Under new ownership and management, and with strong financial partners, Bell Fish Company -- formerly known as Bell Aquaculture -- is ready to take on the future with its farmed trout operations, CEO Robert Davis told IntraFish.
Current grow-out tanks at the Indiana land-based recirculation aquaculture system (RAS) facility are "maxed out," Davis said.
Bell currently produces about 65,000 pounds of steelhead trout per week. However, due to an $100 million (€92 million) investment by the founders -- which included a large-scale hatchery and a feed mill -- increasing the farm's total capacity would only be a matter of adding more grow-out tanks.
Davis said Bell Fish doesn't consider itself to be a producer of one species but instead "as a producer of high-quality seafood with all of the important attributes that the consumer market is demanding, such as truly sustainable, traceable, and free of the antibiotic and parasiticides-based treatments that many of the other sources of farmed fish have to use."
"While we are currently growing steelhead trout, we could easily expand to other species such as salmon, walleye or Arctic char," Davis said.
This would only take an "incremental investment in our final-stage grow-out production area," he added. "We will do that as our customers pull us into the direction of other finfish species that they want with those same attributes."
The strategy is to grow with market demand and with customer needs, without aiming too high or too big, he said.
"We're not a threat to companies such as Marine Harvest or SalMar," Davis said. "What we're trying to do is to be a very successful niche business. We want to grow with our customers."
Last year, Davis brought in US private equity firm Trive Capital Partners as his partner, and acquired all of the assets of Bell Aquaculture, after it faced operational and financial issues due to an electrical device failure in 2015.
With the "strong" financial backing from Trive, and an unnamed Israeli minority partner, the company restarted production under Bell Fish Company.
Bell Fish is now in the process of obtaining Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) and Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) certifications for its operations by the second quarter of the year.
US potential for aquaculture
Davis said aquaculture is still in "its infancy" in North America and that while there are still some negative views on fish farming among consumers, continued education by the industry will help them realize the importance of aquaculture, regardless of whether it is RAS-based, or the model of the traditional open net pen-based companies such as seen in the Atlantic salmon farming industry.
Bell Fish now hopes to do its part to clear up some of these misperceptions, simply by "setting higher standards," Davis said.
Running a RAS facility in the heart of Indiana, which is fully traceable, and allows the production of fish without the need of vaccinations, is a "good story to tell," he believes.
When asked if the new, more protectionist, approach pursued by the new Trump Administration might impact businesses such as Bell, Davis said he would expect that domestic production could strengthen as a result.
"It could be a good thing for Bell," he said. "It's grown in the US, fresh and can be delivered on time."
But at the same time, he doesn't believe that "things will change over night. Global trade can't be reversed.
"But it's definitely different times to what we've seen in the past. We all need to be alert to it as an industry."
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