Caviar without the cruelty

Long a symbol of indulgence, caviar is becoming a symbol of sustainability. The next step: cruelty-free caviar produced without killing sturgeon.

Embargoed for Wish May 2021. Fees apply. Caviar

Every harvest season, the California Caviar Company team lifts sturgeon from the farm’s tanks for its annual production of caviar: unfertilised sturgeon roe prized by gourmands the world over and which can cost thousands of dollars a kilo.

But looking to this coming winter, CEO and founder Deborah Keane has high hopes for more than a commercially successful harvest. It’s likely that the US Food and Drug Administration will approve Keane’s final samples so that she can bring the first American domestic caviar to market without having to slaughter the sturgeon that produced it.

Unlike the traditional caviar harvesting method, where the fish is dispatched and her ovaries surgically removed with the roe inside, the so-called “no-kill” method involves workers massaging mature eggs from the sturgeon’s belly and stabilising them in a calcium bath so they retain their unctuous, pearl-like texture and can be salt-cured. The fish, while likely discombobulated by the experience, is released back into the water to ovulate another day.

The process was invented by marine biologist Dr Angela Köhler more than a decade ago to make farming sturgeon more economically appealing and undermine poaching of threatened wild sturgeon – a family of 27 species of fish unchanged for 200 million years and listed since 1998 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

“If the caviar will be available [at] a reasonable price, it doesn’t make any sense anymore to catch wild sturgeon,” says Köhler, whose former employer, Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, holds the patent for her method.

At first glance, sustainable caviar might sound like an oxymoron, given the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) says that sturgeon are “more critically endangered than any other group of species”, with most of them at risk of extinction due to overfishing, habitat pollution, and the building of dams that prevent the fish from travelling to their spawning grounds. Some species of sturgeon can live for more than 120 years. The fact that they can take from seven to 22 years to reach egg-producing maturity and then might subsequently only ovulate every four to eight years compounds the devastating effects of human activities on global sturgeon populations.

In 2006, the worldwide trade in wild caviar, estimated then to be worth $100 million annually, was banned for the first time after nine major caviar-producing countries – Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia-Montenegro and Ukraine – failed to convince CITES that their stocks of wild sturgeon were sustainable. But by then, caviar producers had already starting farm-raising sturgeon, leaving wild stocks to recover.

In the 1980s, California’s Sterling Caviar company worked with research universities such as UC Davis to pioneer land-based aquaculture of the state’s endemic white sturgeon, Acipenser transmontanus, a few miles from its natural habitat in the Sacramento Delta. The company took its last brood stock spawned from wild sturgeon in 1992, later replacing them.

“White sturgeon in California is one of the very few of least concern under the Endangered Species Act, and we like to think that our efforts have contributed to that,” says Eric Phillips, Sterling’s former production manager and a fisheries biologist who worked with the company for 23 years.

Sturgeon, whose eggs go to producting caviar

Sustainability in the context of any industry is relative and often loosely defined, but broadly speaking, making sustainable caviar means protecting resources: not depleting wild stocks, not wasting resources such as water and energy, and using the whole fish.

Some sturgeon species are inherently more sustainable than others because they do well in captivity and mature more quickly. Siberian sturgeon can be harvested from around five years of age, whereas Russian osetra can take up to 12 years. California’s native Acipenser transmontanus is somewhere in the middle, usually reaching maturity at the seven-year mark.

Six species of sturgeon are raised in the US, in Oregon, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Hawaii, but approximately 80 per cent of domestic production is made up of white sturgeon raised in California, where farms have a solid history of land stewardship as well as sturgeon conservation.

Local aquaculture facilities use one of two systems: flow-through operations that ultimately return clean water to the ecosystem, and closed-loop recirculation. Both are certified Green by Seafood Watch as they pose no threat to the environment, wild stocks or other species.

California Caviar Company, which was founded on sustainable principles in 2007, adopted the former. Water is removed from the farm’s aquifer, run through the sturgeon tanks, then through filters and ponds of bass, carp and catfish, before it’s directed to irrigate the fields of neighbouring cattle farms and returned to the natural aquifer.

“The water I drink is the same water that the fish are swimming in,” says Keane, who owns and operates her own farm. “Even in a drought our water tables do not drop because of our infinity loop.”

Producer Tsar Nicoulai Caviar follows the closed-loop system, piping water enriched with nitrates from fish waste to a greenhouse growing USDA-certified organic butter lettuce and watercress in a circulating aquaponic system. Once the water has been thoroughly filtered, it’s returned to the sturgeon tanks. Products are sold under the label Bare Roots Produce at farmer’s markets and the national grocery chain WholeFoods, which is owned by Amazon.

Sterling Caviar also has a recirculating system, and any water that leaves the operation is constantly tested for quality.

“We’re in partnership with Klamath Basin Nature Conservancy, which is adjacent to our land, so any water tested to be clean goes into their facility to promote the wildlife in this area,” says Eric Phillips.

Caviar production methods enable sturgeon farmers and caviar purveyors to sidestep issues such as opaque chains of custody, slavery at sea and habitat destruction

Petra Bergstein, a Sterling alum who cofounded The Caviar Company in 2015 with her sister Saskia Bergstein and who buys caviar directly from Sterling and other farms to sell under their private label, says she considers a farm to be sustainable when it has its own brood stock and end-to-end traceability.

“We really want to source from places they’ve seen that the fish from start to beginning; you know, they’ve done the spawning, they’ve done the processing, it’s all been onsite,” she says.

