Emil Andreassen was involved in salmon farming before he could walk.
Growing up in rural Norway, Emil was raised alongside his father Johan Andreassen’s fish-farming business – which itself was a project born out of the family’s longstanding connection with the ocean. Johan’s grandfather was a commercial fishermen and helped inspire him to follow the same professional path from a young age.
Johan had Emil when he was 20 years old, coinciding with when he was first building up his salmon-farming company Villa Organic.
“I brought him with me to the salmon farm from a very young age,” Johan told SeafoodSource.
Emil said when he was a kid, he would often watch vessels pulling out a salmon harvest or putting smolts into the water.
“When you’re [young] that’s quite cool, seeing the big machinery; seeing industry at that scale was very cool to be a part of,” Emil said. “So, at a very early age, I was very interested in all of it.”
As he grew older, in the afternoons after school and during the summer, Emil would work on the salmon farm.
“I think I got my first boat – my first motorized boat – when I was 8 years old,” Emil said. “It was a small feeding boat at 8 or 10 years old, way too young. It was a small salmon feeding boat; it was used to pull the net pens of the salmon, and it was used to feed the salmon. I would go out to the net pens, pull dead fish, and do some feeding.”
At 14, Emil moved to the U.S. and later went to college in Miami, Florida. Even during that time, Emil was still working and involved in the salmon industry in his trips back home to Norway.
“I think he has it in his blood,” Johan said. “I never asked him to join the industry.”
Much like Emil, Johan was on the water at a young age. Villa Organic’s roots grew from when he and his cousin Bjorn-Vegard Lovik were looking for a way to earn money fishing as kids in the mid-1990s.
“I started very young, enjoying recreational fishing as a kid in the fjord,” Johan said. “We actually started by fishing eel, [but] that was not a great success.”
The bycatch in the fishing equipment, however, turned out to be the ticket to making money for the two cousins. The wrasse in the bycatch could serve as cleaner fish for salmon, though at the time Johan said few salmon farmers in the area were using them for that purpose and didn’t even know about their potential usage as commercial cleanerfish.
“We connected with a marine biologist in Bergen who had observed that fish could actually eat sea lice off of the skin of salmon,” Johan said. “So, we started testing out selling the cleaner fish to salmon farms.”
Salmon farmers have always looked for effective solutions for the perennial problem of sea lice, and one farmer decided to give Johan's and Bjorn’s idea a shot, despite their young age.
“The guy said ‘If this works, I need to buy it for my remaining 11 net pens as soon as possible, but I want to test if it works first,’” Johan said. “It worked. Two weeks later, the guy waved at us in our little boat on the fjord – we were 14 or 15 years old at the time – and said, ‘I need you to fill up the rest of my net pens. I think I’m going to pay you a buck apiece for the fish.’ That was ridiculously good business for us at the time. That was the beginning of our first company called Villa Cleaner Fish, which became Villa Organic.”
The young company became a fast success and scaled up quickly, recruiting new fishermen and buying specialized wellboats to transport the cleaner fish alive over larger distances as it expanded its client base. Johan said just a few years later, in early 2000, the company got a license to farm its own salmon, starting his journey into salmon farming, which eventually grew into Villa Organic and a main provider of organic salmon for Whole Foods.
Johan later sold Villa Organic and “semi-retired” for a short time before returning to the seafood industry with the founding of land-based salmon aquaculture company Atlantic Sapphire, which was oriented around using some of the technology Villa Organic had used for cleaner fish and salmon broodstock. He believed he could adapt it to produce fully grown salmon in land-based farms nearer to end markets. Atlantic Sapphire opened its first “Bluehouse” farm in Denmark, which has since burned down, and opened a giant farm in Miami, Florida, that began operating in 2020.
Johan said soon after Emil graduated from the University of Miami, he asked if there was an opening available at Atlantic Sapphire.
“I said, ‘I don’t think you should because you’ll always be seen as the son of your dad,’” Johan said.
Johan instead suggested Emil work at Platina Seafood – a salmon trading business he founded around the same time as Atlantic Sapphire.
Emil said his father called him “at midnight or something” to offer up the opportunity to take over operations of Platina Seafood.
“At that time, we were one of the biggest importers in the [Southeast U.S.] of frozen fish,” Emil said. “Then, that kind of developed over the years, moved a little bit into other origins like Chilean, and, in recent years, moved into fresh [salmon] commodity trading.”
