked which type of fish and part of a fish that the company should emphasize when created a cell-cultured alternative to wild-caught fish. This desire for toro, according to BluNalu, is because chefs see an opportunity to present this premium cut to a wider audience. From the report:

Another intriguing insight from the BluNalu research is the preference among chefs and food industry experts for toro, the fatty belly region of tune. When inquired about which fish type and section the company should highlight when producing a cell-cultured alternative to wild-caught fish, most leaned towards the toro. BluNalu believes this is because chefs see an opportunity to offer this high-priced cut to a wider audience. From the report:

Discussions with chefs illuminated the opportunity presented by cell-cultured bluefin tuna toro to extend menu utilization in non-Japanese fine-dining restaurants for the first time at scale, given that 80% of the world’s supply of this fish has historically been consumed in Japan.

While it’s worth noting the while research in the report is obviously self-serving, the insights and data seem to ring true. Like many, I’ve become increasingly worried about the potential for toxins when eating seafood over the past few years, and I’d be interested in eating seafood that doesn’t have exposure to chemicals, parasites, and other contaminants of seafood pulled from the sea. And like many in the food tech world, I’m also interested in eating less seafood due to the threat to the seafood population from overfishing.

If you’d like to take a look at the full report, you can find it here on BluNalu’s website.

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Roee Nir, CEO and Cofounder of Forsea

I had the opportunity to talk to Roee Nir, CEO and co-founder of Forsea. Forsea is producing cultivated seafood, starting with cultivated eel. Prior to Forsea, Nir headed the business development for a biopharmaceutical company in immunology. We chatted about the differences between cultivated meat and cultivated seafood, customer preferences, navigating the regulatory environment, the foodtech ecosystem in Israel, and how startups raise money in Israel. 

J: Why is eel your first product?

R: We start with eel because our strategy is to target highly priced fish with real market demand that is unmet and endangered species. The place that we go to look for the endangered species is the IUCN Red List and eel was answering these criteria quite significantly because eel has declined 90 to 95% in recent decades and the wholesale price is between 60 to $75 per kilo. Just to understand how big the market need is, Japan, for example, consumed about 160,000 metric tons in the year 2000. Now, they consume around 14. So, there is a big gap between the demand and the current supply and for us that was a no brainer to tackle this market.

J: How did you as a founder become passionate about this problem? 

R: We are in the center of a revolution. Looking at fish and seafood, the demand for them is expected to double by 2050. Already now, less than 7% of the fisheries are being fished at levels below sustainability. Aquaculture has its own environmental and food security issues. There is a great need to close the supply and demand gap.

J: Israel is very strong and cultivated meat, especially because there are a lot of people that don’t eat meat here. How do you see differences in the development of cultivated meat vs. cultivated seafood startups? 

R: Cultivated meat had some background from medical research related to tissue engineering and organ substitutes and so on. The challenge was taking it from that vertical into the right applications in the food. For fish, there was no research and every cultivated fish and seafood company is doing very basic research because the cells develop differently. Each of us is more or less targeting different markets at the beginning (tuna, scallops, shrimp, etc) which require their own modifications. There are some ancillary companies joining the ecosystem related to cell line development, scaffolding, growth factor developments, contract manufacturing, piloting, etc for cultivated meat.

J: So when the Kitchen came to you and approached you with the idea of this startup, and they already had the technology, what was that technology based on? 

R: We are a completely different company than any other cultivated company. Almost all cultivated meat companies do more or less the same thing, they will go to a certain source of stem cells and use a technique called directed differentiation to grow the cells. Then the cells have to communicate which they do by using a scaffold where the cells are seated on the scaffold pre-maturation. This is used as a building block of the tissue.

What my co-founder Iftach Nachman discovered is a technique to take important stem cells which are cells that have the potential to differentiate to any type of cell. And these are usually being created only when you have a fertilized egg. So you have a fertilized egg that doubles to two to four to eight, and so on. These cells upload but they have the potential to differentiate to any type of a cell. He found a technique to take these cells and to aggregate them into a special form called an organoid and give these stem cells the feeling that they are in the early stage of their own development. What happens is that these cells start to grow as if they weren’t each. They grow into many tissues that are naturally composed of edible pieces. 

