What JUV’s Performance Data Is Actually Showing Us

When I talked with The Fish Site not long after taking over as CEO, the question I kept getting was some version of: does this actually work, or is it another aquafeed additive making promises it can’t keep?

Here’s the honest answer: fish and shrimp fed diets with up to 5 percent JUV show higher survival rates and meaningfully lower mortality. They keep eating aggressively through and after stressful periods, which drives sustained growth, more efficient feed use, and in a number of cases, a reduced need for medicated feed. An animal that keeps feeding through a stressor is an animal whose immune system isn’t fighting on two fronts.

JUV comes from a natural, abundantly available microbe, if you’ve eaten lettuce, you’ve encountered ours. We ferment it using a precision fermentation platform, and what makes the ingredient work is its natural package of beneficial compounds, PHB and carotenoids among them.

We came out of a genuinely quiet couple of years. The pandemic forced us to go hyper-lean and focus on a small number of goals rather than promising more than we could deliver. We’re now producing 250 tonnes of JUV a year, with a plan to scale to 5,000 tonnes by 2026.

I didn’t join Knip as an outsider, I was an early investor before I became CEO, because I believed in what the science could do once the company had the focus to execute on it. The Fish Site’s full interview goes deeper into that path, here.