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Blue Star Food aims to scale-up production of Canadian RAS pioneer

West Palm Beach- based Blue Star Food Corp aims to boost the production capacity of recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) farmer Taste of BC Aquafarms Inc., following its acquisition of the family-owned  Canadian steelhead salmon producer.

The aquaculture company based in Nanaimo, British Columbia is a RAS pioneer  in Canada. It has been owned and operated by the Atkinson family for almost a decade. The company’s  Little Cedar Falls brand steelhead salmon  has been in the market since 2013.

Blue Star aims to boost the company’s production to 21,000 metric tons by 2028.

Blue Star Foods, which processes, packages and sells globally refrigerated pasteurized blue crab meat, and other premium seafood products, made a move to purchase Taste of BC Aquafarms back in December last year.

“They’ve built a proven and scalable model and we are excited to strategically fund their next level of growth and use our sales platform to market their delicious, sashimi-grade, steelhead salmon.” said John Keeler, chief executive officer of Blue Star.”…“we have as an internal company goal to be producing 21,000 metric tons of product by 2028. Our job is to get the resources for Ben Atkinson and his team to scale their existing technology and proven methodology to get to those numbers.”

“Almost 10 years ago I set out to create a Salmon RAS model that could be replicated in multiple locations with predicable and dependable results. Our staff, family, and various partners have helped us achieve that original goal, and now Blue Star will help us implement the large scale roll out,” said Steve Atkinson, president and co-founder of Taste of BC Aquafarms. “…we took a different approach than others developing RAS for salmon production. Ours is a more modular strategy that can be launched with confidence and we believe will be highly scalable.”