Photo: Contributed
An idea born out of an environmental mistake has created one of the Okanagan’s biggest business success stories, and it’s a story you may not have heard.
Vernon-based Piscine Energetics has been selling high-quality fish food for more than ten years, and Nuri Fisher, president and CEO of Piscine, attributes his company’s success to the mysis shrimp – a small crustacean that dwells in large numbers in Lake Okanagan.
Fisher and his team have taken their knowledge of the shrimp and developed a technology that harvests them to create sustainable food for aquarium fish around the world.
The genesis of Piscine is several decades old. The journey from the late 60s to today is a fascinating one, which starts with mysis shrimp being introduced to Lake Okanagan with hopes of increasing the Kokanee salmon population.
The Ministry of Environment added the shrimp to the lake in the hope they would breed and multiply, the salmon would eat the shrimp, and that lead to larger egg counts.
After a successful run in the Kootenay lakes, they introduced the shrimp to Lake Okanagan. But by the late 90s, while the mysis shrimp population exploded in Okanagan Lake the Kokanee population never rebounded.
“Okanagan Lake is very deep and Kootenay Lake is rather shallow,” Fisher explains. “They didn’t know that the shrimp were going right to the bottom of the lake and the salmon were swimming near the surface.”
By introducing a competitor for the same kind of plankton, the food chain was disrupted with the salmon not eating the shrimp.
Solving the problem of how to harness the mysis shrimp in an environmentally sustainable fashion was difficult, and required some clever use of technology. So Piscine pioneered a methodology for harvesting the mysis shrimp when they come to the surface at night.
With the system in place Piscine can deliver on its two-pronged mission to create a food product with all the nutritious benefits derived from the mysis shrimp and at the same time improve the Kokanee salmon population in the Okanagan.
Using Piscine’s food, aquariums across North America discovered something nobody expected: endangered aquarium specimens like seahorses were responding to the mysis shrimp. The fish started spawning, responding to the unique nutritional properties in the mysis shrimp not found in other food.
To keep up with growing demand for dry aquarium food, Piscine has shifted gears from producing a frozen product to incorporating the fresh catch into a dry pellet.
The process of transforming fresh mysis shrimp into dry aquarium food is unique to the marketplace, and one which sets piscine apart from competitors.
“The low heat in our craft handmade methodology allows us to preserve the integrity of the mysis shrimp,” Fisher said. “We have a 100 per cent sustainable source going into the product which is highly attractive to aquarium fish.”
Piscine launched its dry food product in the fourth quarter of 2016 and has already been named a Top 10 reef aquarium product by the largest aquarium blog, reefbuilders.com. The award was the first ever given to a food product.
Fisher said he benefitted tremendously from the assistance of Okanagan tech accelerator Accelerate Okanagan.
He says the networking opportunities with other entrepreneurs have been especially beneficial.
“Getting into the AO network has been a great experience: meeting peers in other organizations, learning from other rapid growth companies, piggybacking on some of their ideas, and leveraging best practices they are using. I like to think of our business as a decade-old startup,” he said.
All Biz Profiles Stories
