Over this time the region has become a centre for much wider innovation and disruptive technologies, across multiple sectors. From the energy sector in renewables and electrification, media technology, subsea and oceanography, to health tech and life science. A community of talent and transferable skills and technology, all closely connected and focused on tackling some of our age’s big challenges: healthy environments and healthier lives.

Moving salmon farming onto land seemed like a strange idea a few years ago, but, like many strange ideas of pioneers, today it is fast becoming the

new norm. The next generation of salmon farming has to be land-based, and in the centre of it all stands the West Coast of Norway, with Viking Aqua as the driving force.

Our ambition is to produce the happiest, healthiest, and best-tasting salmon in the world. To do so, we will create a stable and optimal environment for the fish with minimal external disturbances and fish welfare as the central indicator.

We believe:

That technology is the main enabler for disruption of the aquaculture industry
In research and data-driven development
In empowered multidisciplinary teams, united in a clear mission
In outcome centric missions

In high-frequency iterative development guided by strategic frames
In shared open standards and platforms enabling industrial scaling and end-to-end interoperability of new innovative products
In openness and data sharing
In industry products over custom solutions

To deliver on our ambitions we have defined four essential R&D tracks:

Data from sensors and cameras through contextualization to insight

Environment (Optimization of fish farm environment)

Automation (Leveraging our data in close integration with control systems)

Traceability (Decentralized ledger-based history of key fish welfare and quality data)

Photo by Justin_Luebke, Unsplash

Trusted data at scale (Big Data) is the foundation of everything we do and is secured through our end-end data framework. We are basing this on a cloud-native data platform with support for edge computing and a fish farm native data model. Quality control, context, and insight are all driven by sophisticated algorithms and advanced machine learning.

Based on our trusted data, amazing employees, and world-leading academics, we are aiming at establishing the best possible conditions for the salmon living on our farm. We are doing this through close monitoring of environment parameters (temperature, oxygen, food, contamination, and many more) at the same time as we carefully adjust the operation of the facility according to the latest in-house and external research.
Stable operations with minimal disturbance of the salmon are key to good fish welfare. Automation is proven across industries to drive stability and remove human errors, and we believe this also has significant unrealized potential in fish farming, with particular relevance in a fully controlled environment of a land-based farm.

High-quality data and cutting-edge algorithms will be able to act very early on suboptimal changes in the environment and execute required actions even before it is noticeable to humans.

To prove our commitment to openness, quality, and fish welfare our traceability theme aims to document and track the entire lifecycle of the salmon for the benefit of customers, authorities, and fish health personnel. This will be based on fully open cryptographic ledger technology.

In areas where our technological demand cannot be filled by existing products, our innovation hub ‘Aqua Labs’ will aim to develop these products or services with targeted partners.

Aqua Labs will be our innovation centre where we, together with leading research and competence environments, academia, start-ups, and other exciting players, will create the fish farm technology of the future.

No one has a better starting point than Norwegians to build on the salmon's success. We have the knowledge, the history, the infrastructure, the technology, and not least, the Norwegian salmon brand.

Our disruptive vision for land-based salmon farming and our sustainability commitment
A partnership ecosystem
Our innovation principles

together with leading research and competence

We aim to realise our partnership and ecosystem ambition through the following mechanisms;

Secure focus through a dedicated strategic pillar
Implementing new ways of thinking around contractual models, fairly utilising digital and rewarding mutual value creation
Be an ambassador for transparency and openness in the industry
Building a core of strategic partners, starting with the construction of the RAS facility and expanding across the rest of our business