 |
|
|
|||||
You’ve probably seen them: clutch purses designed to look like croissants, anime-inspired hot sauce gear, purposefully ketchup-stained shirts, and even fried chicken perfumes. It seems like many of our favorite food brands are betting on merch, with surprisingly effective results. While some might see these as stunts or a new revenue play, its more meaningfully a reflection of cultural and consumer shifts. Consumers today arent just eating at these restaurants, theyre fans of the brands themselves. Chain restaurants like Waffle House, Applebee’s, or Cracker Barrel occupy a unique emotional space. Just as people support sports teams, they express fandom for these cultural icons. And their proud embrace of brand merch isnt ironic or an inside joke. Whether its through TikTok-famous denim McMerch or retro restaurant lampshades, brands are making genuine connections. [Photo: Xavi Lopez/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images] Theres a strong element of nostalgia driving this. Research of Gen Z, millennials and Gen-X reveal high levels of historical nostalgia compared with baby boomers and the silent generation. For fast casuals, this leads to people celebrating the brands they grew up with; ones that feel like part of their personal and cultural history. But social media plays a role here as wellturning consumers into more than customers, but advocates and extensions of the brand. Branded apparel like shirts, hats, or hoodies become a vehicle for that expression. Aligning with a beloved restaurant can feel like joining a community, and social media amplifies that connection. In our current times of economic uncertainty, brand advocacy becomes even more valuable. Thats why fast casual apparel and other collaborations can help maintain visibility, attract new audiences, and reinforce loyalty; smart plays if done thoughtfully. [Photo: Panera] Brands worth wearing Todays fast casual chains face mixed economic realities. Some brands are thriving; others are struggling under macroeconomic pressure. Young and lower-income consumers, for example, are spending less at chain restaurants, likely due to tighter budgets. When forced to choose between dining out and cooking at home, many opt for the latter. But these iconic restaurant brands are also having a cultural moment. We now live in a post-ironic world. In the 1990s, wearing fast-food or diner merch mightve been tongue-in-cheek. Today, its a genuine cultural statement. People are earnestly celebrating brands that once might have been considered lowbrow. This reflects a larger postmodern blending of high and low culture, where Michelin-star restaurants serve burgers, and cultural hierarchies have softened. Consumers see authenticity and nostalgia as valuable, not kitsch. Adding to that, these brands now have the ability to reach audiences in new ways: digitally and socially, creating activation opportunities far beyond traditional marketing. Together, this creates a climate where, suddenly, people are not only open to wearing their favorite food brands, they crave it. And while the initial impact for brands can be more revenue, its real value lies in brand building, deepening affinity, and strengthening the relationship between brands and their audiences. [Photo: Arby’s] What food fandom craves While demand is up, adding a logo to a hat or shirt isnt enough. Instead, creating the right opportunity means translating the brand experience into something people genuinely want to live with; something that both celebrates what makes the brand itself and taps into whats happening in culture. The goal is to take the rituals, emotions, humor, or nostalgia tied to the brand and express them through products that feel culturally current, functional, or stylish enough to belong in peoples real lives. [Photo: Pizza Hut/Chain] Take Arbys 13 Hour Drip Fit, a recent project where we collaborated to transform a familiar part of the Arbys experiencethe messy joy of eating barbecueinto a wearable cultural moment. The napkin-made clothing line was playful, self-aware, and unmistakably Arbys, while also speaking to fashions fascination with absurdity and craft. Other ideas, like the Pizza Hutinspired Hut Hat, work because they tap into a universally recognizable brand experiencethe lights over the tableswhile aligning with cultures embrace of bold, nostalgic statement pieces that feel both fun and genuinely wearable. As importantly, when executed well, these types of collaborations generate buzz, encourage social sharing, and attract influencers organically. Our “13 Hour Drip Fit” spread everywhere from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to the media to TikTok, earning valuable organic reach in the process. In these instances, success isnt just measured by sellouts but by cultural resonance and conversation. [Photo: Heinz/ThredUp] Of course, when stepping outside the norms of fast casual marketing, theres always a danger in overdoing things. Brands that chase trends or follow others risk appearing derivative. But playing it too safe leads to stagnation, and fast casuals cant afford to rely solely on traditional pricing tactics to serve their hungry fandom. Its those brands ready to create products that surprise and delight audiences that will spark the type of cultural conversation that will expand their reach.
