Some RAS projects have suffered from budget overruns, quality issues, and failure to reach production targets. Many of these ventures could have benefitted from strategic and operational experience from well-established industries that master complex commercial and project development. And that experience needs to start at the top of the organization.

Meet CEO and co-founder of Great Northern Salmon, Marianne Naess, who brings over a decade of C-suite executive experience from McKesson/NMD and Aker Solutions and, before that, a strong leadership and consulting background from the Big 4. Her experience spans profit responsibility for a $1 billion product portfolio in the Nordics to Senior Vice President with a world leader in complex offshore energy projects. She has spent the last 6 years building and promoting US land-based aquaculture ventures.

Although building a new business differs from life in a large corporation, the discipline and culture required to deliver complex business undertakings successfully still apply. Leadership sets the tone and focus of the entire company. Marianne says that leveraging experience from world-class companies while rolling up your sleeves and getting the work done is both an interesting and rewarding journey. As they used to say in one of her previous companies, failure is not an option!

We asked her what she sees as important for land-based aquaculture in the US.

The US has a unique opportunity to build a competitive aquaculture industry with material sustainability and financial impacts. To achieve that, we need to address the domestic supply of high-consumption seafood products, she says. Right now, we see that the land-based salmon industry is taking off in Europe and Asia. The US lags far behind in that development. If we are to be serious about delivering American-made quality seafood to American families, a land-based US segment needs to be competitive.

While a diversity of smaller and larger businesses in aquaculture is positive, larger ventures have the muscle to drive important innovations that many benefit from. A US alternative to volume seafood products imported by airfreight will produce the greatest sustainability rewards. That does not mean we need high-risk mega-farms in the US, but we need the scale and capabilities to be competitive. That shaped the business strategy behind Great Northern Salmon.

How does Great Northern Salmon approach its development of a land-based salmon farm?

 We are extremely disciplined in our approach. Our core management team comprises industry veterans and talented people with strong educational backgrounds. We have planned how to mitigate known risks in detail without relying on unproven innovations. And we have hand-picked vendors who really know what they are doing. For example, our RAS vendor, Nofitech, has developed a modular RAS system and has built more than forty of these modules with repeat customers. We are adapting a well-proven system to our production plans to reduce costs and risks. There is always uncertainty to manage, but decades of learning curve in the team establishes high awareness and an ability to address uncertainty efficiently.

Any last words? 

Any RAS company needs to be extremely professional in everything from commercial planning to building its organization to delivering on its business metrics. We have done that every step of the way to date. Great Northern Salmon has deep executive and production experience, so we are very bullish on delivering on both investor and customer expectations in Great Northern Salmon. 

 We remain committed to salmon because you don’t have to be a market maker – we already have a huge established consumption market in the US for Atlantic Salmon. And almost all is imported. It is also important to work with more novel species, but an off-take case of any significant volume  and pricing are far more uncertain.