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The aquafeed sector has spent three years learning from the 2023 El Niño shock. The useful question now is not whether that event was severe. It was. The question is whether ingredient qualification has changed fast enough for the next one.
Aquafeed Magazine’s July 2026 issue frames the problem directly: another El Niño is developing, and the industry has to ask whether diversification, procurement strategy, formulation flexibility and risk management have advanced enough since 2023. Its special report, How the 2023 El Niño reshaped the aquafeed industry, is useful because it moves the discussion beyond a simple marine-ingredient shortage narrative. It describes what buyers changed inside formulation and procurement systems.
That makes this post different from our earlier coverage of fishmeal tightness, input sovereignty and Peru’s anchoveta closures. Those pieces dealt mainly with the supply shock and the feed-security signal. This one deals with the buyer-side consequence: alternative ingredients only matter during a shock if they were already specified, tested, approved and contractable before the shock arrived.
Aquafeed Magazine’s central message is that the industry did not simply wait for fishmeal and fish oil markets to normalize. It diversified ingredient portfolios, broadened supplier bases, invested in R&D, improved forecasting and inventory strategies, and treated climate risk as an operational variable rather than a rare exception.
For BSF producers, that is more useful than another replacement argument. The market is not asking for a miracle substitute. It is asking for ingredients that can pass the qualification file before the next procurement shock.
The 2023 shock was large enough to change behavior
The 2023 disruption was not a marginal supply event. FAO GLOBEFISH reported that global fishmeal production fell 23% in 2023, while fish oil output declined 21%, largely because of poor Peruvian anchoveta catches. Aquafeed.com, citing IFFO, reported a similar picture: cumulative fishmeal production across analyzed countries was around 1.738 million tonnes in 2023, 23% below 2022, with Peru down 52% year on year after the North-Centre April to June season was cancelled and the final-quarter quota came in below average. Fish oil output was down 21%, with Peru down 85% year on year.
Those figures explain why the 2023 event still matters in 2026. Marine ingredients are not only high-value nutrients. They are concentrated supply-chain dependencies. IFFO and Aquafeed’s 2025 Madrid meeting coverage described a marine-ingredient sector recovering from El Niño, but also moving toward by-products, diversified sourcing and more flexible product development.
That recovery did not erase the structural issue. Rabobank’s 2026 research note argues that rising demand from high-value species and intensive aquaculture is colliding with stagnant marine-ingredient availability, with fishmeal shortages projected as early as 2028 and fish oil scarcity expected to intensify through the decade.
The same point showed up in our recent anchoveta update: a biologically responsible closure can still become a feed-security problem. The next El Niño does not have to repeat 2023 exactly to force reformulation. It only has to arrive when inventories are thin, demand is firm and buyers have not qualified enough alternatives.
What changed after El Niño
Aquafeed Magazine identifies six lasting transformations after 2023: diversification became permanent, formulation became more flexible, innovation became a strategic investment, procurement became strategic, functionality entered mainstream formulations, and climate risk became operational.
That list is important because it describes a more mature buyer. Before 2023, alternative proteins and lipids could often be treated as sustainability options or tactical replacements. After 2023, they increasingly sit inside risk architecture. A nutritionist is not only asking whether an ingredient can reduce fishmeal inclusion. The better question is whether the whole formulation system has more room to move when fishmeal, fish oil, freight, certification, disease pressure or farmer profitability shifts at the same time.
This is where the insect sector has to be careful. BSF meal does not solve the EPA and DHA constraint. BSF oil is not fish oil. A defatted insect meal is not the same product as a full-fat meal, hydrolysate, oil or chitin-rich fraction. If the sales message collapses all of that into “fishmeal replacement”, it misses the direction aquafeed is moving.
The better reading is that El Niño pushed feed companies toward multi-ingredient resilience. BSF can fit there if it is positioned as a defined component in a portfolio that may also include marine by-products, poultry meal, single-cell protein, algal oil, plant proteins, attractants, functional additives and precision-nutrition tools.
Diversification is not enough without qualification
Aquafeed Magazine’s report separates diversification from formulation flexibility. That distinction matters.
Diversification means a company has more ingredients and suppliers available. Formulation flexibility means the company can actually use them without losing growth, feed conversion, palatability, health performance, pellet quality or farmer economics. A long ingredient list is not resilience if most of those ingredients are not commercially validated at the species, life stage and inclusion level where the feed mill needs them.
For BSF producers, the practical implication is clear. The product has to be specified and trialed before the disruption. Buyers need to know whether the value is protein density, digestible amino acids, palatability, lauric-acid-rich lipid, chitin-related functionality, hydrolysate effects, gut-health response or simply a controlled animal-protein source that reduces exposure to one marine raw material.
That means lower-inclusion, use-case-specific work may be more valuable than headline replacement claims. A 2.5% to 5% inclusion that reliably improves performance in a plant-heavy or disease-pressure diet can be easier for a feed company to adopt than a high-inclusion substitution that requires rebuilding the formulation. The commercial test is not whether BSF can carry the whole marine-ingredient burden. It is whether it gives formulators another qualified lever when the marine-ingredient system tightens.
Procurement strategy is now a product requirement
The report also says procurement became strategic. That should change how BSF producers think about sales.
If buyers are trying to secure supply before climate shocks, they will look beyond nutrition. They will ask whether production volume is stable, whether specifications drift with substrate, whether processing is consistent, whether contaminants are controlled, whether the ingredient is certified for the target market and whether the supplier can support long-term contracts rather than one-off trial volumes.
This is where insect ingredients can either become part of the solution or remain interesting but peripheral. Feed companies cannot build resilience around an ingredient that is technically promising but commercially irregular. The procurement team needs the same confidence as the nutrition team: repeatable product, predictable documentation, dependable delivery and clear pricing logic.
El Niño therefore raises the bar for the insect sector. It creates demand for diversification, but it also rewards suppliers that behave like industrial ingredient partners.
The BSF opportunity is narrower and stronger
The most useful conclusion is not that El Niño is good for BSF. That is too simple. El Niño is good for already-qualified ingredients that help feed companies reduce fragility without compromising animal performance or farmer margins.
That is a narrower opportunity, and a stronger one. It pushes BSF away from broad sustainability language and toward product architecture: full-fat meals where the lipid matrix matters, defatted meals where protein concentration matters, hydrolysates where palatability or digestibility is the target, oils where medium-chain fatty acids are useful, and chitin-rich fractions where immune or gut-response claims can be tested.
Aquafeed’s question is whether the industry is ready for the next El Niño. For BSF producers, the parallel question is more uncomfortable: when feed companies look for pre-qualified resilience ingredients, will insect products already be in the formulation file, or still waiting for the emergency to prove their case?
Sources
- Aquafeed.com. Aquafeed Magazine July 2026: Preparing for the next El Niño. Published 16 July 2026.
- Aquafeed Magazine, Vol. 18 Issue 3, 2026. How the 2023 El Niño reshaped the aquafeed industry. Available through the July 2026 magazine issue.
- FAO GLOBEFISH. Fishmeal and fish oil. Species analysis and market context.
- Aquafeed.com. Fishmeal and fish oil production around 20% less in 2023 than in 2022, IFFO reports. Published 13 February 2024.
- Aquafeed.com. IFFO Members’ Meeting: Industry recovers from El Niño, charts future with byproducts and diversification. Published 2 June 2025.
- Rabobank. Hooked on scarcity: Navigating aquafeed nutrition amid looming marine ingredient shortages. 2026.