Category:
E-Commerce
BJ’s Wholesale Club is planning to open nine new U.S. stores in 2026, and already debuted a new location on December 17 in Casselberry, Floridaits third in December alone, following openings in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Sumter, South Carolina. BJs currently has more than 250 clubs in 20-plus states. In 2025, the membership-based warehouse chain added 12 new locations in a number of states, including Georgia, Kentucky, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Our momentum remains strong as we continue to bring unbeatable value and convenience to new communities, Bill Werner, BJ’s Wholesale Club’s EVP of strategy and development, told Fast Company in a statement. Were on track to open our first clubs in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 2026 and look forward to bringing BJs Wholesale Club to even more families in 2026 and beyond. BJs confirmed to Fast Company that it will open clubs in the following locations in 2026: Selma, North Carolina Delray Beach, Florida Chattanooga, Tennessee Forney, Texas Waxahachie, Texas Grand Prairie, Texas SW Fort Worth, Texas Foley, Alabama Mesquite, Texas How does BJ’s work? Like Costco and Sam’s Club, BJ’s is a membership-based warehouse chain that sells both bulk and regular-size products at a discount. Everything from groceries to tech, home goods, apparel, and gasoline is known to be competitively priced. Members pay an annual fee, and can shop online or in-store. BJ’s Wholesale Club financials The Massachusetts-based chain reported strong third-quarter earnings, including a 9.8% increase to $126.3 million in revenue from membership fees, and adjusted earnings per share of $1.16, which beat analysts expectations. Total revenue came out to $5.35 billion, a 4.9% year-over-year increase. BJs Wholesale Club Holdings (NYSE: BJ) was up more than 1% in midday trading on Wednesday, December 17.
Category:
E-Commerce
Balancing on a railroad-tie-size beam of a platform floating in Spains Vigo Bay, Ricardo Tur crouches and points below. Dangling several feet underwater is a pen the size of a garden shed, home to 80 octopuses. I squat too, hoping to glimpse even a single armthere are 640 of them down there! In my excitement, I lean too far and almost fall in. Tur is a marine biologist who for the past decade has been feeding the octopuses on this batea, the Spanish term for the 65-foot-by-82-foot raft Im on. The rafts owner, Carlos Veiga, a short, fit 75-year-old who has fished the planets oceans since the Franco era, stands nearby. Around us in this inlet, which contains Europes busiest fishing port, are nearly 500 more bateas, primarily devoted to mussel farming. But Veigas raft tends to a far more complicated creature. It is the worlds oldest continuously operated aquaculture farm for Octopus vulgaris, the common octopus. No reporter has ever been aboard before. The Spanish government granted Veigas fishing co-op, the Samertolameu Pot Fishers Association, an experimental license in 1998 to fatten up around 2,000 wild-caught octopuses per year. Veiga and his fellow fishermen retain permission to capture young adults, house them in shelters made of PVC pipe, and feed them fishing discards and special octopus food through a yellow tube that snakes down from the surface. Veiga tells me that the animals 5 feet below us are a month old. Once theyve reached 6 pounds, in another two months or so, Samertolameu can sell themfor about $45 each on a good dayat Vigos daily fish auction. It would be nice to see them. But three decades of trial and error have taught Veiga and Tur that if cages are hung higher, there is too much light, and rainfall dilutes the salinity. Also, thieves can get ideas. Wholesale prices for large octopus in Europe have climbed to almost $8 per pound, double what they were in early 2021, FAO Globefish data show. (Shrimp and salmon prices are relatively unchanged.) Demand for octopus is soaring. Global catches climbed from fewer than 35,000 tons back in 1950 to 375,000 tons in recent years, pushing the first-sale fish market to between $6 billion and $8 billion annually. Once a delicacy for adventurous eaters, octopus now appears on menus across the globe: mesquite-grilled for Texas barbecue, sliced for Japanese sushi, folded into Mexico City tacos, and sun-dried on the Mediterranean coast. The surge has put intense pressure on wild stocks. Following a 400,000-ton catch in 2017, the decades largest, governments began to enact fishing bans. This summer, the octopus fishery in Galicia, where Veigas batea is also based, shut for three months so that populations could recover. Portugal