In partnership with

BLUE FOOD | STRATEGY BRIEFING

The Blue Shift

Why the most efficient protein on Earth is still the one we understand least

BY ROBERT ANCILL

The accounting error

Water covers 71 percent of the planet. It supplies roughly 2 percent of humanity’s calories. That is not a law of physics. It is an accounting error, one we have compounded over ten thousand years of agricultural habit, and it is finally being corrected.

The correction has a name: blue food. The term covers everything edible that comes out of fresh or salt water: finfish, shellfish, crustaceans, cephalopods, seaweeds, and the microalgae increasingly grown in steel fermenters rather than harvested from the sea. It entered serious circulation in 2021, when more than a hundred scientists published the Blue Food Assessment and made an argument that, in hindsight, should have been obvious. We had spent two decades in furious debate about land-based protein, beef versus soy, regenerative versus intensive, plant-based versus everything, while systematically ignoring two-thirds of the biosphere.

Own Search With Podcasts

Your competitors are fighting over the same keywords. The smartest brands are building the authority that search engines, AI platforms, and customers trust everywhere.

Every relevant podcast appearance can produce branded mentions, backlinks, transcripts, citations, clips, expert content, and third-party proof that keeps compounding across search and AI discovery.

PodPitch searches millions of podcasts, finds the shows that matter to your market, develops the angle, sends personalized pitches, and follows up automatically until your experts are booked.

Growth teams are already using podcast appearances to build distributed authority that cannot be manufactured by publishing another generic SEO article.

Only 20 SEO, AEO, and GEO demo spots are available this month. Once they’re claimed, the offer disappears.

Start building searchable authority now, before your competitors own the conversations shaping your market.

Appear on 3,853,234 Podcasts

Consider the scale of what was being ignored. In 2024, global fisheries and aquaculture production hit a record 235 million tonnes, of which 195 million tonnes were aquatic animals. Aquaculture alone crossed 100 million tonnes of aquatic animals for the first time in history, worth $371 billion at the farm gate; add algae and the figure reaches 141 million tonnes and $391 billion. Trade in aquatic animal products climbed to $184 billion, now rivalling the global trade in terrestrial meat. Some 89 percent of that production goes directly to human consumption, supplying at least a fifth of the animal protein consumed by 3.1 billion people.

Blue food is not an emerging category. It is a mature, $400 billion global industry that the food world has been describing as a side dish.

Blue food is not an emerging category. It is a mature, roughly $400 billion global industry feeding half of humanity, which the rest of the food world has spent a generation describing as a side dish. The strategic question is not whether blue food matters. It is why the capital, the talent, and the menu space have taken so long to follow the arithmetic.

Start with a number that reframes everything: humanity has domesticated somewhere between a dozen and twenty terrestrial species for food. Four crops, wheat, rice, maize, soy, supply about two-thirds of our calories. Three animals supply the overwhelming majority of our meat. Terrestrial agriculture is, biologically speaking, a monoculture wearing a costume.

Blue food is the opposite. More than 2,500 aquatic species are already harvested or farmed commercially. That diversity is not a curiosity, it is the sector’s single greatest structural advantage. It means genuine nutritional range, from the calcium-dense sardine to the iodine-rich kelp to the zinc-heavy oyster. It means climate resilience, because a portfolio of 2,500 species does not fail the way a portfolio of four does. And it means an innovation surface area that terrestrial protein simply cannot match: every species is a distinct set of production economics, flavour profiles, and margin structures waiting to be engineered.

It also means the sector is chronically mis-sold. Walk into most Western supermarkets and the blue food category collapses into five species: salmon, shrimp, tuna, cod, tilapia. That is not a supply constraint. It is a merchandising failure, and, for anyone building in this space, it is the opportunity in plain sight.

The nutritional argument for blue food is frequently made softly, as though it were a matter of taste. It should be made hard, because the data are not ambiguous.

When aquatic foods are scored using standard nutrient-profiling indices, small pelagic fish, sardines, anchovies, herring, mackerel, rank as the most nutrient-dense foods in the system, followed by bivalves. Seven categories of aquatic food, including pelagics, shellfish and salmonids, outperform beef, lamb, goat, chicken and pork when averaged across omega-3 long-chain fatty acids, vitamins A and B12, calcium, iodine, iron and zinc. Bivalves, cephalopods, demersal fish, small pelagics and salmonids each deliver more than 20 percent of the daily value of omega-3s. Bivalves, gastropods, cephalopods and crustaceans each clear 20 percent DV for zinc.

