Fishmeal Price Spikes Are Not a BSF Strategy

Marine-ingredient scarcity is useful for the insect sector, but it is a dangerous foundation for a business case. High fishmeal and fish oil prices create attention. They do not automatically create durable demand for black soldier fly ingredients.

That is the most interesting point in the recent coverage of Innovafeed’s white paper, Beyond Replacement: Why marine ingredient scarcity demands a smarter strategy for aquaculture feeds. The article repeats the now-familiar market stress signals: fishmeal production down, fish oil prices higher, lower anchovy biomass in Peru and more volatility around El Niño. Hermetia Blog has already covered that supply-side story in posts on fishmeal tightness, Peru’s anchoveta restrictions and El Niño as an ingredient qualification test.

The different angle here is commercial discipline. If insect meal only becomes attractive when fishmeal is temporarily scarce, then the product is still priced against someone else’s shortage. The stronger route is to prove a formulation role that remains valuable after the procurement panic fades.

Scarcity opens the door, but it does not define the slot

Aquafeed.com reports that Innovafeed wants formulators to stop asking only what can replace fishmeal and start asking what the feed needs to deliver. That sounds like a semantic change, but it has real consequences for BSF suppliers.

Fishmeal carries several functions at once: digestible protein, amino acids, palatability, minerals and a long history of predictable performance. Fish oil carries the EPA and DHA constraint that insect oil does not solve. A BSF ingredient cannot win by pretending those functions disappear. It has to win by showing which function it can carry better, more reliably or more economically inside a modern formulation.

That pushes the conversation away from emergency replacement and toward value allocation. Marine ingredients may be reserved for the life stages, species and diets where their biological value is hardest to duplicate. Other ingredients then have to support the rest of the matrix: plant proteins, poultry meals, microbial proteins, algal oils, attractants, enzymes and functional additives. BSF has a place only if its role is specific enough to be bought deliberately.

This is why the phrase “hybrid ingredient” is useful, even if it should not become another marketing label. A BSF meal is not just protein if it can also support palatability, gut condition, immune readiness or stress resilience. But those functions have to be tied to product form, inclusion rate and measured endpoint. Otherwise “hybrid” becomes the new “sustainable”: directionally attractive, commercially vague.

The better benchmark is not maximum replacement

The Aquafeed.com interview is valuable because it puts real inclusion logic behind the claim. Maye Walraven says some shrimp customers use insect meal at around 2% as a natural attractant to improve palatability, while others use 5 to 10% during periods when they expect health challenges. Innovafeed also points to starter, juvenile, salmon smolt and shrimp applications where survival and robustness can matter more than raw material cost alone.

That is a more credible aquafeed lane than chasing maximum fishmeal replacement. A high-inclusion replacement claim forces BSF into a commodity argument: price per tonne, protein percentage, amino acid digestibility and inclusion ceiling. A targeted use-case claim asks whether a defined product improves a difficult diet at a practical dose.

Hermetia Blog has argued this before in the context of functional feed additives and low-inclusion BSFL work in rainbow trout. Innovafeed’s white paper adds a sharper commercial filter: the product must find the place in the formula where its cost base makes sense for the value it brings.

That should be uncomfortable for the insect sector. It means that “fishmeal is expensive” is not enough. If BSF is sold as bulk protein, it will be compared with fishmeal when fishmeal is scarce, but also with poultry meal, soy concentrates, pea protein and single-cell protein when buyers are optimizing cost. If it is sold as a functional ingredient, it will be compared with krill meal, palatants, probiotics, prebiotics, organic acids, enzymes and health additives. Either comparison is serious. Neither rewards generic claims.

Fishmeal volatility is an audition, not a strategy

The strongest quote in the Aquafeed.com piece is Walraven’s warning: “We cannot rely on El Niño.” Roel Boersma makes the same point by saying the aim is not opportunism, but finding where insect ingredients reduce risk for formulators.

That distinction matters. Marine-ingredient volatility can make a buyer willing to reopen formulation work. It can justify trials, second-source qualification, procurement conversations and pilot contracts. But once the buyer has opened the file, the insect ingredient still has to pass normal commercial filters:

• Does it improve the feed at the inclusion rate the mill can afford?
• Is the effect repeatable across batches and production sites?
• Does the supplier preserve the compounds behind the functional claim?
• Does the ingredient reduce formulation risk, or merely shift risk from marine supply to insect-supplier consistency?
• Can the product hold its place if fishmeal prices fall or inventories recover?

That last question is the one BSF producers should take most seriously. If the answer is no, then scarcity has created a temporary window, not a market position.

Process control becomes part of the claim

The source article also describes an operational point that should not be treated as background. Innovafeed says that as its production stabilized, it gained more control over ingredient consistency and could optimize processing to preserve functionalities. It mentions lower-temperature processing and recovery of soluble proteins before reincorporation into the final ingredient, with the aim of preserving compounds such as antimicrobial peptides.

For specialist readers, that is the real product story. Functional claims depend on processing. Chitin level, residual lipid, lauric acid, soluble proteins, antimicrobial peptide preservation, drying temperature, defatting method and storage stability are not minor technical details. They determine whether the same nominal ingredient behaves the same way in feed.

A commodity protein can sometimes tolerate broader variation if the buyer formulates around proximate analysis. A functional aquafeed ingredient cannot. If the commercial claim is palatability, gut support, immune readiness or survival under challenge, the producer has to control the variables that create that effect.

This is where the BSF sector’s scale-up problems meet its premium opportunity. Larger volumes matter because aquafeed is a large market. But volume without process control will not support a functional premium. The product has to become boring in the right ways: stable specification, repeatable bioactive profile, predictable microbial status, documented heat history and a clear formulation use case.

The durable BSF opportunity is less dramatic

There is a tempting version of this story where marine-ingredient scarcity finally forces aquafeed to adopt insect meal at scale. That version is too easy. It treats BSF demand as a consequence of fishmeal failure rather than as a consequence of BSF product quality.

The more durable opportunity is less dramatic and more demanding. BSF ingredients can benefit from marine scarcity if they use the moment to prove a role that is not dependent on scarcity. That role may be a low-inclusion attractant in shrimp, a robustness tool in health-challenge windows, a starter-feed ingredient, a support for plant-heavy diets or a defined animal-protein component in diversified formulations. It will not be the same slot for every species or every product form.

For BSF producers, the implication is blunt: do not let fishmeal prices do the selling. Use the volatility to get into the trial plan, then make the ingredient defend itself on performance, consistency and risk reduction. That is the only version of the aquafeed opportunity that survives after the crisis narrative cools.

Sources

• Aquafeed.com. Innovafeed sees hybrid ingredients as the next step beyond fishmeal replacement. Published 23 July 2026.
• Aquaculture Magazine. Beyond Replacement Why Marine Ingredient Scarcity Is Reshaping the Future of Aquaculture. Published 24 July 2026.
• WeAreAquaculture. Innovafeed advocates moving beyond a single replacement to address the aquaculture feed challenge. Published 21 July 2026.