ProChile at Aquaculture UK

Chile is the second largest producer of Salmon around the world, and its aquaculture industry is recognized as a highly developed one with high possibilities of scalability. Chile’s technology, processes and human capital, are used by salmon producing markets such as Norway, Canada, and Scotland, among others.

The Chilean salmon industry emerged in the 1970’s and specialized a decade later, which meant that production companies outsourced services so they could dedicate themselves to their main business. This created a fully specialized local supply chain where third parties provided them with services such as health, food, security, and construction of cage rafts, docks and pontoons, among others.

Now a days these suppliers have come to form an ecosystem and a cluster, which has made the Chilean aquaculture industry more efficient in that it replaced or generated local alternatives to high-cost equipment and supplies, mainly due to the great distance over which they had to be moved. Another benefit of this development was technology transfer and local technology developments, with significant interaction with supplier companies from Norway, Great Britain, the United States and Japan, which in many cases chose to make alliances with Chilean companies, allowing this ecosystem of suppliers become more sophisticated and innovative.

During the first years of the 21st century, the whole industry saw a tightening in its environmental and sanitary regulations, development of good practice standards, clean production agreements, relationships with suppliers and the community, as well as in closer relationships with Chilean universities where aquaculture research and teaching centres where born.
In the second decade of the 21st century, Chile shows innovative advances in the entire value chain of aquaculture production, not only with stronger marketing strategy and commercialization, but also with a chain of suppliers of infrastructure, equipment, biotechnology, molecular genetics, animal health and environmental care.

The sector also has advanced laboratory and manufacturing services, process plant automation, circular economy, strategy, and innovation consulting services, among others.

The growth of this industry has been recognized outside the borders of Chile, which has allowed state agencies such as ProChile to develop a specific service to promote this sector’s exports for suppliers of the aquaculture industry, aiding the sales of innovative solutions for Europe, North America and South America.