Forever Oceans emerges from the challenges of the pandemic with a solid marketing plan

After years of developing its unique approach to raising fish in deep-sea pens, Forever Oceans is now bringing its products to market.

At Seafood Expo North America 2022, Forever Oceans Founder and Chief Sustainability Officer Jason Heckathorn told SeafoodSource that his company plans to make its farmed yellowtail flounder widely available to US customers by the end of this summer.

“I would say for us this is another step towards healthy development,” Heckathorn told SeafoodSource. “We had a good market start a few weeks ago, and towards the end of the summer our yellowtail products will be more widely available on the market. We are delighted to be at this stage.

The company farms fish in deep ocean waters off the coasts of Panama, Brazil and soon Indonesia, according to Heckathorn, who also served as the company’s CEO until the company hired Bill Bien. to assume this role in November 2021. Heckathorn said Forever Oceans relies on the a highly automated remote system for raising fish at sea that he developed himself.

The company first introduced its new Forever Oceans Yellowtail to North American Seafood Show Reconnect in 2021a product that also helped him land a spot on SeafoodSource’s Top 25 Seafood Innovators listing. The company offered the first public taste of its product at Seafood Expo North America. The fish was prepared by chef Mark William Allison and sampled by the Brazilian Secretary of Aquaculture and Fisheries, Jorge Seif Junior. Brazil recently granted the company a huge offshore aquaculture concession in Brazil.

Forever Oceans products were developed with current markets in mind and were developed with the help of a Culinary Council of 49 chefs who helped create recipes for the species. However, their availability will be limited at this time – Heckathorn said aFor now, the company is focused on improving its platforms and efficiency before diving deeper into specialized products for specific markets.

Forever Oceans’ product development has been complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Heckathorn.

“We are a multinational, multilingual and multicultural company and travel restrictions have made communications much more difficult,” he said.

Construction of the company’s first hatchery was about to begin when the pandemic began to spread globally, he said.

“We didn’t even open our first hatchery before the pandemic started. So we literally went from having no commercial production before the pandemic to having production facilities running at full capacity,” he said. “It was tough, with such crazy things as getting permits of work for our team to drive dirt trucks for the foundation at In the Beginning. Through the product processing and return to market logistics at the end. It’s been satisfying, but certainly over the past couple of years it’s been a bit more complicated.

Now that Forever Oceans’ development has reached a point where it is producing a commercial product for the first time, it is beginning to examine the effectiveness of its farming method. Heckathorn said Forever Oceans’ proprietary farming technology is a middle ground between traditional net-pen farming near shore and tightly controlled indoor recirculating aquaculture (RAS) systems developed by other companies.

Forever Oceans uses RAS for some steps, but sees its new technology as a way to improve results, Heckathorn said.

“We use RAS onshore technology as the basis for our brood stock and the production of our fingerlings. We don’t see any issues with this technology, and it’s the engine of juvenile production for us,” Heckathorn said. “The part of RAS that I failed to see, as a businessman…is the large-scale business growth, the size of the crop. Frankly, the ocean is really big and the fish grow very well there.

Going forward, the company plans to continue to expand its operations, which Heckathorn says should be relatively straightforward due to the process it has developed.

“Our systems are very modular,” he said. “So we just need to add more modules for production.”

Heckathorn said Forever Oceans has spent much of its time and energy figuring out how to combine technologies to grow fish in the ocean without a big impact on the water around it – which is facilitated by its automation. With its proprietary systems, Forever Oceans can farm fish in deeper waters and at greater distances, minimizing the impact of its farms on any section of the ocean.

Heckathorn said creating jobs in the communities where it operates remains a priority for Forever Oceans, despite its reliance on automation for many of its processes.

“If you create more skilled jobs for employees who produce more, it also creates more sustainable and better paying jobs,” he said. “I think that’s really important when you talk about building economies, it’s not just a race to the bottom in the workforce, but actually investing in a workforce, helping to create wealth in a region. That’s another part of what we have to do.

Photo courtesy of Forever Oceans