Cruelty-free Yorkshire caviar farm swims against the stream

The world’s first “socially-acceptable” sturgeon farm is to start producing caviar next week after receiving a delivery of five hundred fish, all of which they plan keep at the farm.

Based on the outskirts of Leeds, the family-run farm – which operates a no-kill policy – was developed by John Addey and his son Marc after £250,000 of investment.

Co-founder of KC Caviar John said: “You lose money for five years then you have all the investment of setting up the farm and buying the fish so generally it’s not classed as a wise investment from the beginning, but once you start making the caviar, people are happy to invest in it.

“From Tuesday, the eggs will be produced, mixed with salt then once it’s matured we can start selling it to our wholesaler who will sell it to all the posh restaurants in London and we’ll be selling it online to Mr and Mrs public too.”

The online caviar will be available later this year, not only offering 50g, 250g and 1kg tins of the eggs – but also the option to find out more about the fish that produced them.

Because – unlike in other farms – KC Caviar keep their fish, each tin of caviar will have a QR code which will take customers straight through to website’s page about the particular sturgeon. This will eventually comprise of pictures and stories of all 500 fishes.

John added: “We hope people will say ‘I want some of Bruce’s caviar, I had it last year and it was very good can I have some more?’”

“As soon as we produce the caviar and everybody’s happy with it and it tastes like it’s supposed to, there will be a queue of people wanting to take the bait.”

With traditional farms planning to kill three million sturgeon to hit 2020 production targets, the family were keen to prevent the imminent extinction of the species in whatever way they could.

“Sturgeons are the most endangered species in the world, even more than tigers, but people don’t know that because fish generally aren’t very interesting.

“They’re becoming extinct because people weren’t bothered what type or what size or anything, they were happy with what they were doing and thought there would always be millions of sturgeons around,” John added.

However, the problem was that mature eggs of a living sturgeon are not stable enough and will burst when salt is added to create the caviar. Only immature eggs have the firmness needed, and the fish was required to be cut open to access those.

“One lady, Angela Köhler decided that she would take on the responsibility of trying to find a way of producing caviar without killing them and she did this for about eight years in Germany,” John added. It was here in Germany that John and Mark were given the knowledge of how to successfully harvest the eggs 15-20 times in the fish’s lifetime.

Through research, Angela found that once the eggs had been released, the fish coated them with a special chemical. She then replicated this chemical and with the backing of AWI university, placed a worldwide patent on it.

Instead of catching and cutting open the sturgeon to extract the eggs, KC Caviar’s farm will use this patented process to harvest the caviar.

The fish will be induced, have their stomachs massaged and once the eggs are released, coated with the special AWI chemical – which has so far only been given licensed for KC Caviar to utilise.

Close