Now layer cost onto nutrition, which is where most nutritional arguments quietly break. Mackerel, mussels, tilapia, octopus and squid score highest for nutrient density per dollar. Not salmon. Not tuna. The five species that deliver the most nutrition per unit of spend are, almost without exception, the five that Western retail has spent thirty years teaching consumers to overlook.

The most underappreciated fact in the entire field concerns bones. Small fish eaten whole, head, skeleton, viscera included, deliver calcium, iron, iodine, zinc, vitamin A and B12 at concentrations that filleted large fish cannot approach, because the nutrients are concentrated precisely in the parts Western processing discards. Recent work published in PNAS found that dried small fish already provide widespread access to critical micronutrients across Africa, largely outside formal markets and almost entirely outside official statistics. Meanwhile, studies of marine species off Tanzania and Mozambique found micronutrient concentrations materially higher than the reference food-composition databases used to design global nutrition policy.

Read that again, because it is the strategic point. The nutritional value of blue food is being systematically undercounted in the very databases governments use to allocate billions in nutrition spending. A category that already outperforms its terrestrial competitors is being measured with instruments calibrated to miss its best attributes.

The climate mathematics are similarly lopsided, and similarly under-marketed. For the greenhouse gas cost of one kilogram of beef, you could eat somewhere between 100 and 200 kilograms of sardines. That is not a rounding difference; it is two orders of magnitude.

The best performers are small pelagics, farmed bivalves and wild salmonids. Bivalves are the extreme case, and worth dwelling on: mussels and oysters require no feed, no fresh water, no arable land, no fertiliser and no antibiotics. They are protein produced from sunlight and seawater, filtered out of a nutrient stream that would otherwise cause harm. Seaweed goes further still, requiring nothing but a rope and a coastline.

Here the economics get genuinely interesting, because these species do not merely have a low footprint, they have a negative one, and that negative can be monetised. Oyster aquaculture removes nitrogen from coastal waters at a replacement-cost value of roughly $1,385 to $6,716 per hectare per year. A single typical oyster farm removes something like 4,900 to 7,100 pounds of nitrogen annually, worth between $42,000 and $233,000 against the cost of engineered wastewater treatment. Kelp farms deliver $147 to $1,226 per hectare per year on the same basis.

Reframe that and the model changes entirely. A shellfish farm is not a food business with a pleasant environmental side effect. It is a water-treatment utility that happens to produce protein, with two revenue lines, one of which is currently unpriced in most jurisdictions. As nutrient-trading and blue-carbon markets mature, restorative aquaculture will stop being a philanthropic story and start being an infrastructure asset class. The operators who structure for that today will own the category tomorrow.

The popular narrative places cell-cultivated seafood at the frontier of blue food innovation. It belongs there, but it is not the most consequential thing happening.

The most consequential thing is feed. Farmed carnivorous fish have long carried a legitimacy problem: you cannot claim to be relieving pressure on wild stocks if you are grinding up wild forage fish to feed the farm. That constraint is being dissolved by microalgae. A single tonne of algal oil delivers the EPA and DHA equivalent of up to 60 to 66 tonnes of wild forage fish. Veramaris, the main commercial player, lifted production 61 percent while cutting emissions, and in May 2026 extended its portfolio with an EPA-rich oil designed to let feed formulators hedge an increasingly volatile fish oil market. Break the forage-fish dependency and you do not improve aquaculture at the margin, you remove its central ecological objection and unlock the growth curve behind it.

The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.

Cell-cultivated seafood is nonetheless past its proof point. Wildtype secured FDA clearance for its cultivated salmon in June 2025, the first cultivated seafood cleared in the United States, having raised over $123 million from backers including Bezos Expeditions, Temasek and Cargill, note that last name, a commodity protein giant hedging its own category. BlueNalu is pursuing clearance for cultivated bluefin tuna; Germany’s BLUU Seafood raised €16 million and is pursuing hybrid products that blend cultured fish cells with plant proteins. The realistic near-term application is not the commodity fillet. It is the species where wild supply is constrained, prices are extreme and the sustainability story is genuinely broken: bluefin, eel, certain roes. High value, low volume, defensible margin.

