Cooke Aquaculture Scotland, the regional arm of Canada-based Cooke Aquaculture, has acquired Balta Island Seafare, a salmon farming operation in the Shetland Islands.
Terms of the purchase were not announced, but it includes three farm sites capable of producing more than 1,000 tons of salmon. The acquisition gives Cooke Aquaculture Scotland exclusive management over the northernmost salmon farming region in the United Kingdom.
“This transaction is consistent with Cooke Aquaculture’s focus on vertical integration and diversification in terms of geography, products and markets,” the company said in a press release. “Cooke’s strategy has been to achieve growth through acquisitions and organic growth that is both sustainable and responsibly managed to meet a growing global demand for healthy, fresh seafood.”
Balta Islands Seafare's farms are located near the islands of Yell and Unst, in the northern stretch of the Shetland Islands. The company was founded in 1987 and since 1998, it has worked with Skaw Smolts, a hatchery, to produce organic salmon, which it introduced commercially in 2000. On its website, the company claims its geographic isolation and the tidal nature of its farms have allowed it to avoid using chemical treatments to control sea lice or the use of antibiotics.
"It's a beautiful part of the world, a very interesting part of the world, a fantastic environment, and now we control all the sites up there around those islands. It just made sense from a logistics point of view," Andrew Lively of Cooke Aquaculture told SeafoodSource during Seafood Expo Asia on 7 September.
Expanding its operations in the Shetlands will help Cooke Aquaculture reduce its exposure to biological risks and provide the company with synergies in production, it said in its press release. The purchase of Balta Island Seafare will also “protect jobs in the area and support investments in other aspects of the business, including processing,” the company said.
"It's great for our existing staff and the staff of the other operations," Lively said. "There's a lot of synergies, and now there's the economies of scale. Now that we have a larger operation up there, it's better for employment, for everyone."
