With 70% of the aquaculture production being fed, from a sustainability standpoint, feeds are a very complex input into the world’s fastest growing food production sector. It’s widely recognised that the ingredients used in feeds can represent up to 80% of a farm’s carbon footprint, with most of that occurring at the feed ingredient production level through, amongst other things, deforestation, land conversion, agricultural practices and fisheries management. There’s also the risk of forced labour and child labour in certain supply chains.
Ensuring and accessing responsibly-produced feeds and feed ingredients was the focus of a special panel event at this year’s Seafood Expo Global (SEG) in Barcelona. Organised by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), with the theme “Feed Responsibly: Why Responsible Aquaculture Needs Responsible Feed”, key industry players shared how they are adopting the new ASC Feed Standard to drive transparency, social and environmental improvements in feed supply chains.
ASC’s Feed Standard was launched in June 2021 and became effective in January 2023. It requires feed mills to meet strict environmental and social requirements; to source ingredients from socially responsible suppliers; and to use environmentally responsible raw materials. All ingredients above 1% inclusion must undergo a due diligence process.
Its aim is to achieve a deforestation- and land conversion-free supply chain for all crops, while also reducing carbon emissions and improving human rights, as well as incentivising best-practice in fisheries.
Mexican-based feed producer Vimifos and the Chilean branch of global operation Skretting were the first operations to achieve the certification at the start of this year.
To-date, just nine feed mills in the world are ASC-certified, but more are in the pipeline, with the programme seeing an increasing number of feed companies joining the audit process.
ASC’s Feed Standard Senior Coordinator Alexandra Warrington explained that ASC has always had feed requirement in its farm standards, but now, with the creation of the feed standard, it can look at where the biggest impacts are.
“It’s not an easy task. These impacts are quite wide ranging. Honestly, the feed standard isn’t tackling them all, but we have to start somewhere, “ she said. “I think by not just looking at marine ingredients, and not just soy and palm oil, but by looking at ingredients as a whole, we are starting to make a real difference.”
Fulfilling commitments
From a seafood processor/supplier standpoint, its hugely important to be sourcing responsible feed, insisted New England Seafood International’s (NESI) Head of Sustainability Ruth Hoban.
“Feed is a big part of what I talk about on a daily basis – the sourcing, the raw materials, the cost,” Hoban said. “What we are trying to understand more about is the traceability and transparency, and there’s a lot more noise around feed now than there ever has been – going all the way to where it was sourced, how it was sourced, what’s the raw material, and right the way down to that human rights perspective. We want to do is understand the risk areas for feed.”
She added that NESI hopes the standard can be a solution in terms of helping the company on its journey towards responsibly-sourced feed.
Also on the panel, Thai Union’s Chief Sustainability Officer Adam Brennan said the ASC Feed Standard is helping the seafood giant de-risk its supply chains and to answer questions from retailers, while also mitigating the company’s impacts and providing commercial opportunities.
Thai Union, which released its new sustainability strategy in mid-2023, has done a lot of work in the tuna fisheries space over a long period of time, but it has never had a global, group-level commitment for the aquaculture supply chain, he said.
“We wanted to replicate our ambition of what we have on wild-caught on the farm-side. And when we began to create that new strategy, we knew that shrimp (for us) was a particular impact that we had to address, and we know that feed is a key material impact. So whatever commitment we wanted to go out with, feed was always going to be at the heart of it.
“The [ASC] feed standard actually touches multiple commitments that Thai Union has. We have very ambitious commitments around climate change – we are aligned with the 1.5 degrees pathway; we have to have 42% reductions across scope 3 between now and 2030, and that’s important because we all know the linkages with feed and deforestation.
“We also have our commitments around responsible fisheries, and again we see the ASC Feed Standard as being one of the mechanisms through which we can deliver on this commitment. And then we have the aquaculture commitment itself – a mixture of farm-level and feeds. To be specific, that’s for 100% of the feed used by our supply chain to be responsibly sourced.”
Onboarding supply chains
Skretting’s Global Sustainability Manager Jorge Diaz told the event that when he and his colleagues first saw the ASC standard, they thought it was “extremely challenging”. But while all the requirements sounded and looked “scary”, and a handful of ingredients suppliers called the feed company “crazy” for asking so many questions, once Skretting started digging into the obligations and implementing them into its operations, it realised it needed it, he said.
“It’s helping us have a better understanding and giving traceability for all the risks that we have.”
With regards to the wary ingredients suppliers, Skretting informed them it’s the standard that’s coming for the whole industry, and that if they want to be relevant for all the other aquafeed companies, then they will also have to work on it, Diaz said.
“I think that was a turning point. It changed the connection and the relationship we have them, because they also saw it as an opportunity to learn together with us and to also have a better visibility of their own risks. I think this whole supply chain approach is helping us to step up as an industry,” he said.
Brennan echoed this, saying that working to the ASC standard was a challenge for Thai Union, but insisting that it needed to be credible rather than easy to achieve.
“It needs to address all of the material risks that exist within the supply chain. We know that some of these risks are really challenging, so it brings me the confidence and the credibility to report on how I’m going to meet some of these commitments,” he said.
“It also brings me scalability. Thai Union’s footprint within shrimp is all across the world, across thousands of farms. What mechanism do I have to drive impact at scale? That’s another of the values of the feed standard: that not only does it address those material impacts, when in October 2025 we’re connected to the feed standard, we can look to this end-to-end, address it holistically, including the confidence that the label brings to the consumer because that is the only way I believe we can move forward on this.”
ASC has advised that certified farms have until October 2025 to switch to sourcing compliant feed produced under the ASC Feed Standard. Feed mills that become certified in 2024 will not have to pay licence fees on the volume of compliant feed they produce this calendar year.
Brennan also revealed that through the focus on the traceability of incoming raw materials, Thai Union found a number of ingredients that were not compliant, which led it to find new suppliers.
“This was particularly a challenge for us in Thailand. We had to create those new supplier relationships, go through the sustainability credentials of the raw materials that they were providing us with and making sure that they met all the requirements of the feed standard.
“That’s where we had most of the challenges, but we were able to overcome them and we are happy that we did,” he said.