Then there is seaweed, the sector’s most persistently underestimated asset. The commercial seaweed market sits around $21 billion in 2026, with China producing roughly 58 percent of global output and mariculture accounting for 97 percent of the world harvest. Seaweed’s value is that it refuses to stay in one category, it is food, hydrocolloid, fertiliser, bioplastic, cosmetic ingredient, textile feedstock and cattle methane inhibitor simultaneously. Finland’s Origin by Ocean is converting invasive sargassum into alginate and fucoidan for textiles and cosmetics. Any business modelled on seaweed as a single-product play is mispricing the input.

A word of caution on the technology that attracted the most capital and delivered the least: land-based recirculating aquaculture. The pitch was seductive, grow salmon in a warehouse next to the city that eats it, no sea lice, no escapes, no ocean. The execution has been brutal. Recirculating systems are capital-intensive, energy-hungry and biologically unforgiving; a single water-quality event can erase a year of production overnight. The lesson is not that the technology fails. It is that in blue food, biology sets the timetable and capital does not get to argue with it. The winners in this sector are consistently the operators who worked with the organism’s constraints rather than engineering around them at any cost.

The three things holding it back

If the case is this strong, the obvious question is why penetration remains so low. Three constraints, in ascending order of difficulty.

The first is policy, and it is improving. The WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies entered into force in September 2025, the organisation’s first agreement with environmental sustainability at its core, targeting an estimated $22 billion a year in subsidies underwriting illegal fishing, overfished stocks and unregulated high-seas activity. Capture fisheries have been effectively flat at 86 to 94 million tonnes since the late 1980s, which tells you the wild ocean has been at its ceiling for nearly forty years. All future growth is aquaculture growth. The subsidy reform matters because it stops public money from propping up the part of the system that cannot grow.

The second is infrastructure, and it is expensive. Blue food is the most cold-chain-dependent protein in the system and the most spatially dispersed at origin. Small-scale fisheries account for about 90 percent of employment in the sector and generate 44 percent, some $77.2 billion, of the economic value of landed fisheries. One in twelve people on Earth depends at least partly on small-scale fishing, nearly half of them women. Roughly 600 million livelihoods rest on the sector overall. That is an extraordinary distribution of economic participation, and an extraordinarily difficult supply chain to aggregate, trace and finance. Post-harvest loss in this category is not a rounding error; it is one of the largest recoverable value pools in global food.

The third is cultural, and it is the hardest. Most consumers in high-income markets are functionally illiterate in blue food. They can cook chicken. They cannot cook mackerel, they are intimidated by whole fish, they associate shellfish with risk and they have inherited the belief that anything that is not salmon is either cheap or difficult. This is a learned behaviour, taught over decades by retailers and operators optimising for the convenience of the boneless fillet. Behaviour that was taught can be retaught, but only by whoever is willing to invest in the teaching.

Who is actually winning

Abstraction is cheap. What makes the blue food argument real for operators is that the businesses executing against it are already outperforming, and they are doing it through five distinct and repeatable models.

1. Yield engineering, Josh Niland, Saint Peter and Fish Butchery

One of the most instructive operators in global seafood is a chef in Sydney. Josh Niland opened Saint Peter in 2016 and Fish Butchery in 2018 on a premise that sounds ideological and is in fact pure margin arithmetic. Conventional filleting recovers somewhere between 40 and 55 percent of a round fish; everything else, head, frame, roe, liver, swim bladder, skin, blood line, leaves the kitchen as waste or low-value trim. Niland built a business around recovering nearly all of it, turning fish offal into charcuterie, roe into bottarga, skin into crisps, eyes into crackers, and frames into value-added product.

He paired that with dry-ageing. Fish at Fish Butchery is handled dry and never washed after landing, hung whole in a temperature-controlled, ice-free room and aged for days or weeks. The shelf life extends rather than shortens, the flesh firms, glutamates develop, and the product commands a price no ice-packed fillet can. The strategic point for any operator is this: Niland did not secure better fish than his competitors. He secured the same fish and extracted materially more revenue per kilogram from it. In a category where food cost is the binding constraint, yield is the lever nobody is pulling.

