We are not a company that simply makes delicious algae.
Our goal is to carry dwindling fish into the future.
Do you know what farmed fish eat in order to grow?
Farmed fish, in fact, grow by eating wild fish. DHA is essential to a fish's growth, and it is wild fish that can supply that DHA cheaply and steadily. So farmed fish grow by eating wild fish.
Those wild fish are now disappearing from the seas around Japan. A catch of about 13 million tons in 1988 is now below 4 million tons. If this continues, we may be the last generation able to eat sushi.
"Can we farm fish without depleting them?" That was our starting point.
The key to it is algae. It is algae, in fact, that first produce DHA in nature. Fish merely store the algae's DHA through the food chain. If algae could be produced cheaply and steadily, aquaculture that does not deplete fish might become possible. So we began to grow algae.
But depleting resources in order to grow algae would defeat the purpose.
So we committed to cultivating algae using unused food. We ran cultivations with a range of unused foods, shochu lees and bagasse among them, and in the process came upon discarded awamori lees.
The result, "by chance", was an alga rich not only in DHA but in umami. That is Umamo.
Through Umamo we are creating a market category, algae, as a natural umami to follow kombu, katsuobushi and mushrooms.
Beyond that umami, we aim for a world in which fish continue into the future.
