#97 - Salmon Farming January 2026

This week I found myself looking more closely at salmon.

Analysts are already floating the phrase “super year” for 2026. Not because salmon is suddenly booming, but because the system looks increasingly constrained. Growth is no longer a given. Instead, pricing, margins, and survival are being shaped by who can operate best within limits: biological, environmental, and political.

In that sense, salmon is becoming a useful lens for the wider Blue Economy: less about scale at all costs, more about control, Sustainability, resilience, and precision.

Market Outlook

At a global level, salmon supply is expected to flatten or slightly contract in 2026, a notable shift after years of volatile expansion. The key point maybe isn’t the exact percentage change, it’s the direction. For the first time in a while, demand growth is running into hard biological ceilings.

• Norway remains the global price reference, but persistent challenges around sea lice, disease, and welfare are limiting biomass growth despite strong export values. Capital is available; biology is not.

• Chile stands out as the main source of meaningful volume growth heading into 2026. It is increasingly framed as the industry’s cost leader, with Coho salmon expanding beyond its traditional Japanese stronghold into broader markets.

• China is pulling in more imported salmon, particularly from Norway, while simultaneously investing heavily in domestic, land-based production. Demand growth and self-sufficiency are happening in parallel.

If the biology holds, 2026 may well deliver strong pricing, not because the industry has cracked sustainable growth, but because it’s learning where growth stops.

Public Companies of Interest

If 2026 really is a tight-supply year, listed salmon companies won’t be differentiated by ambition or access to capital, but by how well they manage cash, biological and operational risk.

The centre of gravity remains the Oslo market, where salmon equities still act as a proxy for the health of the wider sector.

• Mowi

  As the world’s largest producer, Mowi enters 2026 in consolidation mode rather than expansion. Recent strategic decisions — including changes to its feed setup — are about cost discipline and predictability, not volume growth. In a constrained market, scale becomes defensive: margin protection matters more than tonnes harvested.

  
  

• SalMar

  SalMar is one of the few players expected to post meaningful volume growth into 2026, helped by biomass build-up and the integration of Wilsgård. The bet here is that scale plus operational efficiency can still unlock growth — but only where biology cooperates.

  
  

• Bakkafrost

  Bakkafrost continues to position itself around quality and provenance, particularly through its Scottish operations. That said, Scotland remains one of the most politically and environmentally scrutinised salmon regions in Europe, with welfare and mortality issues keeping pressure on both regulators and operators.

Takeaway: Share price performance into 2026 is likely to hinge less on growth narratives and more on survival rates, feed efficiency, and regulatory resilience.

Venture Capital & Technology Trends

While overall aquaculture venture funding has cooled, the direction of capital is becoming noticeable. Investors are no longer chasing volume growth or headline capacity. Instead, they’re backing technologies that reduce biological risk, improve predictability, and squeeze more value out of existing biomass.

After peaking during the post-COVID investment cycle, global aquaculture VC fell sharply in 2024. But that pullback hasn’t been uniform. Capital has clustered around tools that help farmers see, measure, and intervene earlier, before problems turn into losses.

The strongest momentum is around AI-driven precision farming:

• Advanced biomass cameras now allow operators to estimate fish size and weight with near-real-time accuracy, tightening harvest schedules and reducing feed waste.

• Automated sorting systems, such as those developed by TidalX, are moving from pilots into commercial use, scanning thousands of fish per hour to remove low-survival stock earlier in the cycle.

• New computer-vision tools can now distinguish individual Atlantic salmon based on skin patterns, opening the door to individual-level welfare and performance tracking, rather than population averages.

At a systems level, this tech shift is aligning with infrastructure bets. Hybrid flow-through systems and land-based RAS captured a disproportionate share of aquaculture venture funding in 2024, reflecting investor preference for containment, traceability, and regulatory insulation, even at higher upfront cost.

The common thread is restraint. The technology entering 2026 isn’t designed to make salmon farming bigger, it’s designed to make it tighter, cleaner, and more controllable.