instituted its own restrictions in August. In September, Morocco, the leading producer after China, halted catches until years end. As a solution, many in the industry are starting to embrace the once unfathomable-sounding scheme of farming octopus commercially. If octopus can be scaled at the rate of previous fish species, its estimated that an additional 20,000 tons per year could be produced from farming by late next decade. That may not sound like a lot, but it equals the annual Octopus vulgaris catch for all of Europe in recent years, and its likely to grow. Whoever gets there first will be primed to take the spoils from a brand-new value chain, potentially worth $1 billion per year from farm to plate. If it can be done, octopus would be the first new farmed animal protein to hit the market in half a centurysince salmon was first commercially raised in the 1970scapping off a marathon quest unlike any in modern aquaculture. For decades, farming octopus was believed to be impossible. It requires feeding a predator in captivity, putting animals that traditionally live alone in communal cages, and drastically improving a wild survival rate that ranks among natures worst: At best, one in every 1 million Octopus vulgaris eggs reaches maturity. Six years ago, Turthen technical director at the Pescanova Biomarine Center, run by Spanish seafood conglomerate Nueva Pescanovaand a colleague from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, Pedro Domingues, pulled it off. They captively bred a lab-born male Octopus vulgaris, Goliath, with a lab-born female named Lourditas (after the French holy site Lourdes, where water supposedly performs miracles). Five generations of offspring kept reproducing. Veigas batea supplied breeding stock to the Pescanova Biomarine Center so that it could start additional generations; the young octopuses consumed a special feed in the lab, then some of them matured back on Veigas batea. After decades of research at different centers and companies around the world, Nueva Pescanova announced in July 2019, its team had successfully closed the octopus reproduction cycle in aquaculture. Its next step would be building the worlds first industrial-scale octopus farm, in the Canary Islands, to raise octopuses for consumption. Then-CEO Ignacio Gutierrez promised that consumers would see farmed octopus starting in 2023. The announcement outraged animal rights activists, all the way up to Jane Goodall, who found the idea abhorrent. But the shock rippled beyond typical activist circles as well. Octopuses are, after all, among the most mysterious and otherworldly creatures on the planet, popularly associated with exceptional cunning and skill. Nueva Pescanovas plans raised red flags even for meat eaters, igniting a debate about whether these cephalopods should be farmed at all (more on this later). At the same time, Nueva Pescanovas own business entered a rocky stretch: three straight years of profit declines that culminated in 2024 with a $145 million decrease in revenue year over year. Turs octopus team was gutted. The Canary Islands government called for deeper environmental-impact studies before the farm could be built. When Nueva Pescanovas plan appeared to run aground, many assumed the effort to cultivate octopuses had too. But as Fast Company discovered in Vigo, the work continues. The original team of Tur, Domingues, and Veiga has regrouped under a new banner; they are now looking for corporate backing. New companies have entered the race, including at least two other Spanish seafood purveyors and Japanese fast-food chain Tsukiji Gindaco (which sells takoyakifried octopus ballsat Los Angeless Dodger Stadium). There is a remarkable sense of urgency among them. With global octopus catch levels plateauing and demand swelling, some company is likely to figure out hw to farm them. (Multiple scientists I spoke with assume that China could even be doing it already.) And the prize will be about more than just money. Out of the Shallow Now: Farming eclipsed catching in 2020, and the gap has only widened sincefor every type of seafood. Sources: OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2025-2034; FAO State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2024; FAO Whats happening in Vigo today could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get it rightto establish rules from the outset that prioritize welfare, ecological responsibility, and food security for a growing world population. As the world has seen with industrial pork, chicken, and cattle farms, when cruel practices become entrenched, theyre hard to reform. And they rarely stop people from eating