The US money behind a vegan attack on Scottish salmon farming

A well-funded campaign to persuade UK consumers not to buy farmed salmon is being financed by wealthy American benefactors, it has emerged.

Vegan-led Project Slingshot, which describes itself as “a narrative pressure engine”, told Fish Farming Expert that its spend on the campaign was “under £450,000”.

Most of the Project’s money comes from the Karuna Foundation, and Coefficient Giving, both headquartered in the United States. Although fish farmers have expressed fears about "dark money" being funnelled to anti-fish farming activists from abroad, Project Slingshot is happy to name its backers.

'Reducing suffering'

The Wyoming-based Karuna Foundation runs Vegan Grants, a philanthropic organisation designed to support a diverse range of vegan activism, both at the grassroots and institutional levels.

Coefficient Giving, which changed its name from Open Philanthropy in November last year, is primarily financed by Good Ventures, a philanthropic foundation created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna.

Coefficient Giving says billions of animals live in horrendous conditions on factory farms, and that corporate campaigns can meaningfully reduce their suffering. As Open Philanthropy, it financed an emotively presented report by Compassion in World Farming and OneKind in 2021 which was described as “wrong, inaccurate and misleading” by Tavish Scott, chief executive of trade body Salmon Scotland.

Led by veganism

Project Slingshot was co-founded by Matthew Glover, a co-founder of Veganuary, which encourages people to try veganism during January. The organisation’s aim is to expose the public to what it says is the reality of factory farming that they normally don’t see.

Its London-focused campaign against salmon farming runs across more than 500 billboard adverts in 206 Underground stations, including King’s Cross St Pancras, Euston, Liverpool Street, Charing Cross and Embankment, plus more than 4,500 adverts inside Tube carriages.

Earlier campaigns targeted CO₂ slaughter of pigs, and the fast growth of chickens. Each campaign targets both the sector in question, and also a specific retailer. This, says the Project, is “because factory farming doesn’t happen in the abstract; it happens because specific companies choose to profit from it”.

Targeting M&S

The salmon campaign is asking M&S Food to commit to ending sales of factory-farmed salmon and publish a timetable for doing so, something unlikely to happen given that the retailer has just expanded its salmon portfolio to appeal to a wider range of consumers.

Along with the billboards, the campaign presents two films – a short, satirical sketch mocking salmon marketing and featuring vegan TV wildlife presenter Chris Packham, and a longer documentary featuring well-known critics of the industry. The Packham skit will run on Project Slingshot’s social channels, and the documentary will be available on YouTube. A short trailer is running on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, and X.

A spokesperson for Salmon Scotland said: “This is not an independent assessment of Scottish salmon farming. It is the latest campaign from a vegan-led activist group that has already targeted the pig and chicken sectors and is backed by substantial US funding.

'A distorted picture'

“Its co-founder (Glover) has commercial interests in plant-based alternatives, including businesses that have faced financial difficulties.

“The claims present a distorted picture and come amid growing concerns about overseas ‘dark money’ funding campaigns against the sector.

“These activists do not speak for the thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on Scottish salmon, or the millions of consumers who choose the UK’s most popular fish.

“If campaigners drove Scottish salmon off supermarket shelves, demand would not disappear – it would simply be met by more imports, often from countries with lower standards and a bigger carbon footprint.”

Salmon Scotland said Glover founded Veg Capital, which invests in alternatives to meat, seafood, dairy and eggs, and has described combining investment in vegan businesses with activism as a “double whammy of activism”.

He also co-founded vegan food brand VFC, which later became part of Vegan Food Group. In January 2026, The Grocer reported that Vegan Food Group was winding down its UK operations, with around 60 redundancies and core brands removed from supermarket shelves.

Proud to farm salmon

A spokesperson for Scottish Sea Farms, which supplies M&S salmon, said: “We are a proud salmon supplier and 50% of our Scottish salmon is sold to UK consumers through multiple retailers including Tesco, Co-op, Waitrose and M&S. Salmon is an affordable, nutrient-rich protein which is a staple of our diets and we are committed to farming responsibly with the highest standards in the industry for fish health, welfare with the lowest stocking densities.  

“The salmon industry provides circa 11,000 jobs in the UK, and every single farmer at Scottish Sea Farms looks after the health and welfare of salmon on their farm to the absolute highest standards – salmon swim in more than 9.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water which is the lowest stocking density in the industry.

“To meet the demand of one of the UK’s most popular fish, we need to farm salmon, and we do that responsibly in conditions that replicate their natural environment as closely as possible. That means deep, cold sea lochs and seas with fast-flowing, well-oxygenated waters and strong currents.”