A conversation between Mario Hoffmann (Regional Sales Director EMEA, INVE Aquaculture) and Javier Ojeda (Director of APROMAR, the Spanish Aquaculture Business Association)
Some conversations start as a catch-up between old acquaintances and end up revealing where an entire industry is headed. This is one of them. Mario Hoffmann, of INVE Aquaculture, and Javier Ojeda, of APROMAR, have known each other for years — bumping into one another at congresses and trade shows across Europe — and when they finally sit down to talk properly, what emerges is a shared diagnosis: Mediterranean aquaculture has solved most of its technical problems, but it still has unfinished business with society.
Javier Ojeda is Director of APROMAR, the Spanish Aquaculture Business Association and Mario Hoffmann is Regional Sales Director EMEA at INVE Aquaculture
An industry that improved fast, and quietly
Ojeda sums it up with a simple image: when you’re in the thick of the action, you don’t see everything you’re doing; it takes stopping, pausing, and looking back to realize how much progress has actually been made. And what has changed over the last ten to fifteen years, especially at the hatchery stage, is remarkable.
Hoffmann puts a number on it: barely a decade ago, larval survival rates in a good hatchery hovered around 15-20%. Today, that same facility can reach 40-45% as a standard baseline. It’s not only genetics, he says; it’s nutrition, it’s how tanks are managed, it’s protocols that are far more standardized and efficient than they used to be. Bream and bass — and now meagre too — have been the first to benefit from this professionalization.
For Ojeda, that improvement in early life stages isn’t merely a technical detail; it’s the foundation everything else is built on. He compares it to raising children: just as a mother’s diet shapes how her child develops, nutrition in a marine species’ earliest stages determines much of its future performance. It’s where, he says, the success of the whole production cycle that lies ahead is decided.
Animal welfare and productivity: two sides of the same coin
One of the more striking turns in the conversation comes when both men agree on something that until recently seemed contradictory: caring for fish welfare and improving business profitability aren’t two separate goals — they’re the same goal seen from two angles.
Hoffmann frames it through his training as a marine biologist: survival rate, once understood purely as a production metric — comparable to feed conversion ratio — is now also read as an animal welfare indicator. A well-treated fish develops better, ends up with better quality, and is more resistant to handling and stress. Reducing mortality is no longer just an economic target; it’s also a responsibility toward the animal.
Ojeda adds another piece to the argument: a bream or bass fingerling well cared for at the hatchery performs better once it reaches the grow-out cages. Welfare doesn’t stay contained in one production phase — it carries forward, accumulates, and ultimately shows up in the product that reaches the consumer.
The real bottleneck isn’t technical — it’s social
This is where the conversation shifts register. Both agree that the biggest challenge facing aquaculture today — in Spain, Greece, Turkey, even Norway — isn’t about hatcheries or nutrition. It’s social acceptance.
Ojeda puts it plainly: the sector operates in public domain areas — the sea, the rivers — and needs a license to be there; people in coastal towns are asked whether they’ll allow a fish farm nearby. If they’re not on board, opening new farms, or expanding ongoing ones, becomes nearly impossible. That’s why, he says, the industry needs to explain how aquaculture actually works — and that’s where communication comes in.
The example both keep returning to is Norway. Its seafood council has spent years investing heavily in communication, but — and this is the nuance Ojeda underlines with a touch of irony — those widely admired campaigns aren’t designed to build awareness inside Norway. They’re designed to sell Norwegian salmon in other markets. The communication that actually builds social awareness within Norway happens in Norway itself, where the fish is farmed. It’s a distinction, Ojeda notes, that often gets lost when other countries look to the Norwegian model for inspiration.
In Spain or Greece, by contrast, communication campaigns by their national organisations aren’t trying to sell fish in their domestic market — they’re trying to build awareness of the sector’s benefits. These are different objectives, and confusing them leads to campaigns that fail from over-optimism, as Hoffmann readily admits.
The competition that stopped making sense
There’s a mindset shift both consider essential: aquaculture companies no longer see competing with each other as the main problem. As Ojeda puts it, no company needs its competitor to fail in order to succeed. The real challenge lies outside the sector — partly technical, but above all about communication and a shared legal framework.
That logic has driven the creation of collaborative spaces between countries, such as the MedAqua Commission within the Federation of European Aquaculture Producers, where Mediterranean producers — from Turkey to Portugal — share experience. And not only among producers: retailers with operations in multiple countries see what works in one market and replicate it elsewhere, and even NGOs that spot good practice in one country carry it over to another.
INVE Aquaculture, Hoffmann explains, has steadily increased its support for this kind of initiative alongside APROMAR — not because it’s the direct role of a nutrition and inputs supplier, but because sustainable long-term growth for the sector, depends on this collective conversation moving forward.
A young industry that learns fast
Hoffmann offers a useful point of perspective: compared to Norwegian salmon, Mediterranean aquaculture is still a young industry. And yet, in just 15 years, it has resolved most of the technical bottlenecks that once seemed structural — particularly at the hatchery stage.
What remains — social acceptance, coordination between countries, building a shared narrative around what it means to farm fish sustainably — can’t be fixed with a single ad campaign. As Ojeda puts it, this is a marathon, not a sprint: you have to show up every day. What comes out of this conversation between an aquaculture nutrition supplier and the director of Spain’s leading aquaculture association isn’t a list of technical achievements, substantial as those are. It’s a simpler, harder idea to put into practice: the industry already knows how to produce well. What it still has to learn — or keep learning — is how to explain itself. And that task, both agree, can only be done together.