The model has travelled, Fysh at the Edition in Singapore, a beach club on Hamilton Island, three internationally successful books that function as brand infrastructure. It has also had casualties: the Charcoal Fish and Fish Butchery Paddington sites closed in 2024. That is worth stating plainly. Yield engineering transforms unit economics; it does not exempt you from site selection and format discipline.

Niland did not secure better fish than his competitors. He secured the same fish, and extracted materially more revenue per kilogram from it.

2. Owning the input, Rappahannock Oyster Co.

Rappahannock Oyster Co. farms Chesapeake Bay oysters and then sells them through its own oyster bars in Richmond, at the DC Wharf and in Los Angeles. The vertical integration does three things at once. It compresses the supply chain on the most freshness-sensitive product in foodservice. It captures the farm margin and the restaurant margin on the same shell. And it hands the marketing team a story competitors structurally cannot copy, the provenance is not sourced, it is owned.

Recall the ecosystem-service economics from earlier: those farms are simultaneously removing nitrogen from coastal water at meaningful replacement-cost value. Rappahannock is running a restaurant group, a farming operation and, in effect, a water-quality utility off one asset base. Very few restaurant businesses in any category have three revenue logics stacked that cleanly.

3. Throughput and theatre, Kura Sushi

Kura Sushi USA is the counter-argument to everyone who insists seafood cannot scale. Fiscal 2025 sales reached $282.8 million, up 18.9 percent. By May 2026 the chain operated 91 restaurants, opening twelve year-to-date, with a long-term US target of roughly 300 units and an intention to keep growing the estate around 20 percent annually.

The mechanics deserve attention. Conveyor delivery plus touch-panel ordering plus an express belt removes most of the front-of-house labour from a category normally burdened with service cost. Small-plate portioning keeps the entry price low and the per-check average high. And the Bikkura Pon prize machine, drop fifteen finished plates in the slot, get an animation and a toy, is one of the most efficient check-building mechanics in casual dining, aimed squarely at families, the demographic conventional seafood restaurants have historically failed hardest to convert. Kura did not make seafood cheaper. It made seafood a format.

4. The zero-kitchen format, tinned fish

Premium tinned seafood may be the highest-margin format the restaurant industry has stumbled into this decade, and most operators are still treating it as a novelty. Consider what a conserva actually is from a P&L perspective: zero prep labour, zero cook time, zero waste, effectively no spoilage risk, no cold chain, indefinite shelf life, and a guest willing to pay $18 to $30 for a tin opened at the table with bread and butter alongside.

Saltie Girl in Boston built an entire identity on a curated tin list. Brands like Fishwife, now stocked at Costco and menued at Saltie Girl, Maiden Lane and The London Plane, have done the consumer education work for free, converting a generation into sardine and mackerel eaters through packaging and social media rather than gastronomy. For an operator, the tinned seafood section is a raw-bar-quality margin line that requires no raw bar, no shucker, and no capital expenditure. It is the cheapest premium category entry available.

5. Flipping procurement, the restaurant-supported fishery

Dock to Dish inverted the usual relationship between kitchen and supplier. Instead of chefs specifying a species and a fleet chasing it, member restaurants commit to taking whatever the boats land, delivered within 24 hours of the dock. Chefs frequently do not know what they are cooking until the truck arrives. In exchange they get freshness no distributor can match, a price insulated from commodity species volatility, and access to abundant underutilized species, butterfish, porgy, dogfish, whiting, that carry a fraction of the cost of the headline five.

The trade is menu flexibility for margin and story, and it only works in kitchens confident enough to write the menu daily. That is precisely why it remains a competitive advantage: most operations are not built for it, so the ones that are face very little competition for the supply.

And the cautionary tale, Red Lobster

The instructive failure is equally clear. Red Lobster made its $20 Ultimate Endless Shrimp promotion a permanent everyday offer in 2023, at the encouragement of a shareholder holding large shrimp inventory. Guests did exactly what guests do, and the promotion contributed to an $11 million quarterly loss on the way to a Chapter 11 filing in May 2024, alongside roughly $300 million of debt and punishing sale-leaseback rents. The chain emerged that September under new ownership and has since, pointedly, launched a promotion called SpendLESS Shrimp.

