AquaChile, Chile’s largest salmon and trout farmer, has reached another milestone, shipping fresh salmon from the Puerto Natales airport in the southern Magallanes region directly to the United States for the first time.
The operation – part of a weekly flight schedule for shipments to destination markets that began in December – involved a shipment of 2,000 kilograms of fresh salmon to Los Angeles, California. Fresh salmon produced in the Magallanes region is usually transported through Puerto Montt and capital city Santiago, located some 3,000 kilometers away.
AquaChile Supply Chain Manager Matías Silva said the company has been working on the project for several months, and that the move will provide an economic boost to the Puerto Natales airport and Magallanes region.
“It allows us to considerably reduce the times from the place of origin of our fish, delivering the highest possible fresh salmon to our clients throughout the world from southernmost places in a transit time of two days,” Silva said.
AquaChile said the project had come to fruition thanks to coordinated work between the Magallanes Salmon Farmers Association, the region's tourism ministry, and Sky Airlines.
In related news, AquaChile’s Puqueldon coho salmon farming center in the Los Lagos region recently achieved Program for the Optimized Use of Antimicrobials in Salmon Farming (PROA/Salmon) certification from Chile’s national fisheries and aquaculture service Sernapesca. The initiative, launched at the beginning of the year, seeks to maintain a progressive decrease in the use of these treatments in Chile’s salmon production through a comprehensive disease management plan.
“Many of our centers never use medicines in their production cycle. The main focus is animal health and welfare, where we apply the best production practices, use the best vaccines, and take measures to care against the diseases that affect wild fish,” local publication SalmonExpert quoted AquaChile Production Manager José Manuel Schwerter as saying. “No AquaChile product contains antibiotics when it reaches the public, which is why our products and brands are always present in the most demanding markets in the world.”
The company also has two other Atlantic salmon farming sites in the process of obtaining certification: Staines 02 in the Magallanes region and Estero Frío in Aysén.
At the end of October, the Multiexport Foods’ Pilolcura farming center, located in the Los Lagos region, was the first in Chile to obtain PROA certification by Sernapesca for the production of coho salmon.
To date, the reduction in the use of antimicrobials has been due to the implementation of various measures, including the online system of veterinary prescriptions, antimicrobial-free certification, the manual of best practices, and particularly increased information transparency, which is essential for proper management and efficient antimicrobial use.
As Chile’s largest salmon producer and the second-largest worldwide, resulting from a 2018 sector consolidation, AquaChile has commercial presence in 40 countries, with more than 350 direct customers. It has 5,515 employees in Chile, 15 freshwater facilities, and 139 farming sites at sea. It produced 188,050 tons of harvested salmon and trout in 2019.
Bullish on the future of Chile’s salmon-farming sector, company CEO Sady Delgado recently said that he is convinced that Chilean salmon farming is destined to lead production worldwide, adding that Chilean farmed salmon is “the best in the world in flavor, quality, [and] presentation.”
Photo courtesy of AquaChile
