AquaBounty Brand Guidelines: AquAdvantage Salmon, a 2015 FDA Approval & a 2024 Wind-Down

Antifreeze research that turned into a salmon company.

AquaBounty’s story starts in a laboratory rather than a fish farm. According to a company chronology, research on transgenic salmon began at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1989, where Canadian scientists built the genetic construct later sold as AquAdvantage: a growth-hormone gene from Chinook salmon, switched on by a promoter sequence from the ocean pout, injected into fertilised eggs of wild Atlantic salmon. The company dates the establishment of the AquAdvantage line to 1992.

A biography published by the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service for a 2006 lecture explains how the science became a business. The Memorial researcher Garth Fletcher and his colleague Choy Hew patented transgenic salmon and helped license the technology from their universities to a start-up called A/F Protein Inc., based in Waltham, Massachusetts; the two became founding members around 1992. The name stood for antifreeze protein, the company’s first field of research. A Canadian subsidiary, A/F Protein Canada, followed in 1994.

The company chronology traces the renaming that followed. In 2000 A/F Protein reorganised: the parent became AquaBounty Farms, kept the AquAdvantage technology and spun off a separate A/F Protein. In 2004 AquaBounty Farms, still in Waltham, took the name AquaBounty Technologies, and in 2006 it listed its shares on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market. English Wikipedia gives its later base as Maynard, Massachusetts.

Nearly two decades of regulatory review.

AquaBounty’s main product was never a machine or a feed but a fish: AquAdvantage salmon, which English Wikipedia describes as an all-female, sterile Atlantic salmon raised in land-based tanks. Its history is mostly a history of regulation. The company chronology records an investigational file opened with the US Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine in 1995, a first regulatory study submitted in 2003, a hatchery on Prince Edward Island inspected in 2008, a trial grow-out site in the highlands of Panama, and a public advisory committee meeting in 2010. In 2011, the chronology adds, the FDA consulted the National Marine Fisheries Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and in 2012 it released a draft environmental assessment, with a public comment period later extended from 60 to 120 days.

The FDA treats a genetic alteration of this kind under its new animal drug rules. Its own AquAdvantage page says the agency approved the application in November 2015; the FDA later approved a facility in Indiana, and in September 2024 published an amended environmental assessment covering production at the Bay Fortune and Rollo Bay sites on Prince Edward Island. English Wikipedia calls AquAdvantage the first genetically engineered animal approved for human consumption in the United States and Canada, and notes that the approval was controversial.

In Canada, Wikipedia says, Environment Canada authorised commercial egg production in November 2013 and sale of the fish was approved in May 2016; the company reported its first sale of fillets to Canadian customers in July 2017. In the United States, a congressional rider of December 2015 and an FDA import alert held up sales until the alert was lifted in March 2019. Wikipedia dates the first US harvest to 2020, at the company’s farm in Albany, Indiana, and the start of US sales to May 2021.

Ownership shifted as the work went on. English Wikipedia says the synthetic-biology company Intrexon bought a large holding in 2012 and took majority control in 2013, and that in 2019 Intrexon sold its stake to TS AquaCulture, a private company managed by the investment firm Third Security, while AquaBounty stayed publicly traded.

How aquaculture suppliers present themselves.

Aquaculture suppliers sell to fish farmers and other professional buyers, and their brands are shaped by the places their equipment works. The pictures that recur across the sector are aerial views of circular pens floating in a fjord or a sheltered bay, rows of plastic rings linked by mooring lines, and a feed barge moored beside them. Seen from above, a fish farm is a set of simple shapes on dark water, and many suppliers lean on that geometry in their photography and graphics.

Closer in, the imagery turns to working detail: net cages lifted at the edge of a pen, feed pellets and silos, hoses carrying feed out to the rings, cameras and sensors lowered into the water, and divers or remotely operated vehicles inspecting nets below the surface. Land-based farming adds a different picture, of tanks, pipes and filtration halls indoors. Service boats and workboats appear in many catalogues, because service and maintenance at sea are part of what these suppliers sell.

In many identities colour follows the setting: blues, greens and greys stand in for sea and coast, and a brighter accent, often orange or yellow, echoes the buoys, floats and safety gear that make equipment visible on the water. Type is often a plain sans, chosen for technical documents, product sheets and dashboards as much as for advertising.

Trade fairs remain an important stage for these brands. Aqua Nor in Trondheim and conferences such as AquaVision bring farmers, feed makers and equipment suppliers together, and stands there carry the same mix of pen models, barge cut-aways and screens of feeding software. The guides in this series look at how individual suppliers present themselves within that shared visual language.

From land-based farms to a wind-down.

AquaBounty’s plan was to grow its salmon on land, in tanks, rather than in sea pens. In April 2022, English Wikipedia says, it began building a large recirculating farm at Pioneer, Ohio. Costs rose, and in June 2023 construction was paused; Salmon Business reported in September 2023 that the company was also facing possible removal from the Nasdaq market and had asked shareholders to approve a reverse stock split.

What followed was a steady sale of the business. According to English Wikipedia, AquaBounty agreed in February 2024 to sell its Indiana farm, completing the sale by July; announced the sale of its Rollo Bay farm on Prince Edward Island in September 2024; and in December 2024 said it would wind down its Bay Fortune site, its last operating farm, because it lacked the money to keep it running. In March 2025 it completed the sale of its Canadian farms together with the AquAdvantage trademarks and patents, and through 2025 it auctioned equipment from the unfinished Ohio project. The company ended fish production in 2024, so AquaBounty no longer farms or sells salmon, and the AquAdvantage name no longer belongs to it.

The brand therefore survives mainly as a case study: a name built around one product, years of public regulatory review and a long argument about genetically engineered food. For a design guide, AquaBounty shows how a science-led company’s identity can rest almost entirely on a single product name and the paperwork behind it. Compare Innovasea, which designs land-based farms as well as sea pens, and AKVA group, a Norwegian maker of fish-farming equipment. For this guide we use a deep teal, a soft coral and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep AquaBounty’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.