meat. No food choice is without consequences. Vigo, perched on Spains northwestern coast, has a credible claim as World Octopus Capital. A statue of Jules Verne with octopus legs dominates the harbor, eight-legged murals overtake building walls, and graffiti on the main plaza reads DONT EAT ME below an octopus flipping the bird. An hours drive inland, a decades-old festival serves the planets largest platter of octopus every year. Centuries ago, coastal fishermen paid tithes to monasteries in octopus. Today, Vigo is home to several of Spains biggest seafood conglomerates, including Nueva Pescanova. In Vigos Old Town, Tur and I sit at a table inside Tapería O Canario, a block from his apartment. Before us lies an array of prawns, squid, gooseneck barnacles, and pulpo a la gallega, the Galician staple of boiled octopus, cut with scissors, drizzled with oil, dusted with paprika, and eaten with wood picks. In 2021, O Canario became the first restaurant to serve captive-born octopus, a descendant of Lourditas, to Tur and a few other Nueva Pescanova executives. It had been hatched at the Biomarine Center, fattened in a Nueva Pescanova pen, then prepared six different ways. Before he ran Nueva Pescanovas aquaculture R&D, Tur, 41, spent a decade studying marine life around the world: invasive starfish feeding on sea urchins in the Mediterranean, tuna in the Indian Ocean aboard a vessel once hijacked by pirates (before Tur joined), and toothfish in Antarctica. These experiences offered a firsthand lesson in the food systems fragility: Toothfish, an enormous snaggletoothed predator rebranded in the 1970s as Chilean sea bass, now fetches as much as $70 a pound, fueling overfishing and poaching. Seafood is Earths most consumed animal protein. Humans caught or farmed 200 million tons of it in 2025, compared with 150 million tons of poultry, according to an estimate by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a global policy forum founded in 1961. Overexploitation and marine mismanagement have pushed fisheries to their biological limits, leaving very little room to catch more seafood sustainably. But because global human population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, the planet will, in fact, need more seafood: Demand is expected to double by then. Without aquaculture, it will be impossible to feed the worlds growing population, explains Ángel Matamoro, an industry veteran who spent six years as Nueva Pescanovas chief corporate sustainability officer. In its latest annual report, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization declared that wild-caught seafood has officially been eclipsed in global production by farmed seafood. Some 70% percent of salmon now comes from farms. Only a handful of species have defied ongoing attempts at large-scale commercial farming: squid, eels, deep-sea crustaceans like lobsters, some large fish such as bluefin tuna. But wild squid are plentiful. Eels have a small market. Lobster is a luxury. Tuna simply requires too much space. For decades, attempts to farm these eight-legged animalsthe common octopus in the Mediterranean, the western rock octopus in Australia, the Patagonian red octopus in Chilehad sputtered. In 2017, after scientists from Japans Nissui Corp., owner of frozen-seafood brand Gortons, artificially incubated eggs, the company boasted that it would be selling farmed Octopus sinensis in grocery stores within three years. In a world obsessed with protein and anxious about fat and cholesterol, octopus could be the ultimate catch. Its leaner than chicken, high in amino acids, offers 75% of its calories in the form of protein, and is almost entirely edible. It grows fast, takes up little space, produces relatively little wasteand fetches top dollar. One could easily imagine lots of companies processing it into the kinds of palatable octobites now being sold to L.A. Dodgers fans. Octopuses are marvels of mechanical engineering and masters of using their problem-solving skills and fluid forms to stage daring escapes from aquariums. They have throats that pass through their doughnut-shaped brains, three hearts pumping green blood, and arms they sometimes eatand can regenerate. Fascination with them has exploded over the past decade. A year after Sy Montgomerys 2015 bestseller, The Soul of an Octopus, debuted, Peter Godfrey-Smiths Other Minds framed encounters with octopuses as the closest humans will get to meeting an intelligent alien. Documentaries followed, including Netflixs popular My Octopus Teacher in 2020. Fan clubs formed, Mak Robers octopus maze video racked up 100 million views on YouTube, novels featured octopus