Aquaculture Operation
The industry — Aquaculture
Base industry report for 1125 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 266
- Under 10 employeesA
- 73%
Of 266 Canadian establishments with employees, 73% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Raise or borrow the entry ticket, or buy an operator who has already paid it. The barrier is money rather than permission, so it yields to a balance sheet — and an acquisition is usually cheaper than a start.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 4
The binding constraint — entry cost + regulatory drag
A marine finfish licence in British Columbia is a political instrument as much as a permit, and tenure decisions have removed sites from production with years of notice rather than decades. Land-based recirculating systems avoid that exposure and replace it with capital intensity and an energy bill. Shellfish and land-based niches are the survivable versions; open-net finfish is a regulatory bet on a file that has moved against operators.
Licences and tenures are issued per site by federal and provincial authorities, and cannot be moved. Sized by licensed capacity at one site.
Handle — Mowi's per-kilo disclosure for salmon of Canadian origin. Mowi reports revenue, harvest volume and operational EBIT per kilo for Canada separately from Norway, Scotland and Chile. That gives the one thing a site-level entrant needs and cannot otherwise get: what a kilo of Canadian farmed salmon actually earned at scale, and how far that sits from the same company's result in a jurisdiction where the tenure is not in question.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 4 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 4 named · 1 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mowi ASAOSE: MOWIA | $241M | — | FY2025 operational revenue, salmon of Canadian origin, in euros — Lost EUR 1.09 on every kilo it harvested in Canada in 2025 while making EUR 1.82 a kilo in Norway. An entrant's business plan has to explain why it can do in one site what Mowi could not do across two coasts. |
| Cermaq GroupB | not disclosed | — | Owned by Mitsubishi Corporation. Acquired Grieg Seafood's Finnmark, British Columbia and Newfoundland operations at an enterprise value of NOK 10.2 billion. Publishes no Canadian segment revenue. |
| Grieg Seafood ASAOSE: GSFB | not disclosed | — | The most useful name on this record because it left. Grieg sold every Canadian farm it owned and now operates only in southwestern Norway — a listed company's revealed answer to the same question this screen is asking. |
| Cooke AquacultureC | not disclosed | — | Private, Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick; the largest privately held seafood company in the world and the dominant east-coast operator. It files nothing. Secondary estimates of group revenue range from C$4B to US$5.5B and contradict each other, so no figure is carried here. |
Evidence
Evidence. Canadian aquaculture sales, production tonnages, the British Columbia share of finfish and the salmon export figures were read in Statistics Canada's Daily release 'Aquaculture, 2024' of 28 November 2025 [A]; Nova Scotia's 2024 finfish and shellfish estimates are flagged preliminary by the agency. Mowi's Canadian figures — operational revenue EUR 241.4M, operational EBIT EUR −39.8M, 36,584 tonnes harvested and EUR −1.09 per kilo — were read in the 'Salmon of Canadian origin' table on page 12 of Mowi's own Q4 2025 quarterly report, and the Norwegian and group per-kilo comparisons in the group KPI table on page 2 of the same document, not in any summary of it [A]. The Cermaq enterprise value of NOK 10.2 billion is from Cermaq's own announcement of 17 July 2025 [A]; that release states the deal was conditional on competition approval, and the 29 December 2025 completion date is trade-press reporting [B]. The price covers Finnmark, British Columbia and Newfoundland as one package and cannot be apportioned to a Canadian site value. What was not sourced: the number of marine finfish licences and tenures in issue, their concentration among operators, the capital cost of a land-based recirculating system, the energy cost the reason refers to, and the terms and timetable of the federal open-net-pen transition in British Columbia. The claim that the operator set is small, the account of the British Columbia tenure file, and the cut factor itself are therefore UNVERIFIED analyst judgment. Cooke Aquaculture publishes nothing; secondary estimates of its revenue disagree by a factor approaching two and none is carried on this record.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
National industry association for finfish, shellfish and seaweed farmers and suppliers; member index published on its site but no total stated.
Its site description says it represents '60+ businesses' raising farmed salmon in BC; the body on the front line of the open-net-pen licence fight.
Salmon-farming association for New Brunswick and Nova Scotia; publications, wild-salmon recovery and member services. No member count on its site.
Joint national conference of the NL Aquaculture Industry Association (NAIA) and the Aquaculture Association of Canada; 2026 edition held Sept 15-17, St. John's. No attendance figure on the page.
Shellfish farmers' association; licensing support, traceability and an AGM and conference on Nov 12, 2026. No member count on its site.
Freshwater (trout) growers' association; hosts the Canadian Freshwater Aquaculture Conference (April 2026, Muskoka). Its old domain ontarioaquaculture.com no longer answers.
Individual members ('more than 3,000 members in about 100 countries') per its site description; runs Aquaculture America and publishes World Aquaculture magazine.
Blocked automated access (connection refused). Search results show it live with 2026 event listings; Canadian-published (Annex Business Media), sister titles Hatchery International and RAStech.
The Aquaculture Association of Canada site (aquacultureassociation.ca) still headlines its 2022 conference and its conference page is empty, so it is credited via the joint Cold Harvest event instead. aans.ca (Aquaculture Association of Nova Scotia) no longer resolves. The Fish Site (thefishsite.com) and SeaWestNews (seawestnews.com) are live trade news sources.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.