The lesson is not that seafood is dangerous. It is that commodity seafood sold on volume is the one blue food strategy guaranteed to fail. The category’s advantage is nutritional density, provenance and diversity, every attribute that unlimited cheap shrimp actively destroys. Red Lobster did not fail because it sold seafood. It failed because it sold seafood as though it were a commodity.

For operators and foodservice, four plays follow directly from the above. First, work the second tier: mussels, mackerel, squid, sardines, clams and farmed tilapia carry premium nutritional credentials at commodity cost, and willingness to pay in this category is driven far more by preparation and narrative than by species prestige. A well-executed mussel dish carries a food cost most kitchens would consider a gift. Second, audit yield before you renegotiate price, most kitchens are discarding 45 to 60 percent of every round fish they buy, which is a larger recoverable saving than any supplier will ever concede. Third, add a tin list; it is a premium margin line with no capital cost and no labour. Fourth, put seaweed to work: Datassential data show seaweed up 81 percent on US menus over four years, furikake up 268 percent and seaweed in Mexican entrées up 221 percent, kombu and dulse are among the cheapest umami tools available, particularly in plant-forward dishes where depth of flavour is the hardest thing to build.

The unifying barrier is a menu-writing culture that reaches for salmon by reflex. Every operator above won by refusing that reflex.

For investors: the pure-play cultivated seafood story is crowded relative to its near-term addressable market. The under-allocated positions are feed technology, which gates the entire growth curve; cold chain and traceability infrastructure serving fragmented small-scale supply; and restorative aquaculture structured to capture ecosystem-service revenue rather than to donate it. FAO projects aquatic animal production reaching 214 million tonnes by 2034. Every additional tonne needs feed, needs cold chain, and needs somewhere to be grown that does not degrade the water it sits in.

For policymakers: fix the databases. If food-composition tables materially understate the micronutrient content of aquatic species, and the evidence increasingly says they do, then every nutrition intervention built on them is misallocating capital. Correcting the reference data is close to the cheapest high-leverage action available in global nutrition policy, and almost nobody is funding it.

The last frontier is the oldest one

There is a pleasing irony in all of this. Blue food is routinely pitched as the future of protein, yet it is the oldest food system we have. Humans were shellfish gatherers and shore fishers long before we were farmers. The archaeological record suggests coastal foraging, dense in omega-3s, iodine and zinc, may have been instrumental in the development of the human brain itself. We are, quite literally, built out of this stuff.

What is new is not the food. What is new is that we finally have the tools to produce it at scale without destroying the system that makes it: algal oils that break the forage-fish dependency, cultivated cells for the species we have pushed too far, seaweed and bivalve systems that improve the water they grow in, and genomics and sensing that are dragging aquaculture from a craft into an engineering discipline.

The sector’s problem was never the science, the nutrition or the economics. Those arguments have been won for some time. The problem is that blue food has been positioned as a virtuous alternative rather than what the data plainly show it to be: the highest-performing protein system available to us, currently operating at a fraction of its capacity, in the two-thirds of the planet we barely bother to farm.

The tide, as they say, is turning. The only question worth asking is who is positioned to be in the water when it does.

Share the newsletter

About The Author Robert Ancill

Robert Ancill is a globally recognized restaurant consultant, design innovator, and trend forecaster. Based in Los Angeles and originally from Glasgow, Scotland, he founded The Next Idea Group in 2002, a hospitality concept and design agency that has led more than 800 restaurant and café launches across 24 countries. A respected authority on restaurant brand positioning, restaurant design, franchising, and emerging consumer trends, he also serves as Chairman of TNI Restaurant Consultants and as a board advisor to the AI-powered experience platform Atmosfy.

A leading futurologist in hospitality, Robert produces annual trend reports covering robotics, AI, plant-based innovation, and the evolution of casual dining. He is the developer of The Tolerance Scorecard and his 2025 trilogy of books includes Restaurant Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Modern Restaurant Marketing, offering a comprehensive playbook for thriving in today’s tech-driven marketplace, along with The Ultimate Guide to Restaurant Design, a masterclass in building future-ready restaurants, spaces where every element works together to drive emotion, efficiency, and profitability.