The seafood industry won't have to wait much longer to get a sense of how Charoen Pokphand Foods' planned national network of small land-based shrimp growers might fare in the US market, based on comments made by Robins McIntosh, senior vice president of the Thai company better known as "CP Foods", on Tuesday.
"2021: That's the year that we hope to be fully operational and supplying the US with fresh shrimp," he declared.
McIntosh, who recently shared CP Foods' plans for its "Homegrown Shrimp USA" business as part of Undercurrent News' 'Global Shrimp Market Outlook' webinar, delivered more details and more of the company's timeline during the Global Aquaculture Alliance's annual Global Outlook for Aquaculture Leadership (GOAL) conference.
The event, which was originally scheduled to be held in Japan, is being run as an online webinar this week.
Homegrown Shrimp's hatchery in Indiantown, Florida, is already operational, McIntosh reported, noting how the company last month had its first harvest and has begun selling post-larvae-size shrimp to a positive reception in the US and Europe.
CP Foods' plans for selling domestically produced shrimp to consumers has been generating considerable interest in the aquaculture world, as most US land-based shrimp growers for years have struggled to sell their product at rates that can be sustained, and many have gone out of business. The Thai company's plans, however, involve using smarter, more advanced technology and, rather than maintaining only one location, building multiple 1,000 metric tons per year operations spread throughout the US and Europe, always inland and in metropolitan hubs, McIntosh explained.
One of the slides shared by CP Foods' Robins McIntosh at the GOAL 2020 conference.
"The marketing of Homegrown shrimp is going to be key to this," McIntosh said. "We cannot market these shrimp as a commodity import."
To differentiate, Homegrown plans to promote its shrimp as "fresh, never frozen," he said.
"They will be natural. There'll be no chemical additives. There'll be healthy. The feeds that we use will ensure that they are a healthy shrimp. They will be delicious," he said, noting that it will be using saline water to give the shrimp a salt-water taste.
Homegrown Shrimp's first facility is in close proximity to the major Florida cities of Orlando, Miami and Tampa, as well as several major airports.
A map McIntosh shared showed 14 farming locations, including two in California, two in Florida and at least one each in the US states of Colorado, Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington. Also, the map marked Tennessee as the home of an e-commerce center.
One of the slides shared by CP Foods' Robins McIntosh shows the proximity of its first land-based facility in Florida to several major cities.
"We could all still foresee an e-commerce hub, where every point in the United States would be reachable through an e-commerce type of business and associated with some farms," McIntosh said. "We could envision a restaurant that would serve the fresh homegrown shrimp right there at the site or in the area of the homegrown farm."
The Indiantown location is a "pilot experiment", he said. The company is looking to determine what kind of processing is needed, which market outlets will work the best, and what kind of prices and volumes can be expected.
As for the logistics, each location will come with four units, including a hatchery and processor, he said, noting that "good quality post-larvae are not available in the United States".
The shrimp will be raised in 100t tanks, rather than land ponds, to avoid seepage and better collect waste, though McIntosh said the company would start with floc systems rather than using recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) technology.
"We're not going to do RAS because we are not confident in [the ability to maintain] consistent production," he said, though he noted the company's plan to ultimately switch to RAS, its increasing experience and comfort with the technology, and how it would ultimately increase production.
One of the slides shared by CP Foods Robins McIntosh at the 2020 GOALS conference.
All feeding, waste removal and water replenishment will be automated, he assured.
McIntosh said the operations would use much of the same technology that he has employed successfully in broodstock facilities for 15 years in Asia where his shrimp have achieved survival rates of 96% and feed conversion rates of 1.0 to 1.2. He hopes to produce 22- to 24-gram size shrimp (26/30 headless) at a yield of five kilograms per square meter, he said.
He said the company is looking at 90-day production cycles, including 80 days for grow-out and 10 days between, so four cycles per year in each unit, producing 180t each.
One of the slides used by CP Foods' Robin McIntosh during the 2020 GOAL conference shows how indoor poultry farming compares.
McIntosh said CP Foods aims to get as close as possible to the kind of production performance experienced by indoor poultry farmers, though he acknowledged that such a mark is not achievable.
"The issue with us is we can only do maybe 200 grams per meter squared per day," he said. "Poultry can do 1,000. ... And that's where we have to explore the economics and the value that we can get for shrimp in the market, because we're not going to be able to produce the same value as chicken. ... [B]ut we certainly can have the other parameters equivalent to poultry.
"Because in the end, CP wants to be big," he continued. "We know that this will never replace imports, but we want to basically be large enough that it's interesting to a large company like CP. So we do want more than one farm. We want multiple farms. They can provide fresh shrimp at reasonable prices to metropolitan areas around Europe, the United States, and in any other place in the world that might want to produce fresh shrimp."
October 08, 2020 at 12:04AM
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CP Foods aims to start US shrimp production network in 2021 - Undercurrent News
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