Chile: The Volume Engine Heading into 2026

Chile is shaping up as the most strategically important salmon-producing country heading into 2026, largely because it sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to Norway: fewer biological ceilings, lower costs, and room to grow.

Chile is the second-largest salmon producer globally, accounting for roughly 25–30% of global farmed salmon supply. Annual production has typically sat around 1.0–1.1 million tonnes, compared with Norway’s ~1.5 million tonnes. Unlike Norway, however, Chile is one of the few regions expected to post meaningful volume growth into 2026, according to industry analysts.

Several factors underpin this position:

• Cost structure: Chile is widely regarded as the lowest-cost large-scale salmon producer, benefiting from scale, favourable labour costs, and production systems optimised for throughput rather than maximum density.

• Species mix: Chile dominates global Coho salmon production, supplying ~80% of world Coho volumes. While Coho has historically been tied to the Japanese market, exports have diversified significantly in recent years toward the US, Latin America, and China, reducing single-market exposure.

• Biology and regulation: While Chile faces its own disease challenges, regulatory constraints on biomass growth have historically been less binding than in Norway, allowing operators to respond more flexibly when conditions improve.

From a market perspective, this makes Chile pivotal in a tight-supply year. Even modest incremental growth from Chile can materially influence global pricing dynamics, particularly if Norwegian volumes remain capped by biological and regulatory limits.

The risk, as always, is that Chile’s role as the industry’s “swing producer” cuts both ways. Faster growth brings higher exposure to disease cycles and regulatory backlash. But heading into 2026, Chile looks less like a peripheral player, and more like the pressure valve holding the Atlantic salmon market together.

Regulation Snapshot

If technology is reshaping how salmon is farmed, regulation is increasingly shaping where it can be sold. Several rules coming into force in 2026 have the potential to re-route trade flows and raise the compliance bar across the industry.

• United States — MMPA import rule (live from 1 Jan 2026)

  Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the US will block imports from fisheries — including salmon — that fail to demonstrate marine mammal protection standards comparable to US rules. For exporters, this isn’t theoretical: loss of US market access is binary, not gradual, and documentation and traceability are now as critical as price.

  
  

• Norway — Processing, feed, and welfare debates

  Norway is reassessing its long-standing ban on exporting damaged but edible (“ugly”) salmon, a move that could materially affect processing economics and export volumes. At the same time, new requirements around traceability and third-party handling of industrial fish used for feed come into force from January 2026, tightening oversight of the upstream supply chain.

  
  

• Structural reform delays

  Major overhauls to Norway’s aquaculture framework — including elements of the salmon tax and licensing regime — have largely been pushed beyond 2026. In the short term, this creates regulatory predictability for operators, even as environmental groups continue to push for stricter controls.

Taken together, these shifts point in one direction: market access is becoming conditional. For salmon producers, success in 2026 won’t just be about biology and cost, it will hinge on compliance, documentation, and the ability to prove standards across increasingly complex supply chains.

Closing Remarks

Heading into 2026, salmon is no longer a pure growth story. It is a constraint story. Global supply looks tight not because demand has exploded, but because biology, regulation, and social licence are setting firmer boundaries on how fast the industry can move.

A recap:

• Pricing power is returning, driven by flat or contracting supply rather than expansion.

• Chile has become the swing producer, carrying disproportionate weight in balancing global markets.

• Technology investment is narrowing, focusing on precision, monitoring, and risk reduction rather than scale.

• Regulation is becoming a gatekeeper, with market access increasingly conditional on traceability and welfare standards.

In that sense, salmon feels less like an outlier and more like a preview. Many Blue Economy sectors are heading the same way, from growth-at-all-costs toward managed intensity, where success depends on operating well inside limits rather than pushing against them.

It’s a subtle shift, but an important one. And it’s why salmon is a cool industry to keep and eye on, not just as "another" commodity, but as a system under pressure, adapting in real time.

OTI - H

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