BEYOND REPLACEMENT

Beyond replacement. Why marine ingredient scarcity demands a smarter strategy for aquaculture feeds.

ingredients like microalgae, single-cell proteins, insect-derived meals and oils for one underlying reason: to confront the growing scarcity of marine resources. That scarcity is not a one-off event but a structural trend, and it expresses itself through crises that are becoming more frequent and more severe. Yet the aquaculture industry’s dominant response remains anchored in the wrong question: how do we replace fishmeal? Answering the question correctly is what will separate the producers and feed companies that navigate the next decade with confidence from those who remain exposed to an increasingly volatile and resource-constrained supply chain.

Roel Boersma | Product Strategy and Marketing Director at Innovafeed
Maye Walraven | Chief Business and Impact Officer at Innovafeed

Introduction

Something structural has shifted in the markets that feed the world’s fish and shrimp. In 2025, a peer-reviewed study in Nature Food examined 851 forage-fish stocks and found nearly a third over-exploited or already collapsed. IFFO reported first-quarter 2026 fishmeal output down 28% year on year. RaboResearch had already warned of fishmeal shortages arriving as soon as 2028. And then Peru the single largest source of the world’s fishmeal did something it rarely does: after landing only about a third of its intended anchoveta catch, the government suspended fishing outright, and extended the ban into June as the biomass kept weakening. Chile cut its anchovy quotas by 44%. Across northern Europe, several fisheries lost their sustainability certifications amid
unresolved quota disputes, narrowing still further the pool of certified raw material available to buyers bound by sourcing standards.

Since May 2026, the sector has been living through the most severe fishmeal crisis on record. None of this is a bad season that a good one will fix. Marine supply has been broadly flat at 5.5-6 million tons for years, while high-value aquaculture the segment most dependent on it keeps growing at around 3% a year. The cost base of the fishery itself is rising too: fuel, labour, tightening regulation and the steady expansion of protected areas all lift the real cost of landing wild fish, and those costs do not fall back when a season improves. The buffer that once absorbed shocks is gone, and each disruption now settles at a higher price floor than the one before. By mid-2026, super-prime fishmeal was trading around USD 4,000 a ton, against a commodity benchmark of
roughly USD 2,100-2,400 and premium omega3 fish oil was approaching USD 7,000. This is the visible surface of a structural imbalance, not a passing dip.

THE TRAP IN THE OBVIOUS ANSWER

The instinctive response is to find something cheaper to put in its place. But the obvious substitutes are caught in the same net. 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 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.

Soybean meal, the leading plant protein, is no longer insulated. It is exposed to the very same climate driver as marine 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. Diversifying across fishmeal, poultry and soy feels prudent, but they behave as correlated exposures, not independent options a single climate or supply event can move all three in the same direction at once.

This is why the sharper question 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?” It is a question formulators are well placed to answer modern formulation already runs on sophisticated nutrient models that balance many ingredients against precise requirements. What those models capture less easily is the functional role a feed also plays: supporting immunity, stress resilience, gut health and palatability.

That is precisely where marine ingredients have quietly earned their premium over soy or poultry meal. Seen this way, the gap between the commodity price and the super-prime price is not paid for protein on protein the grades are broadly comparable. It is paid for function, and that is a value a well-designed hybrid ingredient is built to deliver.

THE INDUSTRY IS ALREADY MOVING

The shift to these points is not speculative; it has been under way for a generation. Plant proteins began displacing marine inclusion in the 1990s and now carry much of the protein load in modern diets. More recently, algal sources of EPA and DHA pioneered at commercial scale by Veramaris have secured a durable place in salmon feed, proving that the industry will adopt a well-validated new ingredient on the scale when the data is credible and the supply dependable. That was a win for the whole sector, not for a single supplier, and it mapped the path the next generation of ingredients can follow.

Formulators themselves already act on the functional point. When marine ingredients are stripped out of a diet entirely, performance tends to suffer, so many keep a minimum of fishmeal in the formulation specifically for what it does rather than for its protein content. That instinct is the whole argument in miniature: it is an acknowledgement, in daily practice, that function not protein volume is what marine ingredients uniquely provide, and that it is worth
paying for.