heroes, and department stores showcased octopus-themed home decor. We are in the golden age of octopus appreciation, Montgomery says. The more en vogue octopuses have become, the harder it has been to defend raising them for food in tanks. Even Montgomery tells me that if Nueva Pescanovas farm had been proposed five years sooner, there would have been less moral outrage. Nueva Pescanova discovered this the hard way. When the company unveiled its plans in 2019 for its $75 million Canary Islands breeding facility, animal advocates and scientists opposed the project, fast and loudly. Montgomery blasted it as extremely cruel. Godfrey-Smith, a professor of animal philosophy, joined three othersan environmental ecologist, an animal welfare expert, and a marine biologistto write what became opponents touchstone paper, The Case Against Octopus Farming. They argued that octopuses would suffer stress, injury, and disease in captivity. They pointed to experiments like marine biologist Roger Hanlons 1977 attempt to raise Caribbean reef octopuses: He noted problems with cannibalism, containment, dependence upon live food, and the death of pregnant females. The animals appetite also raised ecological concerns. Octopuses feed-conversion ratio is at least 3:1, the authors said, meaning that it takes at least 3 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of octopus. In animal agriculture, this is quick math for assessing environmental efficiency: One pound of beef requires 6 to 10 pounds of feed, pork 3 to 5, and chicken closer to 2. Because octopuses are carnivores, their feed requirements would devastate wild fisheries, the authors argued. As opposition grew, members of Greenpeace and Spains animal-rights political party, PACMA, gathered in Gran Canaria, the site of Nueva Pescanovas planned facility. They painted themselves to look like octopuses and held signs reading OCTOPUS SLAVERY and STOP THE OCTOPUS PRISON. A manifesto asserting that octopuses are too intelligent for captivity was read aloud at protests in Berlin, New York, Mumbai, and Sydney. Jane Goodall backed a petition that has collected more than 162,000 signatures. When I learned Spanish companies plan to imprison these sensitive, fascinating creatures in octopus farms, I was deeply distressed, the late primatologist wrote. PETA warned of horrific terror and pain and predicted that the octopuses captivity would almost certainly lead to unnatural aggression, cannibalism, injury, and death as they fight and struggle to escape. The pressure turned personal. Tur says that an activist organization spammed his work email account with thousands of messages per minute, crashing it. [Illustration: Chloe Niclas] Tur had visited the proposed farming site at Gran Canarias port of Las Palmas several times, with an eye toward implementing some of the humane aquaculture practices hed been working on for years. A building onshore would contain nearly 1,000 tanks, to keep density low. Seawater would be pulled from the bay (and then cleaned before being returned). Plans included sand-padded raceways circulating water to give young octopuseswhich hardly stop movingsomething like an underwater treadmill. Adults would move to offshore enclosures similar to Veigas batea and be fed an advanced version of the same food. When I reached out to Nueva Pescanova in 2023, asking to see the progress, the company invited me to visit the Biomarine Center once the research was ready. But as activist pressure ramped up, the company went silent. It never broke ground on the facility. In response to questions for this article, the press team replied, We dont have a spokesperson available at the moment. Jennifer Bushman, executive director at the responsibly sourced seafood advocacy group Fed by Blue, wonders what the activist pressure has accomplished. Despite the outcry, consumption didnt decrease. It grew. We have determined wild-capture-only isnt scalable, Bushman argues. We have two options, as she sees it: Limit the quantity a growing world can consume, which would make prices soar, or find a way to do what weve done with the rest of our foodswe raise it. Even the Romans knew how to fatten octopuses, researcher Pedro Domingues explains as we peer into one of Vigos ancient cetáreas, or stone pools, which stretch to the Mediterranean and mark the earliest attempts to raise seafood in controlled environments. The thing, Domingues says, is getting them to go to the bottom. In the ocean, a female common octopus lays up to 500,000 eggs and dies after giving birth. The staggering number is natures hedge: Until hatchlings reach the size of rice grains and begin to settle, they