Varkaus, Finland-based Finnforel has launched a new "LOHI" brand of rainbow trout fillets.
Finnforel is showcasing the brand at the 2023 Seafood Expo Global, taking place from 25 to 27 April in Barcelona, Spain.
“LOHI” (pronounced "low-high") is a play on words that encompasses the company’s goals with its new product. The name and branding – "lohi" which means salmon in Finnish – is intended to emphasize the product's low carbon impact and its high protein content.
Finnforel Head of Technology Tommi Makinen told SeafoodSource the final product is the result of the company’s hard work perfecting its recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) farm.
“The whole story started with the product itself,” Makinen said. “We wanted it to be a single-packed premium fillet, then we started going backwards to figure out what needs to be done.”
The new product is a 170-gram premium fillet of rainbow trout, packaged individually. The company raises its fish to between 700 and 750 grams to ensure the exact fillet size it needs for the product, Makinen said.
Because the product is produced in a RAS facility, transit times to its markets in Finland are short, and the company can harvest and process its fish as close to sale date as possible.
“We call it ‘ultra fresh,’ because fresh doesn’t cut it any more,” Makinen said. “You order tonight, we slaughter tomorrow morning, and the trucks leave tomorrow afternoon.”
Finnforel has been steadily improving its RAS over 20 years, he said, and began producing substantial volumes of the fish in a 1,000-metric-ton (MT) facility in 2018.
“It was a disaster for the first two years,” Makinen said of the facility. “But we did a lot of fixes and designs by ourselves.”
The company continued to refine its technology, and by 2020, reached the “magical 90 percent efficiency,” he said. Now its facility is operating at close to 100 percent of its maximum capacity.
Makinen said Finnforel has proven that land-based RAS trout-farming systems can be profitable.
“We’ve been in black figures in 2020, in the sense that we understand what it is to run a factory in its full capacity,” Makinen said.
Part of the secret to the company’s success, he said, is its “gigafactory” concept. The company handles the fish from egg to harvest through processing into fillets on-site. The fillets are packaged for sale, while other usable parts of the fish – guts, heads, and tail – are used for other commercial purposes. Heads and tails go to pet food manufacturers, while the guts and the waste/sludge from the fish go to a bio-energy mill.
Makinen said even the discharge from the facility itself is a potential revenue stream for Finnforel. The discharge water contains nitrogen and phosphorous the company needs to filter out to meet water-quality requirements. Finnforel filters out close to 85 percent of the nitrogen and 90 percent of the phosphorous produced by its RAS using filters, and then runs the water through a woodchip field to filter it further. The nitrogen and phosphorous are then sold as fertilizer ingredients, and the water the company finally discharges back into the environment is cleaner than the water it brought in.
The secret of the company’s success, Makinen said, is the selective breeding program it is using to create a more-robust fish for RAS farming. The company received EUR 45 million (then USD 52 million) in 2021 to help fund the growth of the program, and Finland’s natural resources center is assisting with its breeding in an exclusive three-year agreement.
“We believe that this breeding program is key to our success, because if we can control the technology, and the environment, than we also want to understand the biology more than we do today,” he said.
The gigafactory uses solar and wind energy sources, Makinen said. The roof of the company’s facility is completely covered in solar panels, which produce more power than the factory needs during the day. The excess is placed in an energy storage facility that powers the factory at night.
Finnforel wants to build on its success by raising more funding and investigating new locations - it is now doing pre-studies to establish new gigafactory farms in the U.K. and another in the Persian Gulf region.
At its home farm in Finland, Finnforel s expanding its production from 1,000 MT to 2,800 MT this year, Makinen said, and the “ramp-up is happening as we speak.”
Photo by Chris Chase/SeafoodSource
