Alex Farthing co-founded Delos, a Jakarta, Indonesia-based software technology company that aids farmers in the digitization and automation of farming practices, in 2021.
After five years running that venture, he had a desire to customize a product from farm to table, leading to the the creation of Naughty Prawn, which exhibited at the 2026 Seafood Expo Global (SEG) just a week after launching.
“We launched this week. I think the reason behind it is, as farmers, we find it frustrating that we put so much love, passion, effort, and energy into producing great products, and then the way that the industry is today, that product disappears into the system,” Farthing told SeafoodSource at SEG, which ran from 21 to 23 April in Barcelona, Spain. “We basically are unable to have our story told. By having our own brand, we’re able to start to take control of the story, and it also means that we can do great projects.”
Naughty Prawn is based out of Jakarta and owns two prawn farms on Bangka, the ninth-largest island within the Indonesian archipelago. Farthing said that the team includes 20 staff in office and an additional 150 farmers across the two island sites. Naughty Prawn farms vannamei, or whiteleg prawns, typically sized 16/20 count per kilogram. The company can grow prawns up to 20/30 count per kilogram, as well which is far larger than the industry standard, Farthing said.
“The product of using technology to improve farming outcomes and minimize risk, I think we’ve always proven that works, and I think we prove it more and more. We’ve always proven our worth,” Farthing said. “What we’ve really struggled with is to get paid to do that.”
The name comes from the company’s slogan, “naughty taste, nice business,” but Farthing said he assures future consumers that “the only thing about us that’s naughty is the flavor.”
Farthing added that Naughty Prawn is Aquaculture Stewardship Council-certified and has worked with the Shrimp Welfare Project, which sponsored the use of electric stunners developed by Dundee, Scotland-based equipment company Ace Aquatec to establish humane slaughtering of all farmed prawns over the next few years.
“We also worked with a company called Genics out of Australia ... [which] helped us implement biosecurity across the whole farm,” Farthing said. “Every one of our ponds are fully biosecure. Our survival rate is about 85 to 90 percent, compared to the industry standard at about 70 percent.”
Farthing, a career entrepreneur, launched four businesses prior to Naughty Prawn and has an educational background in marine biology and agriculture. His career started with a healthcare company in London, U.K., that helped people struggling with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease before going on to create an impact finance company that worked with international conservation organizations and charities to convince investors to work with farmers.
“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do a better job than [Naughty Prawn]; I might have peaked,” Farthing said. “I’m really, really proud of it, and we hustled, so we developed the brand and everything in about six weeks. I like to build things that don’t exist, and I generally don’t enjoy building things that do exist. It’s a tough journey, but being able to build things is the entire point.”
Heading into this year's SEG, Farthing said the brand expected Naughty Prawn to launch as a U.K.-centric brand but quickly garnered international interest from retailers, chefs, and wholesalers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy, and Korea.
“We see chefs as the connoisseurs and craftsmen of food, so when they want to use our products and our prawns, that’s the place we start,” Farthing said.
The company is already in talks with two luxury supermarkets based in the U.K. and is set to hit store shelves in September. Farthing added that he sees the brand launching several different formats from boxed to bagged products to even more fun mediums like “pot of prawns” or “pint of prawns.”
“We think the industry needs a bit of a shake-up and some energy injected into it,” Farthing said. “Everything is blue and grey. I like blue. I don’t like grey. If you go to the freezer aisle, there’s no color, so how do we inject energy? We do things differently.”
Another difference in Naughty Prawn's product is making sure that shrimp are out of the water for no more than 15 seconds before being added to an ice slurry for humane slaughter. Once harvested, farmers measure the water content and do not allow more than a 0.5 percent water change between harvest and individual quick freezing (IQF). Farthing said the industry standard is anything from 5 to 25 percent added water.
“Think about basically taking the shrimp out of the water and leaving it in the sun for 10 minutes. That’s going to do some bad stuff,” Farthing said. “We don’t allow that, so it comes straight out of the pond, straight into ice, and then it’s kept at 2 degrees [Celsius] or colder until it’s processed, and we assess on a panel of 30 different quality metrics we have. That means we can measure quantitatively the changes in quality.”
Farthing said Naughty Prawn can farm with precision, as 98 percent of decisions on the farm are fully automated thanks to integration of artificial intelligence and in-house software, like automating main actions, using AQ1 feeders across farms, and cleaning the bottom of ponds with autocyphons.
“The technology approach is designed to allow us to automate and standardize decisions to mitigate risk and make things stable and predictable,” Farthing said. “It lets us measure everything, so every gram of product that goes into a pond, we can measure and have full control over everything. It means we can understand the financial implications of every decision, but every decision is made within a framework that’s tried and tested and continuing.”
Prior to launching Naughty Prawn as a brand, Farthing said the farm location in Bangka already produced 35 to 40 tons per hectare, resulting in 1,800 tons per year. With the second farm location purchased, he expects 3,400 tons to be produced by mid-2026.
“We’re here, and we’re obsessed with trying to do things to make a delicious product but do it in a way that means these are prawns you can love,” Farthing said. “That’s our tagline: prawns you can love.”