drift in the current. Nearly all perish. When hatchlings eat enough, though, they fall to the seafloorand their survival rate shoots up to almost 100%. Since the 1960s, researchers on at least three continents have tried to produce feed thats both ecological at scale and palatable to tadpole-size carnivores. Domingues succeeded, developing a special feed for Octopus maya with Carlos Rosas, a researcher in Yucatán, Mexico, who since 2004 has been helping a local fishing co-op there raise the Mexican four-eyed octopus in tanks outside his lab. At the Spanish Institute of Oceanography in the late 2010s, Domingues and Rosas discovered that if they mixed fish discards with polyunsaturated lipids and other ingredients, ran the result through a meat grinder, dried it, then milled that into powder, the picky hatchlings would eagerly consume it. In the fall of 2018, Nueva Pescanovas Biomarine Center took eggs from a wild-caught mother and reared a group of juveniles that included baby Lourditas. The next July, Lourditas gave birth. A month later, those hatchlings sank to the floor, officially making her and Goliath parents. For the next several months, Tur and Domingues logged 12 hours a day, seven days a week, tossing the special feed into tanks, collapsing exhausted each evening. They didnt stop eating, Domingues recalls. The pair watched the hatchlings go through their awkward puberty phase, sprouting elongated arms, discovering their suckers and clumsily sticking them onto the walls. By October, 7 in 10 had survived. (The team also managed to save Lourditass life after spawning.) Using conservative estimates, Tur projected that Nueva Pescanovas anary Islands facility would have a survival rate at harvest of around 40%not perfect, but 39% better than nature, they said. Meanwhile, whereas captive octopuses in Vigo Bay had required almost 6 pounds of feed to gain 1 poundnearly twice the already high ratio critics citedTur and Domingues say they achieved 1.4 pounds per pound gained, approaching the rate for salmon, one of the planets most sustainable animal proteins, at between 0.5 and 1.3 pounds per pound gained. But salmon cant compete on time to market. Farmed salmon takes three years to mature. Even a palm-size oyster needs two. An octopus at Nueva Pescanova could be ready in just nine months. With two or three females, youd get 1 million eggs, explains Domingues. If even half survive, thats 500,000 octopuses. You can have aquaculture just with three female octopuses. The technical barriers were falling. But Turs team needed to prove something else: that octopuses could be farmed humanely. That is where researcher Pep Rotllant came in. I met the marine biologist, who studies stress in octopuses, at his lab at the Spanish National Research Councils Institute of Marine Research in Vigo, where there are two floors of tanks for rearing sea creatures, aquariums of zebrafish whose stripes have been CRISPRd off, bags of glowing red algae, and an octopus room that I was surprised to find totally empty. He shrugged. Under European Union rules, he says, studying octopuses now requires scientists to submit the same amount of bioethics paperwork you would for humans or dogs and cats. He motioned toward the ocean outside. Meanwhile, fishermen can catch octopus without any problem and keep it in a boat. Last year, his team published two papers with Tur and Nueva Pescanova that challenged common assumptions about octopus stress and health. One confirmed that the octopuses raised in captivity had skin microbiomes that did not contain pathogenic bacteria, unlike their wild counterparts, suggesting that by at least one biomarker, aquaculture might be healthier. The other tested for corticosteroids, the hormones that regulate well-being in vertebrates, and found octopuses produce nonemeaning that how they feel, so to speak, remains unclear, but its biochemically different from the way humans, birds, and even fish do. Both sides can cite findings to bolster their arguments. Yet it is worth noting how many cephalopod researchers warn against over-ascribing intelligence to the octopus. The animal is genetically more closely related to a barnacle than to livestock, and it has half as many neurons as a crow, two-thirds of which sit in its limbs. Roger Hanlon, author of the landmark 1977 study, has long urged caution about reading too much of ourselves into the species, once reminding audiences at the height of public blowback that thinking is a loaded word. Hanlon even titled the paper he wrote on his 1977 experiment with a reference to Octopus briareuss potential for mariculture (as marine aquaculture is also called), writing