Welcome to the harbour
For forty years, Akaroa Salmon has been a leading salmon producer, combining quality and sustainability – a local hero.
Akaroa Salmon is a testament to the coexistence of tradition and innovation in a truly homegrown story. It’s a 100 per cent New Zealand-owned partnership that includes Ngati Porou, Ōnuku Runanga (the guardians of Akaroa), and the founders, the Bates family.
With a rich history of farming in Banks Peninsula dating back to 1866, the Bates family embarked on a new journey in 1985 with the establishment of Akaroa Salmon. Starting with a single experimental pen in Lucas Bay, they worked closely with the local community and iwi to help pioneer King Salmon farming.
Duncan Bates and his father, Tom, worked the farm. Duncan used to live nearby in a cabin and row out daily in a wooden dinghy to feed the salmon, regardless of the weather. This hands-on experience over nearly forty years makes them closely in touch with their salmon and their environment.
However, they’re quick to embrace innovation and were the first King Salmon producer to work out how to replace wild-caught fish oil in their feed with farmed and fermented algae – an innovation that saw them win the Future Adaptation award from Seafood New Zealand last year. This algae reduces the pressure on wild-caught fish but also ensures healthy omega-3 levels in their salmon.
In addition, they never use antibiotics, hormones or GMOs in their feed, and their King Salmon are never treated with pesticides. All of this is extra work, but based on their ethos of ‘better not bigger’, they’ve found customers who care enough to support them over the years.
They’ve recently purchased a hatchery in Waiau, after searching for the best alpine spring water to raise their salmon from eggs. Here, they grow the smolt out for six months until it is ready to be sent out to the cold ocean waters of Akaroa Harbour – keeping the whole life cycle locally grown here in Canterbury.
Their status as the smallest ocean-based King Salmon farm worldwide is not a weakness; Akaroa Salmon maintains low stock density in 120-metre pens, providing ample space for the slow-growing King Salmon to thrive. Rigorous seafloor monitoring, as well as not using antifouling paints on their nets and vessels or artificial lighting on their farms, ensures minimal disruption to nearby marine life.
Akaroa Salmon boasts a remarkably low carbon footprint compared to other proteins, trailing only behind tofu, mussels, and oysters. Akaroa Salmon’s Nik Mavromatis says they are passionate about ‘farm to table’.
“People can come down to the Wainui wharf in Akaroa or to our factory store in Wigram to get the freshest fish; we even have the option to buy direct from our hatchery near Waiau.” Nik mentions they are striving to improve the access Kiwis have to fish and hopes they choose to engage more with their local fishers.
At the factory, the fish are filleted into different cuts “with something for everybody to try”. They’re also hot- and cold-smoked.
“We use the same old-school smoking recipe, free from anything nasty. It’s just mānuka we get from the West Coast and Marlborough sea salt – that’s it.”
Akaroa Salmon has won gold at the Outstanding Food Producer Awards for the last four years, and this year took home the Champion award in the ‘Water’ category for its fresh sashimi-grade fillet.