Global aquafeed firm Skretting said it has made substantial progress in decarbonizing its operations, which has resulted in the firm slashing its operational emissions by 40 percent since 2018, but CEO Maarten Bijl said the industry's biggest sustainability challenge looking forward lies beyond its factories.
Bijl told SeafoodSource that Scope 3 emissions – which are indirect emissions that occur across a company’s value chain – are a particularly complex challenge for the sector to solve and, therefore, meaningful progress will require coordinated action across the entire seafood supply chain.
The recent publication of Skretting's “Impact Report 2025” highlights both the scale of the company's sustainability progress and the obstacles that remain.
Alongside advances in responsible sourcing, climate action, innovation, and operational efficiency, the analysis reveals a modest 5 percent reduction in Scope 3 emissions since 2018, underlining the difficulty of reducing impacts across global ingredient supply chains.
"The main barrier is that Scope 3 sits largely outside Skretting's direct operational control," Bijl told SeafoodSource. "Feed ingredients are the biggest lever for Scope 3, but they depend on, just to name a few factors, supplier practices, agricultural and fisheries systems that in general are still hard to decarbonize, traceability information, land-use change, energy mixes, and, more broadly, the availability of lower-carbon raw materials at scale."
To combat the issue effectively, Bijl said much wider, coordinated action is needed.
"The biggest challenge is scale, data, speed, and cost competitiveness. Lower-carbon ingredients often exist but not yet in enough volume with consistent quality, competitive price, and robust, verified data across the full value chain,” he said. “That means progress depends on joint action between farmers, feed manufacturers, and ingredient suppliers.”
As for what Skretting can do internally, Bijl said the firm aims to keep pushing on what it can control, align procurement with climate goals, and use its purchasing power to accelerate change upstream.
“A major part of that work is to also get better insights into the footprints of ingredient value chains and work on better comparable data to make robust decisions. With our tools in place, we are translating these insights and knowledge to the product level to also give our customers the best information for their decision making,” he said.
Skretting’s report also highlighted continued work with alternative raw materials and novel ingredients, including the introduction of proprietary “phytocomplexes” into commercial diets for the first time. Bijl conceded, however, that widespread adoption of alternative ingredients remains constrained by economics rather than technical performance.
"Many alternative ingredients are technically and nutritionally viable and are already part of our formulations," he said. "The challenge today is scaling them sustainably and economically, as in general they still face higher production costs, limited supply, or inconsistent availability on a global scale. Adoption will be accelerated when the value chain moves in the same direction through solutions that balance cost, performance, and long-term risks. We see this not as a technology shift but as a market transition.”
Elsewhere in the report, Skretting revealed 88 percent of its marine ingredients are now either certified or sourced through fishery improvement projects (FIPs), and 97 percent of soy purchases comply with the firm’s deforestation-free sourcing target.
"The last percentages are the ones in which we need value chain alignment to move the needle in the same direction," he said.
Bijl said that any such alignment would have to entail part of the financial burden being picked up by stakeholders such as retailers, farmers, and others, instead of resting solely with feed manufacturers to fund the transition.
"We have a clear ambition of reaching 100 percent certified ingredients, but that comes with an extra cost that we can't absorb on our own since we operate a low-margin business compared to some other parts of the value chain,” he said. "We need retailers and farmers also pushing for the same goal in order to spread the costs and make it a reality.”
The company’s impact report also emphasized the evolution of Skretting's SKAILA footprint tool, which allows environmental impacts to be analyzed at the level of individual feeds and products.
In this regard, Bijl said that granular footprint data is becoming “a requirement, not a nice-to-have” because customers and farmers need product-level, credible information for reporting, decision-making, and reduction planning.
"The real differentiator is not just having numbers but having robust, comparable data of high quality that shows the main footprint drivers [as well as] potential trade-offs with other sustainability metrics in an integrated way," he said.
The report did not just highlight improvements Skretting has made internally, as it also showcased innovations aimed at helping producers achieve better biological and economic performance, including automated shrimp feeding trials in China and the rollout of new nutritional solutions.
According to Bijl, efficiency is becoming the most important sustainability measure because it directly links environmental and commercial performance.
"Every improvement we can make in feed conversion ratio (FCR), every reduction in mortality, and every gain in growth efficiency directly reduces raw material use, emissions, and pressure on natural resources while also lowering cost per kilogram of fish or shrimp,” he said. "Efficiency is becoming the primary sustainability metric because it is the only one that consistently scales. It is measurable, comparable, and directly links biology, cost and environmental impact."
Despite the progress outlined in the report, Bijl said the firm is looking toward the future, remaining focused on tackling some of aquaculture’s most fundamental difficulties, including disease management; climate adaptation; and making sure sustainability data is robust, comparable, integrated, and scalable.
"The challenge that keeps me awake at night is to ensure we innovate fast and bring nutritional solutions that are cost-efficient and solve our customers' pains,” he said.
