Chile’s largest salmon farmer, AquaChile, has sent its first shipment of Verlasso salmon, the company’s premium brand, to France.
“After having sent a sample of our products, we dispatched the first sale of Verlasso Salmon Ultra Premium Salmon to France, where it will be distributed in exclusive restaurants in the country,” AquaChile said on its LinkedIn channel.
AquaChile’s Verlasso ultra-premium salmon was originally marketed in the U.S., where it has been sold for more than a decade. More recently, AquaChile has expanded sales of the premium salmon brand into Brazil, China, Mexico, and now France.
Verlasso salmon was the first farmed fish to achieve the Good Alternative rating by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch sustainability rating system. Chef and television personality Andrew Zimmern, executive producer and host of the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods” and “The Zimmern List,” was enlisted in 2019 by the Verlasso brand to document AquaChile's production methods at is salmon production facility in Chile. The project formed part of the development of a documentary spearheaded by Zimmern's production company to follow the aquaculture firm’s salmon production process from egg to plate.
AquaChile has previously touted the salmon’s “richness and flavor like nowhere else on the planet,” which it attributes to its farming locations in the convergence zones along Chile’s coast where low salinity waters circulate through the farms.
AquaChile is Chile’s largest salmon producer, resulting from a 2018 sector consolidation that brought a number of actors – AquaChile, Los Fiordos, Salmones Magallanes, and Friosur salmon area assets – under the same umbrella.
In Q1 2022, AquaChile saw a drop in net profits due to a significant hit from fair-value adjustments, primarily due to the sale of its former holding, Rainforest Tilapia. AquaChile posted Q1 2022 net profits of USD 6.12 million (EUR 5.78 million), off 57.3 percent from the USD 14.3 million (EUR 13.5 million) it recorded in the first quarter of 2021. AquaChile boosted its top-line revenue 24.1 percent to USD 402.5 million (EUR 380.3 million) in the first quarter of 2022 – divided between USD 381 million (EUR 360 million) in exports and USD 21.5 million (EUR 20.3 million) in domestic sales. That total compares to the USD 324.4 million (EUR 306.4 million) in revenue in the same quarter from one year previous.
Photo courtesy of AquaChile
