Global Salmon Feed Sourcing Criteria

The growth of aquaculture production is critical to global food security and livelihoods, but if managed unsustainably, it can also drive increased greenhouse gas emissions and degradation of ecological resilience. With most global capture fisheries at or beyond capacity, aquaculture production must continue to grow to support the world’s demand for aquatic foods while also reducing use of resources and improving overall sustainability. The resources and emissions embedded specifically in aquaculture feed represent the largest component of aquaculture’s environmental footprint, making aquafeed production a priority in sustainability efforts.

Through examples like The Nature Conservancy’s collaboration with industry partners to reduce impacts of shrimp aquaculture, we know that more sustainable feed is economically and operationally viable when facilitated by demand from end customers. However, most of the aquaculture industry lacks a critical mass of demand commitments and the coordinating mechanisms to spur the transition to sustainable feed at scale. Given the consolidated and vertically-integrated nature of the salmon industry, salmon feed provides a promising pathway to align stakeholder interests on sustainability and drive industry-wide change for aquaculture feed ingredient sourcing. 

Over the past year, TNC outlined a set of high-impact salmon feed sourcing criteria that we hypothesized was feasible for retailers, salmon farming companies, and feed producers to adopt. TNC evaluated the feasibility of these sourcing criteria across multiple categories (volume, cost, and ease of industry-wide implementation) to determine whether these criteria could realistically be adopted by the industry at scale, leveraging financial modeling, literature review, and interviews with industry stakeholders.

The analysis, detailed in the link below, suggests that sourcing more sustainable salmon feed across key categories (marine ingredients, soy, and overall environmental footprint) is feasible at scale. There is sufficient supply of certified marine ingredients and deforestation- and conversion-free soy already in the supply chain; it is also likely that the supply of electronically-monitored marine ingredients and novel ingredients will grow if catalyzed by this initiative. From a cost perspective, the TNC analysis estimates that full implementation of the sourcing criteria will have a moderate cost impact on overall salmon production (+1.4-2.2%).

In the near-term, we plan to work closely with feed producers, farmers, and retail partners to share these findings and drive commitments to adopt improved feed sourcing criteria. We hope that, by collaborating with partners within and beyond the aquaculture industry, we can introduce a sector-wide transition to more sustainable salmon feeds enabled by supply chains that are willing to share the costs of this transition. 

If you are interested in learning more about this initiative, please email taylor.voorhees@tnc.org.

We'd like to thank the team at Bain & Company for their support in the development of this analysis.