New Zealand-based Akaroa King Salmon has adopted BioMar’s Blue Impact aquaculture feed, making it the first king salmon producer to use the product.
BioMar’s Blue Impact feed is the company’s flagship diet for sustainability, which the company said is centered around reduced carbon emissions, restorative or circular raw materials, and minimization of ingredients derived from wild fish stocks. The company debuted the feed in 2022, and it has since been used by salmon farmers like Loch Duart to achieve environmental impact targets ahead of schedule.
While other salmon farming companies have used Blue Impact before, Akaroa Salmon is the first company to use it on king salmon. The company, owned by a partnership that includes Ngāti Porou, Ōnuku Runanga, and the founding Bates family, produces roughly 1,000 metric tons (MT) of king salmon per year.
Akaroa has been farming salmon for four decades, and the company’s founder and managing partner Duncan Bates said the sustainability of its feed has improved tremendously since adopting Blue Impact.
“When I first started farming salmon in Akaroa Harbour almost four decades ago, the feed ingredients essentially relied on wild-caught fish as the raw material, and we fed up to 3kg of wild fish to grow 1kg of farmed salmon. Clearly, this wasn’t a sustainable practice,” Bates said. “With the introduction of Blue Impact, Akaroa King Salmon have started our journey to become a positive fish protein producer, a far cry from those days long ago and a testament to our ongoing aspiration to become a truly sustainable food producer. I am particularly excited to use novel ingredients like insect meal, utilizing waste streams previously going to landfill.”
Akaroa said it first started by trailing cultivated algal oil in its feed, and has since evolved into using novel ingredients like insect meal and fish trimmings sourced from pelagic fish. With the new suite of feed ingredients, it will now be a net-positive fish producer – meaning it producers more salmon by weight than the amount of seafood products it feeds its salmon.
Akaroa Salmon Marketing and Sales Manager Nik Mavromatis said the company is still maintaining its fish quality even with the new ingredients.
“Our customers have high expectations – they want us to continue raising the finest tasting king salmon while also being mindful of the broader environmental impact [and] without compromising on the health benefits,” Mavromatis said. “I’m thrilled about the future of aquaculture as we blend our farming expertise with the technical expertise of BioMar around innovative new ingredients like oil from microalgae.”
