Fishmeal-free feed in the pipeline
The news comes the commercial launch of a prawn feed – Perform Plus NoCatch – by Ridley Aquafeed, which contains no wild-caught fish.
A spokesman for Ridley told Fish Farming Expert: “Perform Plus NoCatch for salmon is in the final stages of commercial cage trials. The intermediate weigh up showed the same performance as equivalent diets with fishmeal. Final weigh up will be in the next few weeks.”
The formula is designed to avoid the price volatility to which other diets are subjected, relying as they do on wild caught fish meal, which has seasonal availability and variable catches.
Last week’s launch of the prawn version of the feed is the culmination of over a decade of research by Group Technical and R&D manager at Ridley Aquafeed, Dr Richard Smullen and his team.
“Using a broad range of high quality, responsibly sourced ingredients, we’ve learnt how to optimise our feeds to help deliver the biggest, healthiest and tastiest prawns and fish, and done it without relying on fishmeal. No one else in the world has been able to deliver this commercially,” said Dr Smullen.
Huw Thomas, Fisheries and Aquaculture Manager for UK retail giant Morrisons, who was among a group of several international speakers that recently visited Australia to attend the inaugural Ridley Salmon Seminar (pictured below), commented: “We’re moving away from calling foods sustainable or not, but rather focusing on whether their production is responsible”. He added that “sustainability is typically thought of as the environmental footprint of food production only, but we need to really focus on the triple bottom line of environmental, social and economic responsibility”.
