Once tobacco, now shrimp

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

The vast majority of shrimp consumed in Canada is frozen product coming from outdoor farms in Asia or other warm water regions but a new Ontario company plans to change that by producing Pacific white shrimp at an indoor facility in Aylmer.

Construction of the Planet Shrimp Inc. facility at the Elgin Innovation Centre, a former tobacco plant, is ongoing, and the company aims to have its fresh, organically produced shrimp on the market starting in June 2016, says president Marvyn Budd, who’s also a co-founder of the company. The shrimp will reach Ontario consumers within hours of being harvested.

On Monday, Planet Shrimp received $237,216 from the Ontario government’s Local Food Fund to help pay for a shrimp production racking system, tanks and window enclosures. The company aims to produce more than three million pounds of shrimp annually at its 225,000 square foot facility. When construction is fully completed, there will be 14 miles of production raceway.

The company will start off with 15 employees and eventually grow to 75-100 workers.

Budd says Planet Shrimp will sell as much of its production as it can in Ontario to restaurants and grocery retail outlets. “If we find that the Ontario market can’t handle that quantity — I think it certainly can — but if it can’t, we’ll either export to the United States or we’ll sell across Canada.”

Budd says Planet Shrimp is producing “a premium product so it will sell for a little bit more than normal shrimp — certainly more than the frozen shrimp you get at the Costco’s and the Wal-Mart’s of the world.”

Shrimp is the number one consumed seafood in North America and “yet you can’t get it fresh,” Budd says. Most of the shrimp on the Canadian market comes from outdoor farms in Asia, Mexico or South America and is shipped frozen.

Budd says the conditions of the outdoor shrimp farms “are not particularly welcoming. For example, a lot of them use pesticides, fungicides and growth hormones and they give the shrimp antibiotics because it’s outdoors. An outdoor environment is uncontrollable.”

Planet Shrimp plans to produce its shrimp year-round in salt water at its indoor facility where “you have a chance to control the environment. Therefore, you don’t need any of those harmful chemicals, growth hormones or antibiotics,” he says.

Budd and his partners are business developers who first heard of indoor aquaculture about four years ago. After studying it and developing a business model, Budd says they looked at what they could do to “make the business model viable.”

Planet Shrimp was one of 21 projects awarded funding on Monday as part of the 2014/15 southwest and central areas for the Local Food Fund. It’s a three-year fund that has handed out up to $10 million a year for innovative, local food projects that increase the demand and sales of Ontario-produced food, stimulate private sector investments, and strengthen the province’s agri-food sector. To get the government funding, recipients must also contribute money towards their projects.

Bianca Jamieson, provincial agriculture ministry spokesperson, says by email applications for the final intake of the Local Food Fund closed on Jan. 16. The program ends on March 31, 2016.

So far, more than $22 million from the fund has been awarded to 163 projects, she says. The recipients’ total investment has been more than $100 million.

Some other recipients of funding announced Monday include:

• Sheik Halal Farms Inc. of Grand Valley is getting up to $268,048 to install automation technology to process Halal chicken.
• Vineland Growers’ Co-operative Limited of Lincoln — $299,390 to convert existing cooler storage rooms to cold atmosphere storage for various fruits grown in the area.
• Clear Valley Hops of Collingwood — $5,450 to buy equipment that reduces the time it takes to pellet the hops. This company just won the Minister’s Award last week as part of the provincial government’s Agri-Food Innovation Excellence Awards.
• Hans Dairy Inc. of Toronto — $123,412 to help market and introduce new products that conform to the dietary, religious and cultural needs of Ontarians. BF