that his methods could be applicable to mariculture on a larger scale. Now retired, Hanlon did not respond to requests for comment. However, his colleague Jennifer Mather, author of Octopus: The Oceans Intelligent Invertebrate, wrote in a 2019 letter in the journal Science, I would like it if no one killed and ate the intelligent and fascinating octopuses that I work with, either caught in the wild or farmed in captivity. But I am a realist; people have to eat. Still, suggesting that an animal capable of staging daring aquarium escapes could be healthier in captivity often feels futile. It is difficult when the public is busy watching a guy on Netflix befriend an octopus, Rotllant says. Over the past year, the heat around octopus farming has intensified. Science ran a letter in late 2024 signed by Sy Montgomery, Peter Godfrey-Smith, and almost 100 other conservationists, environmental experts, and scientists at 77 institutions in 10 countries urging Congress to pass the OCTOPUS Act, outlawing octopus aquaculture in U.S. waters. O. vulgaris, the species featured in the award-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher, lives in the intertidal zone and is capable of problem-solving and play, they wrote. This species is not suited for a life in a controlled, sterile, and monotonous environment with set diets and regimented feeding schedules. In response, 118 hard-biology cephalopod experts from 66 institutions in 25 countries, including Domingues and Rosas, formed the Sustainable Cephalopod Aquaculture and Welfare Group and issued their own letter last May. They challenged the idea that octopus sentience renders farming them unsuitable, noting that pigs, cows, and chickensno less sentienthave been farmed for millennia. Seafood companies, meanwhile, are charging ahead. Since the public blowback, the industry has clammed up, choosing to play their cards close to their chest, says Japan-based marine biologist Ian Gleadall, organizr of the Sustainable Cephalopod Aquaculture and Welfare Group. Last year, one of Nueva Pescanovas Spanish rivals, Grupo Profand, announced that it had received a license to start an experimental octopus hatchery in Vigo Bay, but said it would be a regenerative project to restore and improve ecosystems only, with zero commercial aims. Activists, however, have already vowed to create a PR disaster for Grupo Profand, mirroring Nueva Pescanovas. (The company didnt respond to a request for an interview.) Meanwhile, Nueva Pescanovas project, despite being stalled for three years, may not be entirely dead. Beatriz Calzada, president of the Port of Las Palmas, told me that in its latest update to her office, the company said it is now reconsidering the Canary Islands facility design, not abandoning it. Richard Schweid, an author and journalist who got a tour of the Pescanova Biomarine Center last year for his forthcoming book Life on the Octopus Farm, tells me he doubts Nueva Pescanova will ever sell farmed octopus, but he believes that some company will commercially scale it (his money is on one of the Japanese ones hes tracking). Chef and TV host Andrew Zimmern, a longtime blue food advocate and cofounder of the Coalition for Sustainable Aquaculture, tells me that if farming what he considers a profoundly sentient being proceeds, it must be done with precision and restraint, with input from universities, governments, and local communitiesnot just industry. Back in Vigo, Tur is busy trying to build something like that. He and Nueva Pescanovas former aquaculture chief, David Tronosco, have founded a consultancy and project management company called Green Parrot Aqua Solutions and have begun reassembling the old team of scientists plus government partners and local fishermen for a new phase of study. In October, they established what Tur calls the worlds first offshore lab for octopus aquaculture research, on Carlos Veigas batea. Their pilot project, dubbed Octopus Prime, involves fitting underwater enclosures with cameras and sensors to track animal health and behavior. Researchers in Spain, Portugal, and Mexico are involved, including Domingues and Rosas; Rotllant is using the data to hunt for welfare biomarkers. Tur says that theyre on track to reach a feed-conversion ratio of 1.2 to 1, edging closer to salmons benchmark. Eventually, they hope to advance what Carlos Veiga and his fishing co-op have been doing in these waters for generations. You get profit, and you get something thats almost pure proteinno fat, low cholesterol, low pollution, low biological waste, Domingues says. What else do people want?
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||