New source of fish feed found
"Good innovators must be in denial, Guy Kawasaki says. Otherwise, "the bozos will grind you down." That’s what the former Apple software evangelist, venture capitalist and author of "Art of the Start" told a crowd of about 200 in November at BioWest 2008", according to a report by Colorado Biz Today, suggesting that "Biotech is a bright spot in the Colorado economy". The article describes Oberon, an Idaho Springs-based biotech company that is developing a renewable process to supply sustainable protein to the aquaculture, or farmed fish, industry;
"With global fish consumption accelerating rapidly and stocks of wild-caught fish declining, the fish-farming industry is experiencing rapid growth. The problem is that farmed fish still need to eat — dubbed "feed and breed" by industry insiders. Guess what they eat? More fish; ground up and turned into fish meal — about 6 million tons a year since the 1990s. And as wild fish stocks diminish, the cost for fish meal has skyrocketed. In 1999, the cost for a ton of fish meal was $350; by last year, the cost had tripled to $1,050."When I first got involved in this, I called up a feed manufacturer and said, ‘We’re thinking about making this product, would you be interested?’" said CEO Randy Swenson during BioWest’s Venture Showcase Competition. "The first thing out of this guy’s mouth was that he would take all we could make. So I knew we were on to a good thing." The showcase judges agreed, declaring Oberon the winner and recipient of a $10,000 prize. The funding is on top of $900,000 the company garnered during series-A financing last year from Acquacopia, an aquaculture VC firm.Oberon’s model is to partner with industrial food and beverage manufacturers to capture the bacteria used to clean the excess wastewater churned out during the manufacturing process, dry it, and turn it into single-celled protein substitute for fish meal. Known as "sludge," the microbial-rich wastewater is a by-product that industries must treat and then compost or bury in landfills. Oberon’s process removes sludge generation, eliminating millions of dollars in disposal costs and adding points to the manufacturer’s "green card," according to Swenson. "Most large manufacturing companies are very interested in renewable programs," Swenson said. "We can offer them a process for that."Since last year, the company has partnered with Fort Collins craft brewer New Belgium. Oberon built a small-scale treatment plant to harvest the beer maker’s sludge and has manufactured about one ton of the protein fish meal. Recently the company performed a series of tests with Aquiculture Institute of Norway, substituting their product with conventional fish feed. "At eight weeks, in a sample where we substituted 43 percent with our product over conventional protein, we actually got accelerated growth," Swenson said. "We know that our product will work as a fish-meal replacement strategy."The company is currently in additional trials with giant feed companies Cargill and Purina to determine how the product works with their feed formulations. Plans for 2009 are to develop Oberon’s first full-scale plant and obtain $10 million in series-B financing.