So we barely use growth factors. We do use some growth factor to direct this organoid tissue to have the composition that we want, but it’s a very minimal usage compared to the directed differentiation methodology. Then these many tissues of this organ start to develop autonomously up to less than a millimeter before we start building tissue from it. 

And by this method, we are tackling the largest challenges of the cultivated meat space. We eliminate the scaffolding stage because each one of these organoids is its own connective tissue. They communicate together and we don’t need to synthetically put them on a scaffold. We also simplify the production process so we are much more scalable. These advantages allow us to bring our product to plate faster and reach price parity faster. Also, the tissue is more natural in the way that we manufacture the cut.

J: When do you expect that consumers will be able to try your seafood? 

R: We are in the R&D phase and are planning to launch the first product to market at the end of 2025. 

J: When a new product enters the market here in Israel, especially food tech, what kind of adjustments do you have to make toward customer preferences? 

R: The final product that we launch will probably be more suitable for the Asian territories. As a company for our product of eel, we would want to do the market adaptations in Japan, not in Israel. I think that overall most companies are going to try Israel or Singapore as a test country but we are all aiming at selling globally. Because our industry is an industry that requires a lot of CapEx and we need markets that justify such an investment. Our vision is that our first launch would be in Asia.

J: With this product, what kind of regulation or intellectual property protection challenges do you have to navigate? 

R: The first wave of companies has to face two aspects. One is regulation, and the other is market education. The way is being paved by them for us. Any company that is getting the approval, it’s a very big advancement. I’m quite confident that our process will go through there quite smoothly as any cultivated meat company. From an IP perspective, everything that we do is completely innovative. We are submitting a few provisionals these days, based on the research that we generated in our lab. But really everything that we do is very innovative and this is how we protect ourselves. 

J: There are probably a lot of challenges as a first mover entering the market, especially around customer reception. What are the other challenges associated with developing not just a technology, but also a business that has to have customers? 

R: First, every consumer research that has been done says that the most important thing in the product is taste. So it’s on us to deliver a product that is high quality. From a market perspective, we, as a company, do not plan to be the ones that are marketing the product. For example, now we are looking for strong partners in the different territories that we target to partner with to make the right market adaptations to the target market. And also such companies which are seafood manufacturers and seafood traders that already have their own relationships with the restaurants and the retail stores. They will be the ones that will take the path of introducing the product into the market. That’s our strategy. Specifically with the eel, more than 80% of it is being sold in restaurants and that’s also our strategy: to start with the restaurants and then expand to the stores. 

J: Are there any other food tech companies from Israel or from other places that you really admire for their innovation or their business strategy? 

R: I think that Aleph is doing amazing work. I love their strategy. I love their technology and I think that it’s very well managed. I love the technology of Imagindairy also, they have very deep technology for the milk space. Also mushfoods, it’s a hamburger that’s 50/50. 

J: It sounds like the startup ecosystem here within food tech is very well connected. Would you say that the ecosystem here is generally a very close-knit and supportive community? 

R: First of all, in cultivated meat, no one needs to speak now on competition. Even the ones that are very soon going to launch their products, the market is still big and everyone is still starting. Everyone should collaborate in order to help us all bring this industry up, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the IP of others. 

As part of the larger ecosystem in Israel, we all collaborate. We are Israelis and we are very communicative within ourselves. We like to meet, we like to share ideas, and we love that this is a very central industry that is erupting from Israel. We also share investors. Sharing investors is a very connective thing.

J: And you talked about investors, so what is it like raising money here? 

R: So many of us, certainly all the companies from the Kitchen, have received Israeli Innovation Authority funding. We had to go through a very rigorous application and many meetings and once we were approved to be financed by the Israeli Innovation Authority and by the Kitchen, we were given 3 million shekels ($900,000). And it’s a very smart thing to do from the government’s point of view because it’s their way of incentivizing innovation. Then you have to start raising and from the earlier stages you can probably target angels as well. But most of my investors are Vc’s and only one angel. My preference is either VC’s or CVC’s, professional investors that not only know the business but support additional fundraising in the next stages, networking, etc. There are less investors in Israel than US or Europe so more investors are American or European. But there are also Israeli VC’s that have started to be more interested. 

J: You mention corporate venture capital, is that very common here? 

R: It is a source of funding. Of course, VC’s are more active, and naturally, there are much less CVC’s and their process is much longer and they are more conservative. For the relevant companies, it’s there. There are less investors in Israel than US or Europe, so more investors are from US or Europe.

