Daniel Russek was so moved by scenes of devastation along the coast of his native Mexico that he quit his studies and relocated to a remote fishing community.
Here, among the debris of Hurricane Stan, began a near 20-year journey that has carried the tech entrepreneur to the brink of his maiden revenue as head of a startup that is pioneering a different way of farming shrimp.
“This is the year that we are focusing on revenue,” Russek told IntraFish. “Our target is $6 million (€5.5 milion) by the end of the year.”
Atarraya Inc. produces shrimp in something that resembles a dark blue shipping container. The company, which has the backing of several big-name angel investors, including tech venture capitalist Jeff Horing, has won praise and prizes for its innovation. It was listed among TIME magazine’s Best Inventions of 2022.
“Our company is at the intersection between biotech, engineering, software and farming,” Russek, Atarraya's CEO and founder, said in an interview in Boston this month. “This is a hyper-modular, plug-and-play shrimp farm that you can use to farm shrimp anywhere in the world.”
After abortive attempts to gain a foothold in Latin America, Atarraya chose the US Midwest for its farming prototype. At a site in Indianapolis, the company employs 60 people and is already producing fresh shrimp; by the end of this year, it will be a commercial-sized farm producing a total of 80 metric tons a year from 50 individual containers.
Each AI-operated container - the company calls it a “Shrimpbox” - holds two tanks of 25 square meters each, a control room and, in Russek’s words, some “very simple hardware” operated by “a very complex cloud-based software system.”
‘We call them blue whales’
The Shrimpbox, he said, uses “the geometry and the specifications" of a 40-foot shipping container. They are tailor-made from scratch.
“A 40-foot shipping container is the biggest thing that you can move across the oceans,” Russek said. “This is why we call them ‘blue whales,' to use a pet name.”
At present, Atarraya is marketing its fresh shrimp under the brand name Agua Blanca as an alternative to species such as rock shrimp and Argentinian red shrimp. The company seeds every four weeks and harvests weekly, shipping its product in vans from Indianapolis to several major cities.
“We sell locally to farmers’ markets, to some chefs, but our most important clients are in New York and Washington,” Russek said. “We wanted to prove the point that our product is superior. People are substituting, let’s call it ‘specialty wild shrimp,' with our shrimp.”
The company’s ambitions, however, go beyond just selling shrimp. It plans to soon be selling entire farms. A commercial farm on the scale of Indianapolis – 50 Shrimpboxes, a water treatment plant and a processing facility – costs $3.3 million (€3 million).
“We are right now in contract negotiations for 40 [containers]. That will probably be something like 80 at the end of the year,” Russek said, adding that these talks were with two prospective customers in the United States.
“Probably by the end of 2025, we’ll start looking at projects outside the United States,” he said.
‘Obsessed’
Russek admits to having become “obsessed” with playing his part in solving a looming global food crisis.
“This whole thing started in 2005,” he told IntraFish. “I was a city boy studying economics, and there was a natural disaster: Hurricane Stan destroyed part of the South Pacific coast of Mexico.”
Russek abandoned his studies, gathered some friends and headed south, organizing emergency aid for some of the worst-hit coastal settlements. That led to a series of small-scale economic development projects in the years that followed.
“I became obsessed,” said Russek, “and we realized the dirty little secret of shrimp: In order to get our yearly amount of wild-caught shrimp, we need to scrape 2 million square kilometers [of the sea bed] from the bottom of the ocean. That’s the size of Mexico, every year.”
Russek decided to produce shrimp in another way. He embraced biofloc, a technology that promotes nitrogen uptake through bacterial growth and recycles waste nutrients as fish food.
“We did three things,” Russek said. “First, we replicated the ocean’s biochemistry in a controlled environment. Second, we packaged our technology into a hyper-modular solution that can be replicated.
“The third thing that we did is that we improved upon the quality of the final product. Our product has three times the shelf life of commodity shrimp – fresh, never frozen. We don’t use antibiotics. We don’t use preservatives.”
Leapfrogging the industry
Russek said consumers had been “traumatized” by reports of malpractice in the food industry.
“We have had a lot of information about how bad our food system is right now,” he said. “We know that it’s destroying our environment and it’s basically killing us. Most of our chronic disease can be traced back to the food that we are eating.”
He also holds out little hope that plant-based proteins or cell-based food – “fake meat,” he calls it – will answer the need for a more sustainable global diet.
“Plant-based will never cater to more than a single-digit [percentage] market share,” he said, “and lab-grown stuff, after $14 billion (€12.9 billion) [of investment], hasn’t produced a single commercial product.”
Finding a receptive audience for the Shrimpbox, though, has not been easy.
Russek launched his company in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2010. He built a pilot plant, then a commercial operation. He traveled around Mexico and to Ecuador, Guatemala and the Philippines in search of investment from within the shrimp industry.
“Our idea was: ‘We will show that this is possible and, as rational players, everybody, or some, will be interested in investing.' Nobody showed up! Nobody wanted to take the risk,” he added, “so we decided to take the risk, and leapfrog the whole industry.”
Avoiding the world’s main shrimp-producing nations has turned out to be an unexpected blessing.
“Usually tech companies, when they are disrupting a system, have adversaries: cab drivers to Uber, hotels to Airbnb,” he explained.
“Here, the people that we are disrupting don’t live in America. They live somewhere else. We are tiny and the market is huge, so everywhere we go here in the United States people want to see us succeed.”
