Not only bytes and bitcoin: but fish too
This is the April 19, 2022 edition of the Opportunity Miami newsletter written by Matt Haggman, which we send every Tuesday. Click here to subscribe to get our weekly updates in your inbox.
This week is a frenzied time of tech talks, panels, and parties when we peer into the future and imagine Miami’s place in it. It starts with eMerge Americas and ends with Miami Tech Week, with plenty in between.
In thinking about what lies ahead I recently got in my car and drove south to a large patch of farmland in the southwest corner of Miami-Dade County. I went to visit an experiment that may well be Miami’s most vivid illustration of an economic future that fuses technology, sustainability and, hopefully, creates many jobs too.
We’re not talking about bytes or bitcoin. This is about fish.
More than than a decade ago Norwegian entrepreneur Johan Andreassen decided the fishing industry is ripe for change. Having grown up fishing the fjords of Norway and later building a successful seafood business there, he decided there was a different, more sustainable way to produce and transport healthy protein to kitchen tables across North America.
So he came to America — and, in particular, came to the flat agricultural lands of Homestead, 40 miles south of downtown Miami — to build that future. Atlantic Sapphire, which Andreassen co-founded and is CEO, is now underway.
“I think Miami can, and will be, the largest producer of salmon in North America,” Andreassen said.
Today we launch our second installment of On Site, where we feature short videos of entrepreneurs building Miami’s economic future by meeting them in the places they’re doing it.
We met with Andreassen at Atlantic Sapphire’s Blue House which is the largest indoor aquaculture facility in the world. You can see the On Site episodes with him here.
Our inaugural On Site last month featured The Underline’s Chief Technology Officer Breanna Faye and the effort to deliver free, contiguous WiFi throughout the under-construction 10-mile linear park (Miami still suffers from a digital divide with two in ten households not connected to the internet). You can watch those episodes here and here.
For Andreasen, he and his company are working to upend a system in which more than 90 percent of salmon consumed in North America are imported, with much flown in from far away places like the cold waters off Chile or Norway. Instead, by employing a range of technologies, Atlantic Sapphire is building giant tanks across its 160 acres of land (with plans to add more) that will ultimately produce a billion meals of salmon a year.
Gone are traditional carbon-emitting fishing practices or long flights to ship the food. Instead, fish is grown in controlled environments — called Blue Houses — and shipped by truck to grocery stores. Imagining a future where energy to power the Blue Houses is clean and trucks to ship are emission free, there is an “opportunity to get very close to net zero,” Andreasen said.
In peering into our future, Atlantic Sapphire sits within one that is built on technology, sustainability and a net zero economy. It’s another illustration of how the shift to net zero — that is, putting no more CO2 into the air than taken out — represents a generational business opportunity across the entire economy.
“Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world,” Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, one of the largest money management firms in the world, wrote in his annual letter to CEOs this year. “The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?”
Fink went on to write that the “decarbonizing of the global economy is going to create the greatest investment of our lifetime.”
So, as you continue your journey through this week of Miami tech, think about where your startup, company, or you will be in this massive transition. And think about Miami’s place in it.
Meanwhile, on a separate note, last week we launched a partnership with Tech Equity Miami, kicking off a series of essays on how to build an innovative, entrepreneurial and equitable Miami. We kicked it off with a post by Aire Ventures’ Leigh-Ann Buchanan, who is leading Tech Equity Miami. Today we feature Jorge Gonzalez at The Miami Foundation on achieving much greater internet access. Universal broadband access is a key pillar of achieving real equity. You can read it here.