Caviar production methods enable sturgeon farmers and caviar purveyors to sidestep issues such as opaque chains of custody, slavery at sea and habitat destruction that currently plague the seafood industry.

In addition to producing their main product, caviar, sturgeon farmers also produce sturgeon meat for human consumption: at American wholesalers Costco, you’ll find smoked sturgeon fillets – a by-product of this season’s harvest – next to the pots of caviar the fish produced. Anything left over from processing is reused as fertiliser or feed. Sterling’s fishmeal is 1:1, meaning no more products are taken from the wild than it takes to raise a single sturgeon.

But harvesting the same fish multiple times is the ultimate goal for complete sustainability in caviar production, and there are a few ways to do it. Producers have trialled processes similar to caesarean section, but the mortality rate for this type of procedure is high, estimated by industry insiders at over 70 per cent.

Another method involves capturing the eggs as part of the natural spawning process and then pasteurising them, which changes the structure of the caviar, can destroy its proteins and oils and ultimately impair the flavour.

The most promising is the patented process developed by Dr Angela Köhler after witnessing horrifying scenes during a visit to the Caspian Sea in 2005. She was attending a congress on marine pollution and had been invited along with other attendees to tour a caviar production facility in Iran. Workers brought a 20-year-old sturgeon in front of the group, hit her on the head with a wooden block and sliced her open so the egg-containing ovaries could be removed, but then realised that the fish was close to spawning and so the roe was too mature to be used.

“They carried away the dead female and discarded 10kg of caviar, hundreds of thousands of eggs – what a waste of life! – and brought in a new individual for the demonstration,” recalls Köhler. “I was shocked, as were the other people in the audience.”

Köhler returned home to her lab determined to find a way to make caviar without harming the sturgeon that produced it.

Black gold

Farmers often strip eggs from a fish when it is spawning, and to a lesser extent for food products, but roe behaves differently once it is mature, making it unsuitable for caviar production. Whereas immature eggs don’t react when they touch water, ovulated eggs turn into a mealy, goopy mass – it’s what makes the roe stick to rocks in the wild so that it can be fertilised, and where eggs will remain, protected, as the baby fish develop.

Trialling her method first with sea urchins, Köhler realised that after administering a small amount of luteinising hormone to reliably induce a form of labour – common procedure in commercial farming – she could then gently pump the eggs from the belly of the fish and rinse them in calcium, a signalling molecule that occurs naturally in the body, to retain their shape. (Her method works for every egg-laying marine animal.)

With help from Köhler, the world’s first so-called “no-kill” caviar company was established in 2010, trading under the brand name Vivace – an adapted contraction of “vive” and “acipenser”, essentially “living sturgeon”– until it shut in 2015 due to disagreements between the producer, investor and bank.

California Caviar Company CEO and founder Deborah Keane, who held the exclusive licence to distribute Vivace in the US, says she couldn’t source as much product as she could sell at the time, and believes that the global market is more than ready for “no-kill” caviar.

For one thing, caviar generally is only becoming more popular. It’s a bioavailable superfood and a major source of Omega-3 fatty acids, B vitamins and other key nutrients and antioxidants that help to sustain and protect the body and boost mood, and are reputed to have aphrodisiac effects.

According to Orbis Research, the global caviar market was worth $US356.2 million in 2019 and will grow to $US531.45 million in 2027

According to Orbis Research, the global caviar market was worth $US356.2 million in 2019 and will grow to $US531.45 million in 2027, notching up a compound annual growth rate of 8.26 per cent. These numbers seem more significant when you consider that large-scale caviar production operations, such as Kaluga Queen in China, are producing lower-cost caviar in such volumes that global prices have halved since 2012.

Caviar produced via the Köhler method is not only cruelty-free, it also offers a different proposition in terms of culinary experience. Because the membrane around the roe becomes thicker as it matures and is harder for the salt cure to permeate, caviar made this way has a more subtle flavour and firmer texture than traditional caviar. It can be frozen and defrosted without sacrificing quality, so there’s no need to plan around overnighting a shipment or going to a store in good time for a dinner party, and it also stands up much better to cooking processes – a boon to consumers and chefs seeking new ways to enjoy the product.

“Keane says that her online retail business has seen a tenfold increase since the pandemic started, as customers, unable to travel or dine out, seek to indulge themselves more at home. She’s also noticed a shift in her customer demographic from middle-aged executive types happy to shell out $US50 ($65) a mouthful to female young professionals who request recipes.

Currently, two small producers are deploying Köhler’s method: KC Caviar in the UK and Köhler’s own facility. (We were unable to reach KC Caviar for comment for this story.) Köhler, who now runs her own consulting company, AKAZIE, to help farmers secure the rights to use the patent, says a Danish company is likely to use it in 2022, followed by an Austrian company in 2023. Other companies in Germany, Austria, Portugal, Scotland, Russia, Japan and the UAE look set to follow. The Köhler method is also patented in Australia, although AKAZIE has yet to consult with sturgeon farmers here.

More immediately, Deborah Keane, who holds the exclusive right to use the patent in the North America, is in the final stages of securing approval from the FDA to use the method in the 2021/22 harvest for product bound for the retail and wholesale market. Keane says she might get the green light by September and intends to deploy Köhler’s method for roughly half of the upcoming harvest, before helping other American farmers adopt “no-kill” caviar production for both domestic consumption and the export market. Says Keane, “Köhler has mastered the art of truly sustainable caviar.”