BioMar Brand Guidelines: The Danish Fish-Feed Maker Founded by Trout Farmers in 1962

Trout farmers who set up their own feed company.

BioMar began in Denmark in 1962, when a group of Danish trout farmers set up a feed company called Dansk Ørredfoder A/S — Danish Trout Feed. The date and the founding story are given by the company itself and by its owner, the Aarhus industrial group Schouw & Co., which repeated them in its 2026 announcement of a stock-market listing; Danish Wikipedia also gives 1962 as the year the business was established.

The company says it was one of the first in Europe to produce pelletised dry feed for fish. In the 1970s, it says, Danish fish farmers grew more interested in dry feed in place of the wet feed then in common use, and the firm, which mainly served local farms, began to receive orders from neighbouring countries. In the 1980s it introduced extruded feed — pellets cooked and shaped under pressure — which the company presents as the turning point of its early history.

By the early 1990s the business was trading under the name BioMar. It grew through Europe in that decade, the company says, with acquisitions in France and Norway and new factories at Grangemouth in Scotland and on Karmøy in western Norway.

In the 2000s it went beyond Europe for the first time, taking half of two fish-feed factories in Chile, and added a factory in Greece. In November 2007, according to AarhusWiki’s history of Schouw & Co., BioMar took over the fish-feed activities of the feed group Provimi in Chile, Denmark and Spain, a purchase the company’s own timeline lists as Provimi Aqua.

Feed by species and by stage.

BioMar makes feed for farmed fish and shrimp. Its investor pages say it specialises in feed for more than 45 “high-value species,” including salmon and shrimp, and its website sorts its products by stage — hatchery, starter, transfer and grower feeds — and by species, from Atlantic salmon and trout to sea bass, sea bream, turbot, tilapia and shrimp. The species list also runs to Arctic char and lumpfish, barramundi, yellowtail kingfish and totoaba.

Its named ranges include EFICO, ORBIT, LARVIVA and SmartCare. Its most recent launch is BioRetain, which the company describes as the next step in its approach to feed formulation, building on more than two decades of research. The company also says that ASC Feed certification at BioMar Greece completed the rollout of that standard across its production network.

Expansion after 2010 came largely through partnerships, the company says: joint ventures in Costa Rica, in China with the feed group Tongwei and in Turkey with Sagun; the purchase of Alimentsa, a shrimp-feed factory in Ecuador; and full ownership of its Chilean joint venture. A global hatchery unit was set up in France in the same decade.

In the 2020s, by the company’s account, BioMar has opened production in Tasmania and a new factory in China, set up a joint venture in Vietnam with VietUc, bought AQ1 Systems, a maker of shrimp-feeding technology, and taken full ownership of the factory it ran through its Costa Rican joint venture.

Danish Wikipedia describes BioMar as active in 90 countries, with feed production in 12; the company says it operates in more than 90 countries. Its head office is in Aarhus, and its chief executive is Carlos Diaz.

Pens, pellets and the people who farm.

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.

Bought in 2005, listed in 2026.

BioMar’s ownership has changed more often than its name. In 2005, AarhusWiki’s history of Schouw & Co. records, the Aarhus group bought 68.82 percent of the listed company BioMar Holding A/S from Norsk Hydro, the largest single investment in Schouw’s history. In April 2008 Schouw took full ownership by merging BioMar Holding into the parent company. From 2004 BioMar also held a stake in the Norwegian fish farmer Sjøtroll Havbruk, the same history says, and in September 2010 agreed to sell its 51 percent holding.

In 2026 Schouw brought BioMar back to the stock market. BioMar shares began trading on the Nasdaq Copenhagen main market on 28 May 2026, the company’s investor site says, and Schouw said when it announced the plan that it intended to stay the long-term majority shareholder. The Danish encyclopaedia Lex, in an entry on Schouw updated in November 2026, names BioMar and the electronics group GPV as the two largest companies in the portfolio and says Schouw still owns the majority of BioMar after the listing. BioMar published its interim report for the third quarter of 2026 on 2 November.

Its parent is older still. Schouw & Co. was founded in 1878 by Victor Schouw in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district, where it made paper bags, Lex says, and grew through acquisitions into a listed group whose other companies include the nonwovens maker Fibertex and the hydraulics business Hydra Specma.

For a design guide, BioMar shows how a feed company set up by its own customers grew into a listed international business while keeping its Danish base and its plain, species-by-species way of presenting what it makes. Compare Skretting, the feed maker run from Stavanger, and Cargill, the American agribusiness company that began with an Iowa grain warehouse. For this guide we use a deep sea blue, a navy ink and a pale aqua with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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