Sure, you may have a great idea, but introducing a food product the world has never seen before makes for an extremely hard business case, according to David Melbourne.

“We blazed a trail for genetically engineered animal protein,” said Melbourne, Chief Commercial Officer of AquaBounty Technologies. “We are the first animal protein approved for human consumption in the (United States) and Canada.”

Melbourne was speaking remotely from New Hampshire at the ABIC Speaker Series event hosted by Ag-West Bio in Saskatoon last month.

In what must rank as one of the longest initial-innovation-to-consumer-plates periods ever, the company’s AquAdvantage salmon hit the market in 2021, 32 years after its initial development. About 25 years of this involved navigating the uncharted labyrinths of U.S. and Canadian regulatory authorities.

AquAdvantage salmon is a transgenic, meaning it contains genes from two other fish. The initial work was successfully done in 1989 at Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador. Researchers there were trying to solve the problem of salmon farmers losing stock due to cold water periods during the 36 months it took to grow to market weight. They came up with salmon that reached that weight in half the time, dodging the cold while also using less feed. A company, AF Protein (later AquaBounty) was launched to bring the innovation to market.

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