Local shrimp farming

Who ever said everything is going to be outsourced, from salary slips to agriculture? In The Netherlands, Happy Shrimp is working hard to build Europe’s first tropical shrimp farm, located in the very non-tropical port of Rotterdam. Promising fresh (‘superfresh’) shrimp, aimed at local restaurants, the business is taking on low cost shrimp farming in Asia. It does so by smartly capitalising on trends that the competition may find it hard to latch on to. First of all, Happy Shrimp is thoroughly eco-friendly. Its farm is located next to a power plant, and benefits from a heat-exchange system, using waste heat that would otherwise be released into the air. Farm waste, meanwhile, is used in a biological filter bed (many existing shrimp farms in the southern hemisphere pollute coastal wetlands). Secondly, Happy Shrimp promises wary, demanding consumers that the food on their plate is safe and unpolluted. An ISO 22,000 system is implemented throughout the whole process, while the farm is a closed recirculation system, which means nothing can enter or exit. Thirdly, as the current trend in food and beverage is all about freshness, with supermarkets increasingly shifting from packed and canned goods to fresh, if not produced on the premises offerings, Happy Shrimps prides itself on being able to deliver shrimp to local restaurants within hours after ‘harvesting’, without freezing or month long travels on mega freighters. The opportunity for anyone in agriculture: talk to these guys to bring shrimp farms closer to their markets, from restaurants in Stockholm to WholeFood stores in Manhattan. And if you play the eco/safe/fresh cards right, there are no doubt many other services that you can (again) produce locally, defying the current wisdom that production is only about the lowest possible wages, even if those are 12,000 miles away.