Skretting, one of the world’s largest aquaculture feed companies, has launched three new shrimp nutrition products in Ecuador — and the headline claim will catch every hatchery manager’s eye: its new liquid feed supplement InVita, used alongside the company’s dry feed Elevia, can cut Artemia use by roughly 40–50% under normal conditions, and by up to 70% under ideal conditions, according to the company’s own trial reporting. For an industry where live feed eats up most of the larval feeding budget, that is not a small tweak. It is a direct attack on the most expensive, most labour-heavy and most biosecurity-sensitive step in shrimp hatchery production.
The launch, announced through Skretting’s LifeStart portfolio in late October 2026 and unveiled at AQUAEXPO 2026, covers the whole early life of a shrimp: InVita for larvae and early postlarvae, Ignis for the postlarval transition, and Optiline Starters for nursery and early grow-out. Ignis is already available in selected markets. InVita and Optiline Starters are launching first in Ecuador, with more countries to follow. No India launch date, price list or dealer has been announced yet — and this post does not invent one. But the technology, the numbers behind it and what it could mean for Indian hatcheries are worth understanding now, while the products are still new.
Note: the images on this post are illustrations of shrimp hatchery feeding, not photographs of Skretting’s products or packaging.
Why Artemia is the problem Skretting is trying to solve
Artemia — brine shrimp — has been the backbone of shrimp larval feeding for decades. Newly hatched Artemia nauplii are small, nutritious, alive and moving, which is exactly what shrimp larvae need to hunt and eat. But live feed comes with live problems. Artemia cysts must be bought, hatched, enriched and harvested on a strict daily schedule. Hatching is energy-intensive, needs clean water and aeration around the clock, and any slip in hygiene can carry pathogens into the larval tanks. Prices swing with global cyst supply, and a bad batch can ruin a whole larval cycle.
Skretting’s Latin America innovation manager Marita Monserrate put a number on the cost side in trade-press interviews: live feeds account for approximately 75% of larval feeding costs in typical hatchery operations, against about 25% for dry diets. That single split explains why a product that replaces part of the live-feed requirement — rather than simply adding another feed on top — gets attention. If InVita really does displace 40–50% of Artemia use, the saving is not just the cyst bill; it is also the hatching labour, the energy, the tank space and the biosecurity risk that goes with it.
Skretting is careful, in its own words, not to claim Artemia is finished. Eamonn O’Brien, the company’s Global Product Manager for LifeStart, framed the work as reverse-engineering Artemia and then improving on it — identifying what Artemia lacks, particularly in certain fatty acids, cholesterol and phospholipids, and building a delivery system that supplies those nutrients more efficiently. InVita is a supplement to dry feed, not a replacement for it. That distinction matters, and any hatchery reading the launch hype should hold on to it.
The three products, stage by stage
| Product | What it is | Stage it targets | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|
| InVita | Liquid feed supplement of buoyant sponge-gel microbeads (50–300 microns), used with Elevia dry feed | Zoea II to about postlarva 5–7 | First launch in Ecuador; more countries to follow |
| Ignis | Pasteurised, concentrated Calanus finmarchicus copepod supplement, made with Zooca Calanus | Postlarva 7 to postlarva 11–12 (harvest) | Already available in selected markets |
| Optiline Starters | Stage-specific nutrition plus EDGEOS PhytoComplexes plant bioactives, developed with Nutreco Exploration | Nursery through early grow-out | First launch in Ecuador; more countries to follow |
InVita: gel beads instead of live prey
InVita is the most technically ambitious of the three. It is a ready-to-use liquid supplement made of sponge-gel microbeads that stay suspended in the water column for four to five hours, so larvae can ingest them without chasing moving prey. The beads are produced by a patented spray-congealing microencapsulation process: ingredients are reduced to very fine particles, heated and sprayed through precision nozzles, and as the droplets cool they form gel beads that are collected, packaged and pasteurised — twice, which Skretting says minimises contamination vectors compared with live-feed preparation.
The formulation carries fatty acids, phospholipids, antioxidants and minerals, and is designed to hydrate the gut, stimulate feed intake and interact with the Elevia dry diet to improve digestion and nutrient use. Skretting also says the gel matrix can act as a substrate for beneficial gut bacteria, potentially boosting probiotics already used in hatchery programmes. The feeding protocol reported in trade coverage is simple — shake, open and apply, three times a day — and Skretting reports that within three minutes of feeding, about 80% of larvae had full digestive tracts in its observations. That is a company-reported observation, not an independent trial result, and readers should treat it as such.
