Darden Restaurants, which controls the Red Lobster and Olive Garden chains, recently announced it is beginning to raise spiny lobster through aquaculture, with the goal of supplying aquaculture-raised lobster meat to its restaurant affiliates in Asia in the next decade. It is the first large-scale market attempt to use aquaculture for lobster meat.
The move likely is a sign of things to come, as more food corporations turn to aquaculture to fulfill customer needs. The investment is not meant to pay dividends now but to position Darden for the future, said Tom Matthews, a spiny lobster research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
“They have a 100-year plan to maintain a supply of seafood,” said Matthews, who has consulted for Darden in the past.
Darden spokesman Rich Jeffers said the project, which ultimately will cost between $200-300 million, is a good long-term investment, both in terms of sustainability and business strategy.
“It’s absolutely a cost-effective measure,” Jeffers said. “There’s no way in the world we can continue to feed the world’s populations with just the natural fisheries.”
But Darden has no plans to raise American lobsters, Jeffers said. Growing any lobster is difficult enough, but growing American lobsters presents an even greater challenge because of the species’ cannibalistic tendencies, according to Dr. Bob Bayer, executive director of the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine. American lobsters would have to be kept in individual cages, and that would drive up the already steep price tag of such a project.
“You’re not going to make any money on it,” Bayer said. “Our lobster is just so inexpensive right now.”
The supply of spiny lobster, which is also called rock lobster, crawfish and crayfish, is strong overall, Matthews said. The industry is well regulated in the United States but not so much in other parts of the world, including Central America and the Caribbean. For years, Honduran indigenous populations have been exploited by the country’s lobster fishing industry. Tribal fishermen dive and grab whatever spiny lobsters they can find in murky and dangerous depths, and many have died or been maimed because of decompression sickness.
Darden has pledged to no longer buy lobster harvested by divers, Matthews said, but so far it has been an imperfect ban on the practice. The company is stepping up enforcement efforts and working with the Honduran government to ban such practices.
Growing spiny lobster through aquaculture may help Darden maintain a supply of spiny lobster, but it will not be an easy process, Matthews said. Even 10 years ago, the technology wasn’t available to make such a project viable. The trouble begins at the beginning of life, when spiny lobster larvae must spend six months at sea; the larvae suffer from a high mortality rate in the wild and in aquaculture. The lobster also has 15 different lifecycle stages, each with its own food requirements.
Darden has grown some spiny lobster in lab settings, but their efforts will now switch to larger-scale land and sea aquaculture farms in Malaysia, a country that provides the perfect mix of warm water and shelter from cyclones. If successful, the corporation will begin to supply spiny lobster to its Asian restaurants in the next 10 years, but Jeffers cautioned there will be a steep learning curve in this first-of-its-kind process.
“There’s still a lot that has to happen until we can say that this is successful,” he said.