Joy Chen is a contributor at the Spoon and has been writing about robotics and alternative proteins for the past year and a half. Although originally from the United States, she is currently studying at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. 

Are Deep Sea Fish Farms the Future of Aquaculture? Forever Oceans Thinks So

The growth of aquaculture has been one of the big stories in the fishing industry over the past couple of decades, as fish raised in farms has grown from about 20% of captured fish in the 1990s to half of all fish caught in by 2020, according to a report issued by the United Nations.

But fish farming, while lauded by many experts as a way to relieve stress on ever-declining wild fish populations, is seen as rife with problems by others. Critics say fish farms can expose local fish populations to parasites such as fish lice, as well as antibiotics, and other chemicals. They also say farms pollute waters with unnatural amounts of concentrated fish feces emitted from farm enclosures. Farmed fish also can escape enclosures, which can pose harm to wild fish populations through interbreeding, especially if the farmed fish are genetically modified.

But a new generation of fish farming startups believe that pushing aquaculture away from the shore and into the deep sea, aided by the use of advanced technology such as sensors, automation, and artificial intelligence, will alleviate many of the problems associated with near-shore fish farming and produce a cleaner, more abundant harvest that is desperately needed to feed a growing global population.

One such company is Forever Oceans which has developed a system for farming fish miles offshore in the open ocean. The company, a spinoff of Lockheed Martin, says it can place its fish enclosures 10 miles offshore, up to 6000 thousand feet deep, and allow them to essentially drift naturally in the ocean’s current using a “patented single-point mooring.”

Forever Oceans uses sensors and cameras to monitor water quality and fish behavior, and “AI-driven” management software can make precision adjustments to feeding amount and timing and control hazards such as algae blooms. Underwater images captured by the system’s cameras are processed by what the company describes as biomass software to determine when the fish are ready to harvest. The entire process, which the company says drastically reduces the amount of human interaction with the fish population, is managed hundreds of miles away in a central operations center where a “single employee can monitor and manage our entire global network of farms via their laptop or mobile phone.”

Forever Oceans and other startups in this space believe that pushing fish farms further offshore and deeper underwater allows the fish to live in a more natural environment. Deep ocean currents, they say, can wash away pollutants and naturally clean enclosures, which keeps disease to a minimum. Proponents also believe these systems are better than land-based systems because open ocean farms utilize deep ocean tides as a natural filtration system, resulting in less energy usage and better access to naturally provided nutrients.

While it’s too soon to tell if deep-sea fish farming grows to become a significant slice of the overall aquaculture market, it definitely has momentum. Ever since the first deep-sea aquaculture project launched off the shores of Norway in 2018, a number of startups like Forever Oceans, Mowi, Innovasea, and Blue Ocean Mariculture have started to work on systems to enable fish farming in the open ocean.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this new movement for pushing fish farms into the deep ocean is not without its critics. Last fall, a coalition of environmental groups filed a legal challenge to a permit for a facility off the coast of Florida owned by Ocean Era, a company that has deployed Forever Oceans technology. They claim the EPA issued the permit without adequately vetting the facility’s environmental impact.

For its part, Forever Oceans continues to push forward, building out farm systems across the globe. Last June, the company said it would farm 2,500 tonnes of fish to be harvested over the next 12 months from their Panamanian farm and would bring on more fish capacity from farm sites being developed in Indonesia and Brazil. And this week, the company announced its farm-raised Kanpachi, a popular sushi-grade ray-finned fish, is now on the menus of  75 restaurants across the U.S, including Charlie Palmer Steak in Napa and Michelin-star Gravitas in Washington D.C.

New School Foods Swims Against the Current In Its Approach to Alternative Proteins

In business, the daring entrepreneurs zig when others zag. In the world of plant-based alternative proteins, Chris Bryson, CEO and founder of New School Foods, decided to zig his way into a new approach, introducing a new patented freezing process to create whole cuts of salmon.

New School Foods, based in Toronto, comes out of stealth mode with a strong ambition fueled by research, investment capital, and a mission. As Bryson told The Spoon in a recent interview, companies in the plant-based protein space have primarily focused on small cuts such as nuggets and burgers using a process that uses heat in the extrusion, which precooks the food.

Bryson described how New School differs on both counts.