The validation programme behind InVita is unusually long. Work began in 2015 under Dr Philippe Dhert at Skretting Aquaculture Innovation, with a first minimum viable product in 2017. Commercial scale-up took years more, because, as O’Brien put it, when the team reached industrialisation “the technology simply didn’t exist. We had to design and build it.” The eventual solution is a modular “Factory in a Box” platform, developed in Belgium with engineering partners from the brewing and petrochemical industries, and now installed in Ecuador in containerised units that Skretting says can be replicated in other markets. Validation covered more than 15 trials and over 100 in vivo tests across Ecuador, Vietnam, Belgium and Mexico, including four large-scale validations in Ecuador.
One result Skretting highlights goes beyond the larval tank: postlarvae reared on InVita and Elevia were successfully conditioned with the equivalent of just 200 grams of Artemia cysts per million into viable broodstock, which were then spawned to produce good-quality nauplii — closing the production cycle. If that holds up in independent hatcheries, it answers the obvious sceptical question: do larvae raised with less live feed still make good broodstock? Skretting says yes, at least in its own evaluations.
Ignis: a Norwegian copepod for the postlarval switch
Ignis covers the next, notoriously tricky window: the transition from larva to postlarva, roughly postlarva 7 to postlarva 11–12, when hatcheries typically harvest. It is made from concentrated, pasteurised Calanus finmarchicus, a tiny marine copepod harvested from the Norwegian Sea, developed in partnership with Zooca Calanus. The pitch is a natural, biosecure, ready-to-use alternative to conventional live feeds such as Artemia biomass and nauplii at exactly the stage when feed intake and development decide the quality of the harvested postlarvae.
The nutritional selling points are familiar ones for copepod products: EPA and DHA fatty acids, astaxanthin and cholesterol in a concentrated profile. Skretting reports that some customers have reached their target postlarval weight earlier than usual using Ignis. Again, that is a company-reported customer outcome, not a controlled figure, and the post does not turn it into a guaranteed gain. What is verifiable is the product’s position: it is the only one of the three already on sale in selected markets, which makes it the easiest of the trio for a curious hatchery to actually trial first, subject to local availability.
Optiline Starters: surviving the nursery transfer
The third product moves the story out of the hatchery and into the nursery, where a different problem dominates. Monserrate singled out the post-transfer period in Ecuador — particularly when shrimp weigh between two and three grams — as one of the biggest challenges in the production cycle. Optiline Starters builds on Skretting’s existing Optiline range, combining stage-specific precision nutrition with EDGEOS PhytoComplexes, proprietary blends of plant-derived bioactive compounds developed with Nutreco Exploration, designed to work synergistically with the feed to support performance through nursery and early grow-out.
For Indian readers, the nursery-transfer problem will sound familiar even if the weights and systems differ: every transfer is a stress event, and postlarvae that arrive weak, uneven or poorly conditioned show it in survival and growth for weeks afterwards. Skretting’s argument is that nutrition decisions made at the very start of the shrimp’s journey influence performance throughout the cycle — a point Carolina Kourroski, Skretting’s Marketing Director for Latin America, stressed at the launch, noting that in a mature market like Ecuador continued progress comes from attention to every detail in the earliest stages.
What the numbers do — and do not — prove
| Claim | Figure | Source status |
|---|---|---|
| Artemia reduction with InVita + Elevia | ~40–50% typical; up to 70% ideal conditions | Skretting estimate via trade press — company-reported |
| Larval performance improvement | More than 10% | Skretting-reported, from its validation programme |
| Share of larval feeding cost from live feeds | ~75% live vs ~25% dry diets | Skretting estimate via trade press |
| InVita validation scale | 15+ trials, 100+ in vivo tests, 4 countries | Skretting official announcement |
| Price in India or Ecuador | Not published | No price claimed in this post |
Honesty about the evidence matters here. Every performance number in this story comes from Skretting or from trade journalists reporting Skretting’s statements. No independent, peer-reviewed trial of InVita, Ignis or Optiline Starters was available at the time of writing, and no price has been published for any of the three products. The 40–50% Artemia reduction is an estimate for a protocol in which InVita partly replaces live feed alongside Elevia — it is not a promise that a hatchery can cut all Artemia, and it is not a result measured on Indian farms, species strains or water conditions. The “Nokia-to-iPhone moment” line is O’Brien’s own colourful description, not a measured outcome, and this post quotes it as colour, not evidence.
There is also a context that tempers the excitement. Ecuador’s shrimp industry, where these products launch first, is under real cost and price pressure despite years of production growth, and Skretting itself frames the launch as part of a wider shift toward precision aquaculture — automatic feeding, tighter feed management and more sustainable practice — rather than a single product fixing everything. O’Brien said it plainly at the launch: feed, environment and genetics all need to work together, and no new feed alone solves a farm’s problems.
What this means for Indian shrimp hatcheries
India is the world’s second-largest shrimp exporter after Ecuador, and Indian hatcheries face the same Artemia cost, energy and biosecurity pressures as Ecuador’s — often with tighter power supply and smaller margins. That makes the launch relevant even though no India date exists. Three things are worth watching.