The most useful way to think about the next stage, then, is not a single silver-bullet replacement but 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 Hilucia™, 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. These ingredients are complementary, not competing; together they build a more resilient category than any one of them could alone.

WHY THE SUPPLY ITSELF IS DIFFERENT

Beyond what a functional ingredient does inside the fish, there is a second reason it matters now: where it comes from. Marine supply answers to ocean conditions, quota decisions and wild-catch variability forces entirely outside any buyer’s control. Purpose-built insect production runs on a different basis: year-round continuity, defined inputs, a controlled process and a cycle measured in weeks rather than seasons. Crucially, it is not tied to the same crop harvests and rendered-protein markets that the conventional alternatives depend on,
so it offers genuine diversification rather than more of the same correlated risk.

It would be misleading to claim insect rearing is wholly insulated from agricultural markets it draws on feedstocks such as cereal by-products, whose prices move with grain markets. But it does so across a flexible, adaptable substrate base rather than depending on a single wild stock or harvest, and that flexibility, combined with a continuous and controlled process, makes the resulting
supply far steadier in both price and volume than any single marine or crop input. For a formulator that translates into something the marine market can no longer offer: multi-year contracts, consistent specifications and predictable cost.

HERE IT PROVES ITSELF FIRST

The clearest place to begin is early-life-stage feed. In starter and juvenile diets shrimp starters, in particular raw-material cost matters far less than performance, survival and a strong start, and this is exactly where a functional ingredient earns its keep. Trials show juvenile shrimp gaining up to 25% in growth rate and 30% in feed efficiency at research scale, with markedly higher survival when challenged with the Vibrio bacteria behind some of the most damaging outbreaks in shrimp farming. Because shrimp rely entirely on innate immunity, the baseline tone of their immune system is decisive in an outbreak which is exactly what a bioactive-rich ingredient helps to raise.

The volumes these early-stage feeds require also sit comfortably within current production capacity, which makes the return on investment quicker to demonstrate and easier to justify. Adopting a functional hybrid ingredient here is not a reversal of a formulator’s approach; it is the consistent next step for anyone who already optimises for performance, and the natural entry point from which broader adoption can follow.

A shared challenge, and a narrowing window

The scale of the task is real. The Nature Food modelling suggests that simply holding 2022 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 tons 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 window to act from a position of strength is narrow. Those who secure functional, decoupled supply and forge these partnerships now will help shape the next decade of aquaculture nutrition; those who wait will be left competing for what remains, at prices set by the shortage. Scarcity has already decided that the industry will move beyond marine dependency. The open question is who leads the transition, and who is left to follow.

Fabio Brambilla, PhD | Nutritionist, NaturAlleva (Italy), on integrating Innovafeed insect meal into commercial feed:

“In a strategic move to address the evolving demands of modern aquaculture, we have purposefully integrated insect meal into our feed formulations. This choice is driven not only by the need for sustainable sourcing but by a commitment to nutritional excellence. By leveraging this premium ingredient, we enrich our diets with highly digestible, top-tier proteins that support optimal growth rates. Furthermore, insect meal serves as a natural vehicle for key functional elements bioactive compounds that actively enhance the gut health, immune response and overall well-being of farmed fish, paving the way for a more resilient and efficient aquaculture value chain.”

Sources

FAO GLOBEFISH Fishmeal and Fish Oil Quarterly Analysis, February 2026

RaboResearch Hooked on Scarcity: Navigating aquafeed nutrition amid looming marine ingredient shortages, September 2025

Liu Y. et al. Unstable supply and future shortages of wild forage fish heighten risks to global fed aquaculture production. Nature Food, November 2025

IFFO Reduced fishmeal production, fish oil production shows more resilience. May 2026

World Bank Commodity Markets (“Pink Sheet”) and IMF Primary Commodity Prices – fishmeal benchmark, 2025-2026

IFFO By-product and marine ingredient use in aquaculture: fish oil consumption by sector Fitzsimmons K. Point: There are no essential ingredients in aquaculture feeds. Global Seafood Alliance Advocate, October 2020

Bézagu M., Donati L., Petit E., Walraven M. Rethinking Black Soldier Fly Larvae-Derived Ingredients: A Functional Nutrition Perspective for Aquaculture. Innovafeed, 2026

Image: Innovafeed