“We always intended to be a company that focuses on what we call whole cuts, he said. “We see that as sort of the next frontier of alternative protein. “Burgers and nuggets are great, but there’s a much bigger opportunity, and I wanted to work on that. With alternative proteins, if you can create the equivalent of a Tesla for food, it becomes exciting for people to switch and feel like there’s no compromise, and we can create real impact.”

Bryson said that before diving into the company’s approach to alternative proteins, he funded a lot of research, much of which yielded inconclusive results. One, however, hit the jackpot. “One of those projects came up with this complete alternative to extrusion. And it doesn’t use heat to create texture, and it uses cold or freezing to create texture.” And it is with freezing that New School can more easily produce whole cuts and offer healthy fats.

High moisture extrusion, Bryson said, is used in products such as Beyond Burger. As such, the food is precooked and often “uses color tricks” to make the transition more closely resemble an aminal product such as a hamburger.

Another differentiator for New School is its scaffolding.

“We create a mold with empty slots– thousands of these small vertical channels that we fill up, and we turn those vertical channels into protein fibers because it’s a mold. It gives us the flexibility to work with different proteins. And based on the animal that we’re trying to emulate, we can pick proteins that transition or cook at the same temperature that the animal protein does”.

Bryson goes on to say that the company’s focus is to create a salmon that looks and tastes like the fish that swims against the current and provides the “right mouth feel.”

“We spent countless months, if not years, focusing on how we recreate that no feel. And that comes down to recreating muscle fibers. So, our technology allows us to tune the width of the muscle fiber, the length of the muscle fiber, and the resistance of the muscle fiber,” he said. It also provides a platform that can be used for other types of fish, seafood, and alternative proteins in general.

New School aims to have a product commercially ready in 2024, first for restaurants and then for consumers. Armed with $13 million in funding from Lever VC, Hatch, Good Startup, Blue Horizon Ventures, Clear Current Capital, Alwyn Capital, Basecamp Ventures, and Climate Capital, Bryson said the funds would be used to build out a pilot facility in the Toronto area.

Israeli Startup Mermade Gets Seed Funding for Its Lab-Grown Scallops

Mermade is more than just another food tech startup with a laboratory-oriented process to manufacture an alternative protein. The Jerusalem-based company’s method of using algae to create scallops has set it apart and attracted significant early-stage investment.

The company has announced an oversubscribed $3.3M seed round as it showcases a circular cellular agriculture technology for producing cultivated scallops. In doing so, Mermade attacks two problems at once: bringing sustainable, good-tasting scallops to the public at a below current market price. Most cultured meat companies struggle with the economics of meeting or beating the cost of beef, chicken, or conventional seafood.

In an interview with The Spoon, company Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Einhorn explained the differences in his company’s business and technology approach. “We thought is why not pick some meat product that eliminates as much as possible of that food engineering challenge and just focus on those huge biological challenges,” Einhorn said. “Scallops, they have a fairly similar size, and each unit is a fairly similar size and shape. And texture taste is the same all throughout the cuts. Those are huge unfair advantages compared to our direct competition– other startups trying to replicate the more complex meat products.”

Mermade says it is the first company in the world to produce scallops using cellular agriculture. The company intends to develop a product and reach laboratory-scale production by 2023, reaching consumers and restaurants after that. Mermade will use the funds to employ more stem cell and algae researchers, accelerating the company towards this goal. The scallop is the first product the company will develop out of a diverse seafood portfolio that will gradually arrive on the market.

The use of algae to recycle the cells’ growth substrate is a clear distinction for Mermade. This cellular interpretation of traditional aquaponics was termed by the company Cytoponics, and the company has filed several patent applications related to this circular production method.

Related to the cost issue, Einhorn states, “It’s a big market segment and one that it has a very high price point, which is important because the main challenge right now is driving costs down. We’re trying to integrate all parts of our design into this prototype to bring cost even close to market parity.”

“In the next few years, consumers worldwide will be able to buy cultivated scallops (Coquilles Saint Jacques) made by Mermade in a supermarket or restaurant, at an affordable price and with the same quality and taste as the original food. Using Cytoponics as our production platform, we could also produce a variety of other cultivated seafood products such as calamari, shrimp, crab meat, and more.”

