Aquaculture Dealflow & Notable Reads - 7
Bi-weekly roundup of investments and market movements in aquaculture
Happy Friday fellow readers. These are my pick of news items driving the past two weeks. Enjoy and have a great weekend ahead!
Market Brief
🌏 FAO’s latest The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2022 confirms that the global seafood trade has slowed.
In 2020, 59.8 million metric tons of seafood products worth USD 151 billion were exported, down from record high USD 165 billion in 2018.
The nominal value of aquatic product exports increased at a nominal YoY rate of 6.8% from 1976 to 2022 (3.7% in real terms).
The European Union was the largest single market for seafood in 2020 (34% of global value of imports). The United States was the largest importing country by value (15%), followed by China (10%), Japan (9%) and Spain (5%).
SeafoodSource’s excellent summary of report findings, click here.
Acquisitions
🐟 Wicked Kitchen, plant-based food supplier, acquires Good Catch’s North American channels from Gathered Foods to extend Wicked Kitchen’s offerings to frozen and ambient seafood products
Funding
🌊 Blue Ocean inks NOK 30m to provide sludge treatment equipment for Hima Seafood, world’s largest land-based trout farm
💨 The Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Livestock (CIEL) launches GBP 100,000 seed funding per business opportunity in aquaculture for LCA assessments
🌊 The Constitutional Reserve Fund of Monaco allocates EUR 10m to the Ocean 14 Capital EUR 150m “blue economy” impact fund to back innovators and solutions working to improve ocean health
🇺🇸 Department of Commerce invests USD 49m to boost Alaska’s mariculture industry as part of Build Back Better Regional Challenge
🇪🇺 EU Cohesion Policy greenlights EUR 23m in blue economy spending for Slovenia
🇺🇸 Pacific Seafood is big winner in USD 31m USDA groundfish contract
Movements
🐟 New company 1814 Salmon formed by Norwegian salmon farmers Kvaroy Salmon, Fram Seafood and investment company Nyhamn plans to build a NOK 100m seafood processing factory in Norway
🐟 Ace Aquatec, aquaculture technology specialists, partners with Pisces Fish Machinery Inc as their 1st stunning equipment distributor in North, Central and South America
🐞 Significant lice-specific changes to ASC’s salmon standard includes L. salmonis and Caligus
🍣 BlueNalu, cell-cultured seafood pioneer, joins UN Global Compact
🚜 Cooke receives approval for a second salmon farm in Orkney
👮♂️ FAIRR and Good Food Institute launch sustainability reporting frameworks for alternative protein
🪰 FreezeM partners with Hermetia to produce and distribute PauseM - ready-to-use packages of suspended Black Solder Fly neonates
🪰 Förde Garnelen, Aquafeed Germany, Protix, neomar and Crusta Nova launches a new insect feed for European land-based shrimp farms: SHR EX
🍣 Forsea Foods gets closer to launching cell-cultivated eel products
🍔 Haid claims crown from Tongwei as China’s largest aquafeed producer
🌱 Kibbutz Yotvata and Brevel will build a commercial-scale manufacturing facility for the cultivation and production of microalgae-based protein in Israel, with capacity to produce 3,000 tonnes of dried products annually
🥙 Revo Foods launches 3 new plant-based seafood analog products, introducing the world’s first-ever plant-based salmon spread and gravlax
🌿 SeaMark Horizon Europe will deliver 12 seaweed-based products for commercial exploitation in the next 4 years
🥼 String Bio’s feed ingredient PRO-DG validated by BioMar after successful feed trials with farmed salmon
🥟 Thai Union Group brand OMG Meat launches a new line of plant-based shrimp dumplings across Thailand
🪰 University of Saskatchewan research team partners with multiple industry groups to develop and test plant- and insect-derived proteins to replace fishmeal in aquafeeds
🐡 USDA scientists develops a new rainbow trout line that is resistant to bacterial cold-water disease
🥽 UMaine researchers look into how to make kelp aquaculture a better carbon sink
🌏 Negotiations on a treaty by United Nations member-states to create a system of management and protection of biodiversity on the high seas have fallen short again
Call for Application
Applications open for CI Venture and Hatch’s Women in Ocean Food Innovation Studio 2022
Notable Reads
The Tide Turns Toward Renewable Aquaculture Gear by Meg Wilcox/Civil Eats
Rather than relying solely on plastic equipment, shellfish and seaweed growers are embracing biodegradable alternatives.
Latest from GFI - What do Asian consumers crave in alternative seafood?
Taste is the baseline for both plant-based and cultivated seafood in Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand. Guaranteed lack of mercury and other heavy metal contamination was also a top driver.
Concern about potential taste shortcomings as well as the perceived lack of “freshness” and “naturalness” of plant-based and cultivated products were leading barriers to consumption.
Respondents in Thailand were the most enthusiastic about alternative seafood.
What Do Dolphins Talk About? by Stuart Firestein & Leslie Vosshall
If we can find ways of giving animals more choice and control and more of a voice—I sort of say that I try to partner with the dolphins when I work with them. I’m trying to give them a way to communicate what they want, what their interests are. That’s, to me, a real breakthrough.