Caged Salmon Go Vegetarian as Nutreco Cooks Up Bean, Seed Diet

Salmon is getting a menu makeover.

Scientists at Nutreco Holding NV, the world's largest maker of fish feed, spent a decade perfecting a salmon diet, replacing fish meal from wild catch such as Peruvian anchovies with a mix of soybeans, rapeseed and ground-up chicken. The company is working to phase out the chicken, making the meal all-vegetarian, said Alex Obach, managing director at Nutreco's research unit.

"Fish have an amazing capacity to adapt very quickly to a new taste," Obach said in an interview. "Salmon eat what you give them."

With almost two wild fish needed to raise a single caged salmon, trawling the seas for fodder has become too costly to sustain a $79 billion farmed-fish industry that's set to eclipse wild fishing in size. The swine flu has knocked pork's reputation and lifted demand for salmon, supporting a fish-farm industry that's been plagued by hygiene scandals and oversupply.

Costs to produce salmon have fallen by about half since 1990 as fish farmers become more efficient in their deployment of feeding machines and underwater cameras that monitor the fish.

Fish feed makes up about 60 percent of the total cost in salmon farming, according to Oslo-based Marine Harvest ASA, the world's largest producer of the fish. While the new ingredients are unlikely to slash costs or fish prices, feed makers and retailers said the formula will catch on with consumers seeking a product raised from sources that aren't being depleted.

"We can produce a higher standard fish, in terms of sustainability," Marine Harvest spokesman Joergen Christiansen said.

The new dish, developed at a laboratory in Stavanger, Norway, will supplement about 1.3 million tons of fish feed Nutreco makes each year, according to the company. The pellets still contain fish oil salmon needs to build up so-called Omega 3 acids that support the human immune system and make the fish a popular source of nutrition with consumers.

Nutreco, based in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, Cermaq ASA of Norway and BioMar Group, a unit of Denmark's A/S Schouw, control about 90 percent of the global fish-feed market.

"Nutreco benefits from trends that are interesting to the entire fish industry," said Boudewijn de Haan, who started a 15 million-euro food and agricultural fund at Robeco Group in September in Rotterdam, which manages a total of 111 billion euros ($147 billion). De Haan owns Nutreco shares.

The biggest fish farming market is China, home to about 4.5 million of the world's 8.7 million farms, according to United Nations research. China produced 34 million metric tons of fish in 2006, or about 67 percent of farm-bred fish globally, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

Without vegetarian food, fish farmers are on course to run out of supply to feed the world's appetite for filets and fish fingers, as wild stock teeters on the verge of collapse from pollution and overfishing.

Aquaculture, or growing fish in enclosed ponds or cages in the sea, expanded 8.7 percent annually from 1970 to 2006 and now accounts for almost half of world's seafood production, a 2008 United Nations report shows. By contrast, commercial fisheries may be exhausted in less than three decades, the World Wildlife Fund estimates, boosting demand for caged Norwegian salmon, Chinese carp, Vietnamese Tilapia and Thai shrimp.

Tainted by health scares from polluted salmon cages, fish farming is keen to refashion itself as an environmentally friendly industry that preserves wild stock. So far, only 92,000 farms around the world -- less than 1 percent -- live up to practices endorsed by a group of retailers that sets standards on nutrition, sourcing and breeding practices. Members include Tesco Plc, Carrefour SA of France and Germany's Metro AG.

"We're under a lot of pressure from customers to offer quality fish," said Bjoern Myrseth, chief executive officer of Marine Farms ASA in Bergen, Norway, which breeds salmon and seabass from Scotland to Vietnam.

Though swine flu doesn't contaminate pork, the outbreak has made consumers wary. Indonesia, Southeast Asia's most populous nation, will destroy all imported pork and other swine products and fumigate agricultural goods bought from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico as a precaution amid the swine flu outbreak.

While aquaculture expanded, the industry has failed to keep up with demands from consumers for quality seafood that doesn't damage the environment, according to Amsterdam-based Greenpeace. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the import of Chilean salmon after antibiotics were found and the Hong Kong government stepped up testing of fish feed after contamination with the industrial chemical melamine.

"It is very difficult at present to acquire quality fish feed from sustainable fisheries," said Phil Gatland, managing director of the U.K. unit of Selonda Aquaculture SA, a Greek fish-farm operator.

The World Wildlife Fund is creating a voluntary certification program to guarantee that producing feed doesn't involve destruction of fishing grounds or harmful use of pesticides and hormones. Fish raised using certified feed with be labeled on packaging, and it will be the job of retailers and grocery store chains interested in selling the certified fish to educate consumers about its advantages, said Jose Villalon, director of WWF's aquaculture program.

"We're focusing on retailers to do much of the work," said Villalon. "A lot of consumers don't know about sustainability and need to be educated."

Marine Harvest, the salmon farmer, said it's still waiting for shoppers to put their money where their mouth is.

"Consumers are becoming more aware of sustainable food," Christiansen said. "But so very few are prepared to pay for it."