Marine ingredient scarcity is here to stay, warns fly farmer Innovafeed

Aquafeed producers facing a shortage of marine ingredients should use them where they deliver the highest biological value while complementing them with functional ingredients rather than simply seeking out an alternative protein such as poultry by-products or soy, insect farmer Innovafeed said today.

Fishmeal and fish oil prices have rocketed since Peru called an early halt to its anchovy fishing season because of the impact of the El Niño climate phenomenon on stocks.

But that’s only part of the problem, says Innovafeed, which warns that marine ingredient scarcity is becoming structural, not cyclical.

Innovafeed’s marketing director Roel Boersma and chief business and impact officer Maye Walraven have written a white paper, Beyond Replacement, in which they point to various reasons for shortages and that while marine supply has been broadly flat for years, the sector most dependent on it – high-value aquaculture - keeps growing.

They also point out that each temporary supply disruption now settles at a higher price floor than the one before.

Not a passing dip

“By mid-2026, super prime fishmeal was trading around US $4,000 a tonne, against a commodity benchmark of roughly US $2,100-2,400 and premium omega 3 fish oil was approaching US $7,000. This is the visible surface of a structural imbalance, not a passing dip,” they write.

The “instinctive response” to find something cheaper to put in the place of fishmeal, such poultry by-products or soy, is the wrong one.

“When formulators turn to poultry by-products, they compete with livestock feed and other established buyers for the same material, and the price tends to climb with fishmeal rather than away from it,” say the Innovafeed executives.

“Poultry meal is already a mainstay of Chilean salmon feed, so pressure there flows straight back into aquaculture. And even in ample supply, poultry meals remain a commodity protein: it solves a volume question, but it does not carry the bioactive, palatant and immune-supporting functions that distinguish a marine or purpose-built ingredient.”

Soy exposed to El Niño

The white paper adds that soy is exposed to the very same climate driver as marine ingredients supply.

“An acute El Niño, the kind that most sharply suppresses anchoveta, also brings drought and steep falls in South American soy. In the years marine supply collapses hardest, then, the main alternative tends to tighten at the very same moment.”

The authors say the question aquafeed producers and fish farmers should ask is not “what can replace fishmeal?” but “what does the feed actually need to deliver, and what is the most reliable way to deliver it?”, which takes into account the functional role a feed also plays in supporting immunity, stress resilience, gut health and palatability.

It is for these functions that feed manufacturers are prepared to pay more for marine ingredients than soy or poultry meal, and why algal sources of omega-3 fatty acids have secured a durable place in salmon feed.

A basket of replacements

There is no silver-bullet replacement for marine ingredients, argues the white paper, but there is a broader basket of complementary ingredients: microalgae oil for long-chain omega-3s, single-cell protein for highly digestible amino acids, and insect-derived meals and oils for bioactive function.

“Innovafeed’s Black Soldier Fly larvae ingredient sits within that basket as a functional contributor rather than a commodity swap: it carries antimicrobial peptides, lauric acid, chitin, and nucleotides that support gut health, immune readiness and survival under disease challenge,” write Boersma and Walraven.

“These ingredients are complementary, not competing; together they build a more resilient category than any one of them could alone.”

Starter diets

The best place to begin using insect ingredients is in starter and juvenile diets, where raw-material cost matters far less than performance, survival and a strong start, sates the white paper.

It adds that modelling from a peer-reveiwed study in Nature Food suggests that simply holding 2022 aquaculture output steady under a combined scenario of tighter management and climate impacts would call for roughly 1.8 million tonnes of alternative ingredients every year.

“That figure is both the measure of the challenge and the size of the opportunity for ingredients that can credibly fill the space. Innovafeed offers this perspective not as a large incumbent supplier - at 5,000 tonnes a year we are one contributor among many in a far larger system - but as a partner working alongside formulators on a problem the whole sector share.

“That crisis will not be solved by opportunistic, deal-by-deal moves on a shrinking pool of marine ingredients; that approach only bids up scarce supply and leaves each buyer more exposed to the next shock.

“It calls for the opposite: building a resilient ingredient basket together, so that the current crisis is resolved and the next one is prepared for.”

The white paper is available here.