They say you have to open about 10,000 oysters to find a natural pearl. It's almost a fluke, but, if you want pearls, you can also grow them. Tony Chen, CEO and co-founder at Manolin, had a little of everything. He had always loved water and fish but never imagined his 'pearl' would be aquaculture until he stumbled upon the right oyster or, rather, the right oyster farms in the Chesapeake Bay. Maybe his 'pearl' was farmed but finding it serendipity helped him to turn it into something regular.
He found fascinating what these oyster farms were doing, producing food from working in the water. Tony realized that aquaculture was the perfect industry to combine his love of water with his professional experience from a technological point of view. Then Manolin was born, to go with farmers on their path to sustainability and profitability, and always be there for them, making their decisions do not depend on serendipity but data. And so, hand in hand with data and technology, he jumped from the Chesapeake Bay oyster farms to the Norwegian salmon farms where he now carries out his work, with one foot on each side of the Atlantic.
Tony Chen studied for a degree in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), his pathway toward data seemed set but his passion for water was always by his side in that way. "I always knew that my career path was going to be in technology, but I've been lucky enough to combine it with an industry that I'm really passionate about", he says and goes on to explain the origin of what he calls "my love of water", and how, despite that, aquaculture appeared by chance. "I grew up kind of as a fisherman, and always fishing with my dad. I was also a swimmer competitively through college. So, I've always just had a love of the water and fish, never quite knew that my passion was going to be in aquaculture, but it was an industry that we discovered in the Chesapeake Bay actually" (by that "we" he means John Costantino, the company's CTO, also a computer scientist, and co-founder of Manolin).
When serendipity struck and aquaculture came along, Tony was in the right place, although not exactly thinking of seafood, but people. "I was working in technology, at the US government working in health systems. So, preventing epidemics and collecting human health data was the career that I went into after college but discovered aquaculture through oyster farms. And really just found a passion for what they were doing from a food production system, from working on the water. I've always had that love of the water, but aquaculture combined the two and at Manolin, I'm able to utilize both the passion and my professional experience from a technology point of view".
When asked about the advantages of aquaculture over other industries when it comes to sustainability, Tony's speech does not differ much from the usual, after all, we are all convinced of this. However, even if this is the case at the core, his message does have some nuances on the surface. He uses words and expressions like "dramatic impact", "scaling" or "efficient way", which inevitably makes us think of something more sophisticated than the old methods.
"The advantage of aquaculture over other industries when it comes to sustainability, it's got the opportunity to really make a dramatic impact on global food systems. Aquaculture and how quick it's scaling, when done correctly and efficiently, it's an efficient way to produce food and protein, has an extremely low carbon footprint, limited water usage and overall can be a net benefit for ocean kind of ecosystems", he tells us, and that's where the opportunity was. "When I saw the growth of aquaculture and its potential on the environment and its ability to produce food in a sustainable way, you know it needs to be done correctly, but when you're looking at the advantages over other industries, you have the opportunity to really set the industry on a new path forward. It's such a young industry that there's a lot that can be done".
And among all that can be done, is to teach aquaculture farmers how blue tech can improve ocean sustainability and profitability. Manolin does it in two ways, which Tony explains to us. "One is preventing health issues before they occur. So, our focus is on helping farmers prevent diseases", he says. "Then number two is helping farmers make more sustainable choices. So, whether that's on feed or on other ways that they can improve their operations, whether it's with sea lice treatments, how they harvest, everything around, making sustainable choices, and what monetary benefits they can get from that. We try to add to that transparency with the analytics we can provide".
When you click on 'Product' on Manolin website, the first thing you see is this definition: "a toolbox for farm health". Not for fish or shellfish, but for the farm. "We define farm health, and this is why we don't necessarily say just animal welfare, as a combination of healthy animals and the ability for the farm to limit its impact on its ecosystem. So, a healthy farm is healthy animals that also don't impact the environment in a significant way". That makes sense, doesn't it? But inevitably, a question comes to mind, how do they manage to unite their "toolbox" with human expertise or even intuition cultivated by farmers over years of work?