The company was founded in July 2021 by Daniel Einhorn (CEO), Dr. Rotem Kadir (CTO), and Dr. Tomer Halevy (COO). Investors in the seed round include the investment platform OurCrowd, Israel’s most active venture firm; Fall Line, an American VC fund specializing in AgTech; and prominent Dutch investor Sake Bosch.

Alternative seafood—both plant-based and cell-cultured—is a hot area. As The Spoon reported in April, Good Food Institue’s report, which looks at the entire alternative seafood category across plant-based, cell-cultured, and fermentation-based products, said 2021 investment brought the total invested in the category to $313 million from 2013 through 2021. Cultivated seafood startups commanded two-thirds of all investment in alt-seafood last year at $115 million, compared with $58 million invested in plant-based seafood startups and $2 million in fermentation-based seafood.

Among the companies active in this space are Wildtype, UPSIDE Foods, Gathered Foods, and Finless Foods. With all the activity in this forward-looking space, the United States—in the form of the USDA and FDA—has yet to give the green light for sales of these lab-grown alternative proteins. Only Singapore, Qatar, and to some degree, The Netherlands have given their stamp of approval.

Investment in Alternative Seafood Startups Totaled $175 Million in 2021, Up 92% From Previous Year

According to a new report published by the Good Food Institute, investment in alternative seafood companies totaled $175 million in 2021. The total represented a 92% jump over 2020.

GFI’s new report, which looks at the entire alternative seafood category across plant-based, cell-cultured, and fermentation-based products, said 2021 investment brought the total invested in the category to $313 million from 2013 through 2021. Cultivated seafood startups commanded two-thirds of all investment in alt-seafood last year at $115 million, compared with $58 million invested in plant-based seafood startups and $2 million in fermentation-based seafood.

A few large investments dominated investment in alternative seafood startups, including a $60 million convertible note for Blue Nalu, which the company used to invest in their commercial production facility. Another $34 million was raised by Finless Foods, a startup developing plant-based and cultivated seafood products.

While a near-doubling of capital raised is impressive, the total for alt-seafood is just a fraction of the total amount for cell-cultivated meat investments. According to GFI, the total cultivated meat investment in 2021 was $1.38 billion, nearly 8x the total for the entire alt-seafood category and 12 times the size of the cultivated seafood. It’s worth noting, however, that a large chunk of that $1.38 billion was capital raised by a small handful of companies raising late-stage growth capital, including $467 million in Series F funding raised by plant-based/cultivated meat pioneer Eat Just.

Total deals were up 20% in 2021, jumping from 20 in 2020 to 24 in 2021. While nine investors were active in the category with two or more investments in alt-seafood, one investor – Big Idea Ventures – stood out with six investments in the alt-seafood space. Big Idea invested across all three categories, plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation. Aqua Cultured, a fermentation-based seafood startup that raised a $2.1 million pre-seed round from BIG and others, was the lone fermentation-based startup that raised funding in 2021 according to GFI.

Wildtype Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding, Largest Ever for Cell Cultivated Seafood Company

Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cell-cultivated seafood startup, today announced it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. The round, the largest to date for a cultivated seafood startup, is being led by private equity firm L Catterton and includes a number of high profile investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. (through his Footprint Coalition and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) among others.

The new funding comes after the company’s June 2021 launch of its pilot production plant. With its new funding in pocket, Wildtype plans to expand the production capacity of its cultivated salmon and to begin work with culinary and restaurant partners.

I sat down with company CEO Justin Kolbeck to learn more about what he sees in Wildtype’s future. According to Kolbeck, expanding production would not have been possible had it not been able to build a pilot production plant with its $12.5 million Series A.

“The organizing thought there was let’s build a pilot plant on Series A money,” Kolbeck said. “And we built the world’s first operational cultivated seafood pilot plant. Was it intended to be our go-to-market plant? No, the idea was, how could we set something up quickly and modularly, that we could add capacity to, and start learning from as we scaled.”

And according to Kolbeck, they learned a lot.

Photo: A Saku Block of Wildtype Cell-Cultivated Salmon

“If we had waited till now to start building the thing, we wouldn’t have had the data, we wouldn’t have the know-how to inform something like what is a sensible floor plan? Because we wouldn’t have gone through the motions of growing cells, creating the scaffold, seeding the cells on the scaffold, and so on. And now we’ve done that, we’ve learned a heck of a lot.”