When Emil took over at Platina, he said a large portion of the personnel went over to Atlantic Sapphire.
“There was myself, an accountant, and a lady in purchasing,” Emil said. “Everyone else – the whole sales team, the CFO, and all the managers – all went over to Atlantic Sapphire because, at that time, it was decided that Platina and Sapphire were going to have nothing to do with each other anymore.”
Johan then sold Platina to Emil so that there would be no conflict of interest between the two companies, Emil said.
Emil took over and began building the business back up but realized the landscape for the company had changed. Salmon companies in Norway and Chile had begun establishing sales offices in Miami, leaving little room for a third party like Platina to make money purchasing and selling salmon.
“They have 20 sales guys sitting there, and they are hungry for sales; they’re calling the customer who buys five cases just like the customers buying 100,000 cases,” Emil said. “It becomes quite difficult for someone like us to survive in an environment like that.”
Emil began looking for a different business model, eventually gravitating back toward the roots of what got him into the industry.
“My interest has always been production and processing, actually seeing what we’re selling coming in and coming out," he said. “So, then we decided to open up a processing plant.”
Emil rebranded Platina Seafood to NovoMar, and in 2022 – after putting in the work to convince lending facilities on his vision and plans – the company purchased a 26,000-square-foot facility in Miami and invested USD 15 million (EUR 13.8 million) to convert it from its former use as a tortilla factory into a state-of-the-art seafood-processing facility.
“We gutted the whole thing from top to bottom on the inside and then rebuilt it over the course of a little bit over a year,” he said. “We started up in March 2023 [with] our first phase, which was basically bringing in pinbone-in fresh fillets, pulling the bones, grading, portioning, and packing.”
In August 2023, NovoMar began to bring in more equipment for prepackaged products – skinpack, individually vacuum-packed, fresh, and frozen salmon.
Emil said the goal for the new processing arm of the company, named NovoPro, is to establish a facility with standards matching those found in the highest-end European processing facilities.
“The U.S. seafood processing space has grown in efficiency and quality over the years, but the highest of standards is found in Europe and Chile; this is clearly the direction in which U.S. processors are moving. My goal was to build a processing plant modeled after how we do it at origin,” Emil said. “The idea with NovoPro is to keep growing that business and become the most efficient salmon or seafood processing facility in the [U.S.] Southeast.”
Emil said he is working with U.S. retailers and other buyers to tailor programs in line with what end consumers value and desire, ultimately delivering salmon products that meet those needs and sell through to the consumer.
“The idea of Novo Group is not to just sell boxes and get purchase orders from the customer. The Novo goal is to work with the farms, so together, we can provide the retailers with all the tools needed to be successful in the transition to value-added items,” Emil said. “That’s really the mindset we have here, developing new chef-inspired recipes, new designs, and new marketing. We want to be part of all those efforts and bring our input to our customers, not just a ‘Where is my PO?’ approach.”
Emil said the U.S. seafood industry could learn from the European retail experience, which changed markedly amid the Covid-19 pandemic. A number of European retailers, such as Tesco, completely closed their seafood counters, but sales haven’t necessarily suffered, as consumers seek prepackaged salmon and other fish.
“In the U.S., some of the retailers are growing their skin-packed seafood category more slowly because their customers in certain regions are just now getting comfortable with it, while other retailers have fully adapted and found great success,” Emil said. “I am excited to work with them in true partnership – to look at new options, flavor profiles, and ideas to see how we can grow sales together.”
Innovation in processing, packaging, and presentation could be the path to getting more seafood on more plates in the U.S., where seafood consumption badly trails consumption rates of other proteins and the rates of seafood consumption in many other countries.
“There’s huge room for growth in the space and also huge room for growth in research and development to bring new products and ideas for making things more efficient and less costly,” Emil said. “That is really the vision for the NovoGroup.”
Emil said his father is helping him out with advice from his own experience in the seafood industry as he works toward that goal.
“I think I’m the Norwegian who has been working the longest, at this time, in the U.S. market in salmon. I have more than 25 years of salmon experience,” Johan said. “That knowledge I have, I’m pleased that I can help my son to pass some of that on, along with some of the relationships and some of my wisdom.”
Johan added that advice has been the limit of what he has offered in the recent past.
“I’m very proud of what my son has been doing. I have not been involved much since I handed over the company to him, though I have of course been tracking him from the sidelines,” Johan said. “To put it this way, he could have found easier ways to make a living, but I guess he has some part of me in him.”