"When you talk about the industry in the past, farmers made decisions with their gut, and they had a couple of different tools to help them assess that particular intuition. You have eyes, ears, nose, mouth. You would hear stories of farmers tasting the water to understand what was going on". Now, moreover than see or touch the fish, you can see the data up behind them. "We see computers and data as another one of those sensory opportunities or sensory additions to how you make decisions", Manolin's CEO tells WeAreAquacualture. Having more input into how to make decisions, they can not only provide surveillance to each farmer on their own farms, but they can now see what's happening in the area too.
"That's really the toolbox that we're trying to give farmers. They have so much information ahead of them, and we try to simplify that and really give it to them in a data format". And he continues, "That's really what data has been able to do when it comes to analytics and how we operate as humans. We don't see it as replacing, it's not automation that we're doing here. It's really adding on another piece to that in intuition so that we can make a smarter choice".
Customers, people, and their needs are at the core of Manolin's system. As said, its "toolbox" is not designed to replace the farmer, but to help him. Everything in this company, starting with its name, is designed to go with them along the way. This is what we discovered when, out of pure curiosity, we asked why this name with Spanish roots. "The name is from a character in the book 'The Old Man and the Sea' by Ernest Hemingway", Tony tells us. Spoiler warning in the next paragraph regarding the book, but if you've read it, you'll love the story.
"In 'The Old Man and the Sea', the old man goes out to catch this big marlin, tries to bring it back, and is unable to make it happen. Well, Manolin is his apprentice. He's only mentioned one time by name but that's who our company is named after. The idea for us was always that Manolin wasn't able to go out with Santiago on that fishing trip because of that he wasn't able to bring home the fish. And this time, we as a company want Manolin to be there for the farmers and be able to bring home the fish". So, this is not only the story of how the name came about but also the vision of the company, to be there for the fish farmers.
That vision is based on sharing data in a secure and transparent way. At Manolin they know this is a concern from customers, but, again, this is just an additional way to do it when outbreaks occur. "Farmers already share a lot of data. They talk about outbreaks when things do happen, there is information that gets shared", Tony explains. "We're just speeding up those particular communication channels. Instead of needing to call somebody or write an email, we immediately send some of this information out. So, farmers are definitely aware of the information that we're sending. But it is something that everyone agrees to within our member network".
Being there for the fish farmers means for Tony, for everyone at Manolin, working on both sides of the Atlantic with an eight-hour time difference. That's not always easy, but if their tech hub is in Denver, their customers are in Norway, and that kind of global team works. "I have a ton of IT advisors and people I can go to from a tech point of view who have built large tech companies here in Denver, and there's a great support system for that. On the other hand, Bergen's got the support system from the aquaculture standpoint. All the companies, all the older heads and executives who have built up the industry to the point that it's at right now, you find that in Norway". So, he gets "a little bit of both".
This teamwork on both sides of the ocean will be necessary to face the industry's upcoming challenges, which, in Tony Chen's opinion, will be mainly twofold: "I think cost in raw materials is gonna be one issue, and you're seeing it in supply chain challenges, you're seeing the economy enter into a recession of sorts, so, the raw production side of the house is going to run into a lot of challenges in the upcoming years. But there's also a very high pressure from a sustainability angle. I think those two forces are gonna ask the farmers and really drive it to have some challenges both from animal welfare and from a margin and a money side". In his opinion, in this scenario, something has to change in terms of how farmers operate. And that's where Manolin must figure out how do they fit into this puzzle, "how do we help farmers be able to maximize their farms and still produce a very healthy product and run a healthy farm at the end of the day". In addition to this big challenge, for them as a new company, there are others such as continuing to build the team or raising money, but this is something that excites them. In Tony's words, "having these added pressures just makes the stakes a little bit higher".
Tony Chen is enthusiastic but also committed to aquaculture. For his own future, he just expects to stay within this industry for quite some time. "Our job here is not done, we don't want to be just in salmon but really want to impact global aquaculture, and I think the next couple of years are going to be really exciting for that", he says. The CEO of Manolin is that apprentice that is not going to ever let the old man alone. As in the book quote, he knows "no man was ever alone on the sea".
Founded in 2018, Manolin offers a simple, easy-to-use platform where fish farmers can combine their production information with millions of industry data points that fill in gaps in farm data every 15 minutes, and alert farmers when something is wrong. According to the company, its machine learning models predict the early onset of disease with 93% accuracy. From its offices in Bergen, Norway, and Denver, USA, its goal is "to help build a more sustainable future food system together with aquaculture farmers".