According to Kolbeck, the company will use the new funding to move to a new facility in the San Francisco market and look to open a new production plant in the Pacific Northwest. But he cautioned that even with its expanded production capacity, the company’s overall output will be extremely limited over the next couple of years as they refine their technology and processes.

“In the early days, we will be a very supply-constrained business,” said Kolbeck. “The seafood market is 350 billion pounds a year, a staggering amount of volume. And, to be on the menu at five or six restaurants is just a drop in the bucket. And I think that’s what we’re talking about for the first year or so as more production comes online.”

Like other cellular agriculture startups, Wildtype’s product rollout requires approval from the US government. In their case, this means the FDA, which oversees the regulatory approval process for cell-cultured seafood. According to Kolbeck, that process has been smooth, and they are hopeful the FDA will soon give them (and others) the green light to begin selling their product to consumers.

As for a specific date for when that will happen, Kolbeck said they don’t have one, and there’s a reason for that.

“I think part of it’s because is it’s entirely bespoke. I think if you were to kind of get under a nondisclosure agreement and look at each (cell-cultivated seafood) company, all of our technologies are pretty significantly different from one to the next. And so I think FDA has to kind of look at them individually.”

If you want to hear my full conversation with Justin Kolbeck, you can hear it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Kvarøy Arctic Is Using Blockchain Tech and AI To Make Fish Farming More Sustainable

We’ve recently written about land-based aquaculture and cell-cultured seafood, two high-tech production techniques that could help to satisfy rising seafood demand while reducing environmental impacts. But conventional fish farming is still a big part of the picture: Global aquaculture production rose by almost 530% between 1990 and 2018, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Kvarøy Arctic, a third-generation family-owned aquaculture business, has been farming salmon in the Arctic Circle since 1976. Over the last two decades, the company has taken steps to reduce its environmental footprint. Last week, The Spoon got on Zoom with company CEO Alf-Gøran Knutsen to find out how Kvarøy is using tech to work toward that goal.

The company’s biggest innovation has to do with blockchain technology — which Kvarøy is using to boost transparency and traceability, creating a system where customers can hold the company accountable at every step along the journey from roe to packaged fish product.

“We already had a lot of basic data on where the fish were bred, how they were fed, how they were selected,” Knutsen told The Spoon. “But all of this data was fragmented and kept separate.” With the new system, data on the salmon roe, smolt production, in-sea production, harvesting, and processing are consolidated into blocks. Then those blocks are linked together, creating a chain of data that incorporates information from every stage of the fish’s life cycles. By partnering with fish feed producer Biomar, Kvarøy has even made the individual ingredients in its salmon feed traceable on the blockchain.

Kvarøy’s packages are already printed with QR codes, and the company hopes to fully implement the tracing system with its retail partners sometime next year. The data is also helping the company to improve its own practices, boosting efficiency and reducing fish mortality. For instance, the company is currently experimenting with a prototype of a tool that tells the team when to start raising salmon roe in order to sell a certain amount of fish by a certain date.

The company has also found a way to treat its salmon for parasitic sea lice without using antibiotics. Using Oslo-based tech company Stingray Marine Solutions’ laser delousing system, which is powered by machine vision, the Kvarøy team can eliminate lice without harming the salmon or polluting the environment.

In the near future, artificial intelligence may also help Kvarøy to monitor the health of its fish. The company is considering implementing a system that would recognize and track individual salmon, keeping track of wounds and other potential health issues.

Kvarøy estimates that it takes about 1.4 kilograms less carbon and 500 kilograms less water to produce a kilogram of fish than it would to produce the same amount via standard, non-organic aquaculture. Knutsen attributes most of that difference in environmental footprint to Kvarøy’s fish feed: In addition to fishmeal and krill, the company uses plant-based proteins, starches, and oils to feed its fish. “We are always trying to innovate,” Knutsen said. “And we’re always trying to find new ways of sourcing feed closer to where we produce our fish.”

Last year, Kvarøy launched a U.S. brand, placing its products in Whole Foods Markets and other grocery stores. The company is now working on transitioning away from fossil fuel use, and powering more of its operations with renewable electricity. And in the coming year, Knutsen said that the team will work toward the launch of its first land-based fish farm.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, properly managed fish farms can help to maintain and even rebuild fish stocks. Kvarøy’s approach provides an example of how aquaculture businesses can combine generations of experience with tech innovation to have a better impact.

Image Courtesy of Kvarøy Arctic