Norwegian farmed salmon company Atlantic
Sapphire has gotten full approval to construct a new plant in Florida, the
company's first in the US, Johan Andreassen, the founder of Langsand Laks and
Atlantic Sapphire, told Undercurrent News.
Over the last few months the company has
been gathering the necessary permits and recently completed them all. "We'll start initial drilling in
April, and the rest will commence in May or June," Andreassen said. He added that the first eggs are
slated to go in at the start of 2018, with the first fish heading to market in
late 2019 or early 2020. If successful, the company will create
a huge increase in US Atlantic salmon production, currently hitting
20,000t to 25,000t annually. During phase one, the new facility will have the
capacity to produce 8,000 metric tons of head-on, gutted fish,
and after phase three, it will produce about 90,000t per
year--boosting total US farmed salmon production four-fold if the rest of the
nation's production remained the same. It would also help feed a nation that
already consumes about 500,000t of Atlantic salmon annually. "There's a huge deficit in domestic
production," Andreassen said. "The US relies on importing from
Canada, Norway, Scotland and Chile. So we're going to bring salmon farming to
America to a larger extent." Andreassen added he thinks the US market
has "massive untapped potential". "By bringing this product locally we
can grow this market over the next decade," he said. "It has the
potential to become a significant industry within US borders." The product is already being sold into the
US on a weekly basis from the pilot plant in Denmark, mostly to high end
restaurants, as a premium product. At the moment, distribution is limited to
certain regions in the US, but eventually the product "will be found all
over the US". Part of the reason the company decided to
move to the US was to cut down on air freight costs by producing locally.
It spent over half a decade developing on-land farmed salmon during a
commercial pilot program in Denmark, called Langsand Laks. "It's basically a blueprint of what we
have developed in Denmark in the last six to seven years," he said. In December, Platina Seafood --
Sapphire's parent company -- relaunched its salmon farmed on land in Denmark,
shipped to the US market, under the "Atlantic Sapphire" brand. After a launch in 2014, the company had
issues at its operation and pulled production, but it has resolved these
and is putting fish, rated a best choice by the influential Monterey Bay
Aquarium's Seafood Watch program in October, into the market again. 
Source: Undercurrent news
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