AquaLine Brand Guidelines: The Frøya Pen Maker Folded Into ScaleAQ

Plastic pens from an island off Trøndelag.

AquaLine came from Frøya, the island off the coast of Trøndelag in central Norway. The Norwegian trade site iLaks, reporting in September 2014, wrote that the company began as Frøyaringen, with pen production at Uttian on the island, and that Frøya was still its centre of gravity even though its head office had moved to Trondheim. In March 2014 iLaks reported the company’s own account that it had delivered thousands of pens and pen systems to fish farms on every continent since its start in 1980.

Its product was the floating pen: the plastic ring, or collar, that holds a net bag at the surface of a fish farm. When the business associations of the Trondheim region named AquaLine their company of the year for 2014, the jury statement quoted by iLaks said it had supplied pens around the world since 1980 and called it the world’s largest supplier of plastic pens. We give that as the jury’s description.

The same 2014 report said the company had subsidiaries in Australia and Chile and branch offices along the Norwegian coast. By July 2017, according to iLaks, it had three full bases in Norway — in Harstad in the north, on Hitra and Frøya in the middle, and on Bømlo in the south-west — and offices in Trondheim, Haugesund and Tovik, with deliveries that year to markets including Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Scotland, Ireland and Australia.

The setting matters to the story. Norwegian Wikipedia, citing the NTNU magazine Gemini, credits the brothers Ove and Sivert Grøntvedt with building an early sea pen for fish on neighbouring Hitra, set out in June 1970: an eight-sided frame whose corners were joined with rubber bands. AquaLine’s own start, on Frøya next door, came a decade later.

From pen supplier to system supplier.

The product that defined AquaLine’s later years was the Midgard system. According to iLaks, writing in April 2015, the company developed it after a sharp rise in salmon escapes in 2011, working with others in the industry on a new way to build a pen: a fully integrated net and sinker system, in which the bottom ring hangs directly from the net without other contact with the floating collar, and a newly developed winch raises and lowers the ring in one operation. In March 2014 the company said Midgard was the result of work with fish farmers, the research institute SINTEF Fiskeri og Havbruk and ACE (Aquaculture Engineering), and that a complete pen had been tested in waves and current in SINTEF Marintek’s ship-model tank in Trondheim.

Midgard won recognition in its home region. In April 2015 AquaLine received the innovation prize of NHO Trøndelag, the regional branch of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise, for the system, iLaks reported, which qualified it for the national round.

The system also brought a dispute. In March 2014, iLaks reported, the local news site Frøya.no had blamed AquaLine for job cuts at a neighbouring net firm, Frøya Havbruksservice, after AquaLine began selling nets made in Asia. AquaLine rejected the criticism in a press release, saying the nets were designed for exposed sites and that its competitors also used nets or parts made abroad. In 2017 iLaks reported that AquaLine had since bought Frøya Havbruksservice, as well as Hestnes Offshore & Aquaservice.

That July the company described a change of strategy: from a traditional pen supplier to a research-based system supplier, selling collars, nets and moorings together, with a separate Marine Engineering business area. It had begun supplying its own nets only in 2013, iLaks reported, but that part of the business had grown quickly.

Design and documentation.

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.

A name absorbed into ScaleAQ.

AquaLine did not stay independent for long after that. In November 2017 The Fish Site reported that Kverva Technology and Frøyaringen — the owners of Steinsvik Group AS and AquaLine AS respectively — had set up a joint venture combining the two equipment makers, with Kverva Technology holding 90.1 per cent and Frøyaringen the rest. Both companies were to remain separate, in their own premises, while working together on research and development. The same report named AquaLine’s Midgard range of net pens among its offerings.

The final step came two years later. On 1 August 2019, Salmon Business reported, AquaLine, the land-based fish-farm supplier AquaOptima and the feeding-system maker Steinsvik announced that they would merge into a new company called ScaleAQ, with four business areas — sea-based, land-based, digital and service — and a presence in eleven countries. The three would continue as separate companies for a period. In December 2019 Salmon Business reported that from the New Year the three would be merged into one company. By then ScaleAQ had also taken in PanLogica of Tasmania and the boat builder Moen Marin.

AquaLine no longer trades under its own name. Its old web address now forwards to ScaleAQ, which is based in Trondheim, and ScaleAQ’s website still lists a Midgard winch among its service products.

For a design guide, AquaLine shows how a product name can outlast the company that made it once that company is merged into a larger group. Compare ScaleAQ, the company it became part of, and AKVA group, another Norwegian pen and equipment maker. For this guide we use a fjord blue and a buoy amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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