Andfjord Salmon partners with WellFish on blood sample monitoring programme
Scottish-headquartered fish health analytics company WellFish Tech has announced a partnership with land-based producer Andfjord Salmon, which operates at Kvalnes on the island of Andøya in northern Norway.
Under the agreement, WellFish Tech will deploy its WellFish Predict monitoring programme across active cohorts at Kvalnes, generating quantitative data on the physiological condition of the fish throughout the production cycle, and providing blood biomarker analysis, predictive mortality modelling, and gill health prediction.
WellFish said the programme will provide Andfjord Salmon’s team with objective, internally sourced biological data to sit alongside existing environmental and operational monitoring - providing the granular health intelligence needed to inform production decisions.
99% survival
Andfjord Salmon operates a land-based flow-through system drawing deep Arctic seawater at Kvalnes and has reported survival rates consistently above 99% since entering production.
As the company scales its operations toward its licensed capacity, establishing a robust and repeatable health monitoring baseline becomes increasingly important - both for production management and for the evidential record that underpins the company's welfare commitments. WellFish said its predictive models, covering mortality risk at 14 and 28 days and gill health up to six weeks ahead of visible pathology, are particularly relevant in both a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) and flow-through environment where early biological signals carry significant operational value.
“We have always believed that good outcomes for fish health are inseparable from good outcomes for the business,” said Andfjord Salmon chief executive Martin Rasmussen.
“Our survival and growth data demonstrates what is possible when you give salmon the right environment - but we want to go further. Blood biochemistry gives us a direct window into the physiological state of our fish that no environmental sensor or behavioural observation can provide. We want the decisions we make at Kvalnes to be grounded in the most precise and robust data available, and this partnership gives us that.”
The right question
Charlie Granfelt, chief executive of WellFish Tech, said: “Andfjord Salmon have built something genuinely exceptional at Kvalnes, and they are asking exactly the right question - not just how do we maintain these results, but how do we understand them well enough to be certain we can sustain them at scale. We are looking forward to working with Martin and the team as they build out one of the most ambitious land-based salmon operations in the world.”
In May, WellFish Tech received clearance from the Norwegian Food Safety Authority (Mattilsynet) for non-lethal blood sampling of Atlantic salmon in commercial aquaculture.
It later announced that it was renewing its partnership with Norwegian land-based fish farmer Bue Salmon for the use routine blood biomarker analysis at its pilot facility at Gjørøy Nord in Bulandet to generate the biological data needed to make production decisions ahead of challenges, and to identify which operational strategies are delivering results.