Leveraging new technologies can help reduce the impacts of aquaculture while helping with the challenge of meeting food security

Net pens, recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS), flow-through – which blue food farming system is best? According to Ohad Maiman, Managing Partner of land-based focused fund AquaFounders Capital, this is a complicated question that he’s been asked many times, particularly in the seven years he spent as CEO (and founder) of land-based yellowtail kingfish producer The Kingfish Company (2015-2022). Indeed, Maiman likens the question to asking which car is best – a Porsche or a Land Rover.

“It depends on what you are trying to do,” he told the recent Blue Food Innovation Summit in London. “There’s also the additional layer of technology combinations, with net-pen farmers using RAS for post-smolt, for example. It’s not ‘either/or’, with the technologies involved it’s about ‘also’. And when you think of the global seafood demand and an expected 30 to 50 million tonnes needed in the next 20 to 30 years, there’s room for all of them.”