Our approach to sustainability

Across our aqua nutrition business, we aim for a comprehensive approach to creating more sustainable products.

 

What we do

Cargill’s aqua nutrition business helps customers meet the world’s growing demand for more sustainably grown fish and shrimp with high-quality feeds that are tailored to each species’ nutritional needs. Our aqua feeds account for variation in specific environments and markets while supporting the sustainability goals of both Cargill and our customers.

We source upstream ingredients, transform them into nutrient-rich feed for global aquaculture production, and deliver it to our downstream farming customers, who produce the seafood that nourishes people around the world.

Thanks to the scale of our operations and our central position in the supply chain, we can support positive impacts on the food system in multiple directions.

Backed by our decades of experience, technical capabilities, and market expertise, we are uniquely positioned to connect supply and demand.

Our global brands 

Our products embody the deep knowledge and expertise built over many years across Cargill, Purina, and EWOS brands. Across the world, we have many regional brands serving local customers. Five global flagship brands make up our globally relevant portfolio.

 

	Cargill® offers a full range of animal nutrition and management solutions for producers, feed retailers, and feed manufacturers. Our global reach allows us to source the ingredients needed for high-quality aqua feed. Our feed formulation and mill management systems are recognized as industry leaders.
	EWOS® is a longtime leading brand in the aquaculture industry, with a well-earned reputation as a trusted feed provider in all major salmon farming regions, as well as in other markets with feed for tropical fish species.
	Purina® brings more than 100 years of experience, providing a full program of easily digestible, high-energy nutrition for shrimp and fish.*
	AQUAXCEL® extruded nutritional solutions maximize the growth potential of shrimp and strengthen their health in any culture system.
	Liqualife®, engineered for shrimp post-larvae, uses microencapsulation technology that keeps nutrients intact until consumed. It increases feed availability and nutrient delivery while reducing water quality impacts.

 

How we manage and govern sustainability 

At the corporate level, Cargill has global sustainability policies, goals, and programs.

Our aqua nutrition business aims to take a holistic approach to sustainability across the value chain. We work to reduce negative impact on both marine and terrestrial ecosystems, supporting our customers and suppliers in progressing toward their business and sustainability goals. We are organized with the intent to drive progress in all facets of our business and make a positive impact from the world’s oceans to the food on people’s plates.

We have historically emphasized marine and terrestrial ingredients, as well as helping farmers improve their efficiency. Today, our scope is broader both inside our operations and across the value chain. We seek to account for all the resources we use and work to minimize our global footprint, considering social impacts as well as environmental ones.

This includes a dedicated sustainability management program for our aqua nutrition business. It is aligned with Cargill’s corporate-level approach, although the aqua nutrition industry requires specific strategies. Our sustainability team collaborates on the implementation of these strategies with our commercial teams across markets. This structure helps us to address global priorities as well as local issues, including customer and stakeholder engagement, market and ecosystem conditions, raw material impacts, and other relevant topics. We continue to build capacity and expand our capabilities to address sustainability issues and work toward our goals, incorporating a continuous improvement approach to the work we do.

In line with Cargill’s Guiding Principles, we are dedicated to ethical business practices. We provide annual business ethics trainings to all employees, the specifics of which vary based on job function.

To help ensure the integrity of the products we offer, we require that all Cargill suppliers follow our Animal Nutrition and Health Sourcing Policy and Cargill’s Supplier Code of Conduct. The sourcing policy stipulates that those who sell raw materials to us must abide by our sustainability principles and have environmental and social risk management procedures in place. Read more about our sourcing requirements here.

We use many of the leading certification systems in our industry to demonstrate how both our own products and the materials we source from suppliers are made. We set the same clear and consistent standards for our sourcing teams and our suppliers.

 

Our priority topic areas  

We use the aqua nutrition value chain materiality table below to prioritize topics we measure and manage as an aqua nutrition business. Currently, we direct our attention to the topics with the highest potential sustainability impacts using a precautionary approach to the issues, but our goal is to directly manage the impacts shown across our business. The topics arise at various points in our value chain, which can make them challenging to measure and manage directly. The table below indicates where the main impacts from these topics occur, from supplies of raw materials (upstream), through our mills and operations (production), to end use at farming facilities through the fish to the final consumer (downstream). 

 

 

*PURINA® and the Checkerboard design are licensed trademarks of Société des Produits Nestlé S.A. Available outside the U.S. only.