Carlos Diaz, CEO of BioMar, explains the logic behind the company’s ambitious new 2030 sustainability goals and muses on how the company – and the wider aquaculture industry – is likely to grow in the coming decades.
Diaz has over 25 years’ experience of aquaculture, playing key roles in the growth of the sector in Europe, Scandinavia and South America over that period. Having trained as a vet in his native Chile, he first joined the aquaculture industry in 1995, taking a job in the country’s emerging salmon sector, at a time when farm operations were very different.
“I was working in very remote places, with bad connectivity, no lights, hand-feeding, on 10m x 10m pens – some wooden, some plastic, some metal. It was a totally different picture to the industry today. Farms were small companies, set up by entrepreneurs, now many of them are listed on the stock exchange. None of us could have imagined that at the time,” he reflects.
Diaz’s connection with the aquafeed sector was made soon after he started farming, when the company’s feed division – Ecofeed – was acquired by BioMar between 2001 and 2003, and Diaz was appointed BioMar’s MD in Chile. Following executive roles in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) he was appointed CEO of the group in 2015.
Since then, Diaz has overseen a doubling of the company’s feed output, which has risen from around 800,000 tonnes to 1.6 million tonnes a year – due to a combination of organic growth, joint ventures and acquisitions. While the salmon sector remains their largest market, they have retained a strong presence in trout, as well as established numerous bass and bream feed mills around the Mediterranean, including a JV in Turkey. They also have interests in flatfish, tilapia, yellow croaker and sea bass. However, it is the shrimp sector that Diaz sees as being particularly exciting.
“It’s unlikely that we’ll be able to grow much more in either salmon or in bass and bream, so our next steps are likely to be mainly in shrimp – in countries including Ecuador, Costa Rica and Vietnam. We’ll be looking to expand our shrimp feed production into other countries in Asia and LATAM too,” he explains.
As well as growth, Diaz has also overseen a change in the company’s philosophy.
“BioMar is in a very good position, competing effectively with some very big groups, and has been recognised as being very innovative. We’d like to believe that we’re leaders in sustainability and five years ago we launched a new strategy – defining ourselves as a company with a purpose. Our results are achieved by people, and having a clear purpose helps people guide their innovation in ways to create a sustainable and efficient global aquaculture industry. We want to be more than a company of just KPIs linked to growth and profits,” he explains.
According to Diaz, not enough people recognise the benefits of aquaculture, nor do they appreciate the dramatic improvements in the industry over recent years.
“We need to tell our story in a more proactive way – we are continuously attacked by NGOs and other stakeholders. While we need to improve some of our practices, we are much more sustainable than other protein producers and we need to tell people that we are part of the solution, as seafood is a low impact food choice and features well in a planet-friendly diet,” he argues.
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