Two shrimp companies proved the market is real. Then production nearly killed them both.

16 October 2026

The first objection we always got in the beginning was: you have to be able to compete with (the cheap import) market prices. While one part of my argument was always, no, it is not today’s market prices I am worried about, it is tomorrow’s supply - this was generally rejected, I think either as arrogance or as science fiction. However, I also thought that that is a very local point of view, one that limits value to have “a” (any) shrimp on the barbie. So we started looking. And today’s prices are not the problem. The hard question is a very different version of it: can you produce shrimp - even if you were able to charge (maybe even eye-watering) premium prices - and be profitable? Two companies, on two continents, answered both questions.

The market was never the problem

SwissShrimp grew prawns on land in Rheinfelden, in a country about as far from the sea as a country gets, and sold them into one of the most expensive food markets on earth. Its own shop listed jumbo prawns at around 150 francs a kilo — a price a supermarket buyer would not believe — and Swiss buyers paid it. The demand everyone doubts was proven: in the right market, people pay the premium.

Atarraya, the best-known name in the field, proved the other end of the same point. Its shrimp-in-a-box was clever enough to be named an invention of the year, and it built its reputation supplying fresh, traceable prawns to American fine-dining kitchens that were tired of flown-in, farmed-who-knows-how imports. Same lesson, different price tier: the appetite for local, fresh, traceable shrimp is real, and it runs from the white-tablecloth premium down toward the mainstream.

So the market objection falls. Between the two of them, demand is settled. It was never the hard part.

The hard part was always production

What took SwissShrimp down was not a collapse in demand. The buyers were there and the premium held. It died on the cost of making the product. The animals did not grow fast enough; operating costs ran ahead of revenue quarter after quarter; a late pivot to freezing the product surrendered the one advantage — freshness — that justified the premium in the first place. In early 2025 it filed for a debt-restructuring moratorium, went bankrupt, and was sold out of insolvency. The co-founder’s own post-mortem was as plain as these get: they had, he said, simply been too bad at production. The fixed costs, he explained, had run at around ninety per cent.

Ninety per cent. That is the whole story in one number. A real premium in a real market cannot save a company whose costs eat nearly everything the price brings in.

Atarraya read the same calculations and answered differently — which is why it is still standing. It replaced its flagship container with a flat-pack, IKEA-style design it says costs about seventy per cent less to build per tonne of capacity, and is rolling it out in New Jersey. The trigger was practical: a New York supply contract that required a farm within an hour of Manhattan on a timeline the big unit could not meet. But the deeper move is the one that matters here — faced with the production-cost problem, Atarraya’s entire answer was to attack its own cost structure, hard, and keep attacking it. It did this from a position of some strength, having raised fresh capital, not as a last resort.

Two companies, two responses to the same force. One tried to carry a premium price over a heavy cost base and was crushed. The other is surviving by driving its cost base down and down, and will have to keep driving it. Neither proves production is unwinnable. Both prove it is the decisive fight — the one that determines whether you live — and that it is a brutal one, a war of attrition on the cost of every kilo, which rewards scale, cheap capital, and patience in quantities a young company rarely has.

Which is why we are not a production company

This is the ground SHRMP.bio reasoned from, from the beginning, and it is why SHRMP is not a farm and very unlikely to become one.

If the market is real but production cost is the fight that kills you, then the losing move is to make winning that fight your business — to bet the venture on being the one that finally produces land-based prawns at a profit. A research-stage company in Australia, with none of the subsidy scaffolding that props up production in Germany, the Gulf or Singapore, has no business making that its business.

SwissShrimp and Atarraya proved the market is there and the production fight is savage. We learned from both and came to the conclusion: don’t enter that fight. Build the layer underneath it — the IP, the breeding, the genetics, the systems. And that is why we are looking for a research home: a place built to carry that work, on the one part of this industry that holds its value into the future whether or not anyone makes production pay today.

One of a series on how SHRMP.bio reasoned its way to its strategy.