In the aquafeed industry, more and more stakeholders own their testing facilities to control and improve the performance of their products and customize them to various species, growth stages and rearing environments.
Historically, most large aquafeed manufacturers owned in-house testing facilities to develop and assess, dietary tailor-made formulations meeting the nutritional requirements of various aquaculture species, and their specific growth stages. More recently, they started to develop feed ranges dedicated to rearing environments (RAS farms) or environmental challenges (summertime or wintering). Today, even medium-size and small aquafeed manufacturers have setup their own facilities to optimise their testing capacities, operational costs and control over the methods and results.
With regards to feed additive suppliers, in many cases, they will rely on studies implemented on terrestrial mammals to promote their products to the aquaculture industry. Most committed ones will contract public institutions, such as universities, or private CROs (contract research organisations) to assess the value of their technical solutions in some very specific conditions. However, very few of them have the dedicated budgets to invest in several aquaculture studies and/or setup aquaculture testing facilities.
At Symrise Aqua Feed, a company developing and producing palatability enhancers and functional protein hydrolysates for shrimp and fish feed, a dedicated team of passionate researchers and technicians relies on internal, and external testing facilities, to assess the performance of the technical solutions developed internally or by industry partners. Thus, aquafeed manufacturers are assured that proposed solutions will meet their needs.
A pioneer in fish testing among aquafeed ingredient suppliers
Since the beginning of Symrise Aqua Feed in 2006 (formerly known as Aquativ), Aqualis EMEA is a mandatory step before releasing a new dietary solution to the aquafeed market. Aqualis EMEA facilities comprise a permanent rental of two independent testing units belonging to a French research institute dedicated to marine sciences. It has 24 tanks, each of 100L capacity (Figure 1). Both units are supplied with sand filtrated seawater thermoregulated to 20°C all year round. Minimum water exchange rate is 200% per hour, which guaranties the best water quality for the European seabass juveniles used as a model fish species for all commercially farmed marine fish species because of its high requirements in feed palatability and nutrition.
Experimental conditions are standardised as much as possible to reduce the variability of the different KPIs measured during the palatability, nutritional and health studies. Fish are mostly fed ad libitum using on-line automatic feeders to maximize dietary palatability performance, which can be specifically measured with short-term feeding trials of 2 to 3 weeks.