Blue Impact is a Journey of Change
In the late 1950s, the first European fish farmers experienced the benefits of switching from a home-made wet feed to manufactured dry feed imported from the US. The farmers discovered the feed resulted in better growth performance and offered a much more sustainable solution than home-made wet feed that caused water pollution. This is what inspired a group of Danish fish farmers in 1962 to form one of the first European factories to produce a pelleted feed, operating under the name Dansk Ørredfoder A/S. Throughout our 60-year history, BioMar have had a clear pattern of using innovation to create sustainable feed solutions. Blue Impact is our next step, where we will embark on a journey of change that will prioritise sustainable, novel ingredients to transform aquaculture.
History of sustainable feed solutions
BioMar’s sustainability journey started decades ago. Still operating under the name Dansk Ørredfoder A/S, BioMar created ECOLINE, which was declared the first environmentally friendly fish feed in the world, winning the Danish Environmental Award in 1988. In 1997, we established sustainability as one of the main goals in our feed solutions and since then, have continually pushed sustainable feed solutions. Our BioSustain program was launched in 2007 and is still one of the foundations of our extensive work across all three pillars of sustainability: economy, environment and society. Finally, over the past 35 years BioMar have successfully lowered our salmon feeds’ reliance on marine ingredients, reducing it by 75% during this time.
More recently, in 2013 our Brande production facility was the first in the world to comply with the new ASC standard for salmon and trout and in 2016, we delivered our first ever commercialized feed that utilised the novel ingredient algal oil as a replacement for fish oil. In our 2020 sustainability report we launched our three 2030 ambitions, which outlines what the future of our sustainability efforts will look like. To achieve our new ambitions, we need to continue our history of innovation and sustainable feed solutions. Blue Impact will be the catalyst for change, innovating aquaculture by promoting new novel ingredients and delivering sustainable feed solutions.
The importance of novel ingredients
Throughout our sustainability journey history, novel ingredients have played a key role in innovating aquaculture and creating sustainable feed solutions. In 2013, we began our R&D into the use of algal oil as a replacement for fish oil. By 2016, we delivered our first commercialized feed with algal oil and five years later, in 2021, we had produced over 1 million metric tonnes of feed using this novel ingredient. Novel ingredients help drive innovation in aquaculture and create diets with a more sustainable profile. That is why novel ingredients with a sustainable profile will be included in Blue Impact feeds and play a key role in helping us transform aquaculture.
Going forward, we will focus on low-trophic novel ingredients that can help us decouple our feed supply chains from environmental degradation and direct competition with food for human consumption. By targeting low trophic ingredients, we can use ingredients that bypass the natural food chain, have a high nutritional profile, maximizing our feeds’ profile. Additionally, this will help the ecosystems that the nutrients originate from to recover from human disruption. For example, by using algal oil, we no longer compete for wild caught fish, bypassing the food chain to go straight to the source of omega-3 in the ocean. As a result, we have decoupled our feeds’ reliance on wild caught fish oil and relieved pressure on our oceans.