Clean Seas Seafood, a global leader in yellowtail kingfish aquaculture output in South Australia
Yellowtail kingfish, with its creamy white to pale pink flesh, was known for its sashimi qualities but also gained traction as a versatile cooked product.
Clean Seas Seafood in South Australia became the global leader in full-cycle breeding, production and sale of yellowtail kingfish and the largest producer of aquaculture yellowtail kingfish outside Japan.
Clean Seas was formed by The Stehr Group in 2000 and publicly listed in 2005. Its initial aim was to propagate and grow southern bluefin tuna but it refocused its efforts on sustainably producing hiramasa kingfish. Yellowtail kingfish, with its creamy white to pale pink flesh, was known for its sashimi qualities but also gained traction as a versatile cooked product.
Clean Seas Seafood farms its kingfish off Port Lincoln in Spencer Gulf, with a a processing plant in Adelaide. It has traditionally sold the bulk of its yellowtail kingfish fresh to high-end restaurants around the world but began to pivot the business towards retail markets.
In 2020, its sales to restaurants dried up due to COVID-19 restrictions. To counter this, Clean Seas Seafood partnered with Norwegian Atlantic Salmon processor Hofseth Group to ramp up retail sales into North America and Asia – the largest and fastest-growing markets globally for kingfish, mostly supplied frozen. New liquid nitrogen freezing technology at its Adelaide processing plant also allowed Clean Seas to explore new market segments including retail.
In 2009, Clean Seas had a live biomass inventory of about 4000 tonnes of kingfish before the fish started mysteriously dying. The mortality rate had increased by 2012 from around 15% to more than 80% reducing its live fish inventory to less than 500 tonnes.
In mid 2012, the company discovered a taurine deficiency in the feed was responsible for the soaring mortality rate, sparking a long legal battle. This was settled via mediation in 2019 and the $15 million received by Clean Seas allowed it to enter the COVID-19 crisis with the strongest liquidity position in many years.