First, the manufacturing model. A containerised “Factory in a Box” that can be replicated in new markets is a different proposition from a product that must be shipped frozen or live across oceans. O’Brien himself named India and Vietnam as places the system could be replicated. That is a possibility he raised, not a launch commitment — but it is the clearest signal yet that Skretting sees a path to local production rather than import-only supply, which would matter enormously for price and freshness if it happens.
Second, the cost logic transfers even before the product does. If live feed really is ~75% of larval feeding cost, then any Indian hatchery still running a heavy Artemia protocol should be costing that split for itself, trial by trial, rather than assuming the feed bill is mostly dry diet. The Indian experience with AI-assisted feeding and sensor-based pond management — covered in our recent look at how AI gadgets lifted shrimp returns by 85% in an ICRIER study — points the same way: the early stages and the feeding decisions in them decide a large share of the final margin.
Third, the biosecurity angle deserves attention in its own right. Double-pasteurised, ready-to-use feeds remove hatching tanks from the disease pathway. Indian hatcheries already manage disease risk with products and protocols of their own — from CIFRI’s patented ARGCURE nano-formulation for fish lice to the hatchery seed work behind 1 million hatchery mussel seeds supplied to Maharashtra and the Sindhudurg seed centre planned to breed 1 crore fish — and a feed that reduces live-prey handling fits that same direction of travel: fewer live inputs, fewer contamination routes, more controlled early rearing.
How to evaluate a launch like this before buying
- Ask for the trial protocol, not just the headline. Which species and strain, what stocking density, what Artemia protocol was the control, and how was “performance” measured — survival, growth, uniformity or all three?
- Cost the whole protocol. Compare InVita + Elevia + remaining Artemia against your current Artemia + dry diet bill, including hatching labour, energy and water — not just the cyst price.
- Run a side-by-side batch. One larval batch on the new protocol and one on your standard protocol, same broodstock source, same water, same team. Judge on postlarval quality at harvest, not on day-three gut fullness.
- Check local availability and support first. Confirm with Skretting or its distributors whether the product is actually sold in India yet, what the storage and shelf-life requirements are, and who provides technical support.
- Do not drop Artemia cold. Skretting itself positions InVita as a supplement alongside dry feed, with Artemia reduced — not eliminated overnight. A phased reduction with daily gut-content and survival checks is the sane path.
Frequently asked questions
Are InVita, Ignis and Optiline Starters available in India?
Not announced. InVita and Optiline Starters launched first in Ecuador; Ignis is available in selected markets. Skretting has said more countries will follow and has named India as a possible replication market for its production platform, but no India launch date or price has been published.
Does InVita replace Artemia completely?
No. Skretting positions it as a supplement used with Elevia dry feed, reducing Artemia use by an estimated 40–50% typically and up to 70% under ideal conditions. It is a partial replacement, not a total one.
What ages do the three products cover?
InVita covers zoea II to about postlarva 5–7; Ignis covers postlarva 7 to postlarva 11–12; Optiline Starters covers nursery through early grow-out.
Is there an independent trial?
Not publicly available at the time of writing. The figures quoted here come from Skretting’s own validation programme (15+ trials, 100+ in vivo tests) and company statements reported in trade press.
Why should Indian farmers care about an Ecuador launch?
Because Ecuador is the world’s largest shrimp exporter and India the second largest, and both face the same Artemia cost and biosecurity pressures. Products proven at scale in Ecuador usually reach other major shrimp countries next — and the “Factory in a Box” model is explicitly designed to be replicated.
The bottom line
Skretting’s trio is not a miracle feed, and this post has not treated it as one. What it is, on the evidence published so far, is a serious, decade-long attempt to solve the most expensive problem in shrimp hatcheries: dependence on live Artemia. The gel-bead technology is genuinely novel, the validation programme is large, and the Ecuador-first launch in the world’s biggest shrimp-exporting country is a real commercial test. Whether the 40–50% Artemia saving survives contact with independent hatcheries, different water and different strains is the question that will decide whether this is a genuine shift or just a good launch story. Indian hatcheries should watch the Ecuador results closely, cost their own live-feed split honestly, and wait for a local launch — with trial data — before changing a protocol that currently works.
Sources and official links
- Skretting official announcement, October 2026: Three new solutions. One commitment to LifeStart innovation — skretting.com
- Hatchery Feed & Management, 3 November 2026: Skretting expands shrimp nutrition portfolio with three new solutions — hatcheryfm.com
- Feed & Additive Magazine, 30 October 2026: Skretting launches three shrimp nutrition solutions in Ecuador — feedandadditive.com
- The Fish Site, 30 October 2026: Skretting expands early-stage shrimp nutrition range — thefishsite.com
- World Fishing, 28 October 2026: Skretting launches new shrimp nutrition solutions — worldfishing.net