Another important milestone has been reached by Foods of Norway. In the cages of LetSea’s research facility at Sandnessjøen, 800 salmon are being fed on yeast cultivated on sugars from Norwegian spruce trees, as part of a large field trial evaluating yeast in feed for salmon. The fish will eat the yeast-based feed until they reach full size.

The yeast was produced in the first successful scale-up of microbial feed ingredients from local natural resources in the centre. The yeast-based feed was produced at BioMar’s technical production facilities in Denmark, and researchers from BioMar in Trondheim will monitor the growth performance, health and welfare of the fish during the trial.

Valuable collaboration

Foods of Norway partner BioMar holds the expertise when it comes to high-performance diets for aquaculture, aiming to bring to market efficient, safe and nutritious feeds with minimal environmental impact.

«We are incredibly proud to have reached this phase where we are feeding salmon yeast-based feed in seawater. We are testing increasing levels of yeast protein in the feed, and through the ongoing research in Foods of Norway we look forward to getting answers related to nutritional quality and other trial parameters," says Senior Researcher in BioMar R&D Monica Juarez, who leads the collaboration with Foods of Norway at BioMar.   

BioMar has been a partner in Foods of Norway since 2019 and has played a vital role in the research on novel feed ingredients. Vegard Denstadli is Technical Director at BioMar, and he explains how this feeding trial represents a new and exciting phase.

"We are now in the final phase of our research, but we believe that these trials represent the start of a completely new way of producing raw materials for feed. We have large amounts of bioresources available in Norway and this project demonstrates how it is entirely possible to use forests, macroalgae and other waste streams as raw material for feed," he says. 

Head of Foods of Norway Margareth Øverland agrees.

“Our work follows the entire value chain from tree biomass to the final meat and fish products. This large-scale trial will provide important information on how these novel feeds will affect the growth, health and product quality of the fish, as well as the production cost and sustainability of using these ingredients”, she says.