Planktonic: The EIC Accelerator Barnacle Feed That Kept Selling

Fish hatcheries have fed their larvae the same way for decades: with rotifers and brine shrimp, known as artemia, hatched from cysts that are mostly gathered in the wild, a significant share of them from the Great Salt Lake in Utah, according to a World Bank study reported by the Global Seafood Alliance in August 2026. Planktonic, a Trondheim company, sells something different: the larvae of barnacles, frozen in liquid nitrogen and revived in the hatchery tank. Its pitch is that these are what marine fish larvae eat in the sea.

In the January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected Planktonic's MAXIPLAN project, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names no other beneficiary for the project. The grant, €1,519,503 towards a total cost of €2,170,718.75, was to pay for farming barnacles at sea instead of harvesting them from the shore, and for large pilots at a European sea bream hatchery and with a South American shrimp producer, according to CORDIS. Seven years later the company is still trading and raised new money in 2025. The farms exist; the pilots, and the revenue the project forecast, do not appear in the record.

Where Planktonic Stands Now

Planktonic is active. The Brønnøysund Register Centre lists it as a private limited company with no bankruptcy, liquidation or forced dissolution, 52 registered employees and annual accounts filed for 2025, according to the Central Coordinating Register. Its share capital was last raised on 25 August 2025, to NOK 821,340.50.

That capital increase matches the last public funding event. In August 2025 Planktonic raised NOK 30 million, about €2.5 million, in a round led by Ichthus Venture Capital (IVC) and the Blue Revolution Fund of Hatch, with the existing shareholders Investinor, the Norwegian state's venture investor, and Bondø Invest taking part, according to The Fish Site and Aquafeed. The money is meant for international expansion, the Trondheim factory and more raw material. Chief executive Rune Husby said the products "are already in use at more than 40 hatcheries across Europe, Asia and the Middle East". The shareholder list on Purehelp, taken from the Norwegian shareholder register, shows Investinor Direkte AS with 31.05% and IVC AS and Hatch Blue Norway AS with 11.07% each.

The Technology: Frozen Barnacle Larvae

Barnacles brood their eggs inside the shell. Planktonic harvests adult barnacles, extracts the eggs and young larvae (nauplii) before they start feeding, and freezes them in liquid nitrogen. Thawed at the hatchery, the nauplii swim again and can be hunted by fish larvae, which need moving prey. The company's 2018 presentations stressed hygiene: the nauplii are taken from inside the animal and are close to sterile, and Husby said that vibrio and other bacteria had never been found in the frozen product, according to the Global Seafood Alliance. A US patent on the cryopreservation of juvenile stages of barnacles covers the method; in 2018 the company said its concept was protected by 16 patents in European countries and Australia.

The difference from artemia is nutritional as well as hygienic. Artemia is a brine shrimp from salt lakes and lacks the marine fatty acids DHA and EPA unless it is enriched, Husby argued in 2018. The MAXIPLAN proposal claimed "a 250-times higher level of bioavailable marine fatty acids", growth gains of up to 75% and survival gains of 100% or more, according to CORDIS. These are the company's own figures; no independent comparison across species was found.

Today Planktonic sells three frozen live feeds of about 320, 200 and 70 micrometres, Cryo-L, Cryo-S and Cryo-Micro, and an inert frozen feed, i-Cryo, with a 12-month shelf life at minus 20 degrees, according to its website. It lists cold-water species such as cod, halibut, lumpfish and ballan wrasse, warm-water species such as sea bass and sea bream, and whiteleg shrimp among the species they serve.

What MAXIPLAN Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

MAXIPLAN was Planktonic's third Horizon 2020 grant. An SME Instrument Phase 1 study, CryoPlankton, received €50,000 in 2014, according to CORDIS, and a Phase 2 project, CryoPlankton2, received €1,402,975 from February 2016 to April 2018 to make freezing work at industrial scale, according to CORDIS. With freezing solved, the company's own report says, the bottleneck became the supply of barnacles. MAXIPLAN was to fix that.

The grant agreement was signed on 10 July 2019 and the project ran from 1 August 2019 to 30 September 2021. Planktonic was the sole beneficiary. Its objective was to farm barnacles at sea in "extensive production systems", to test the feeds, sold as CryoMax and SteriMax, at a sea bream and a shrimp hatchery, and to reach "€43m cumulative revenues and €26m profits in the 5 years after launch up to 2025", according to CORDIS.

The final periodic report, for the period to 30 September 2021, records real engineering results. Planktonic tested several barnacle growing systems and put two into the sea as pilots: vertical substrate modules for the shore barnacle Semibalanus balanoides and submerged web bands for the subtidal Balanus crenatus. It fitted processing equipment into a 40-foot container with a liftable roof so eggs could be extracted near the farm, and a new filtering and sedimentation unit raised the yield of eggs and nauplii from adult barnacles from 5% in 2019 to almost 12% in 2020.

The report is thin on the pilots. It says the sea bream feeding trials planned for spring 2020 were blocked by Covid-19 and that the company "hopefully" would start them in autumn 2020; that sentence stands unchanged in the report for a period ending a year later. In their place it reports successful trials at two Norwegian ballan wrasse hatcheries. The shrimp pilot with a South American producer is not mentioned at all. CORDIS lists no deliverables or publications from the project.

1. Farm barnacles at seaDeliveredTwo pilot systems in the sea by 2021, per CORDIS; rope-based farming in use in 2025, per The Fish Site.
2. Streamlined processingDeliveredContainer processing unit built; yield up from 5% to almost 12%.
3. Sea bream pilot at a commercial EU hatcheryPartialNot reported in CORDIS; the company now sells for sea bream and cites long-term trials in Greece.
4. Shrimp pilot with a South American producerNot achievedNo report, release or press coverage of it; the only Ecuador shrimp trials found date from 2018, before the award, per The Fish Site.
5. €43M cumulative revenue by 2025Not achievedNOK 156.4M of sales revenue in 2021 to 2025, roughly a third of the target.

The farming itself took shape outside the report. In January 2020 Nordland county approved a 40-hectare barnacle site at Storsteinvika in Hemnes municipality, over the objections of the municipality, which said the activity would create neither jobs nor tax income, according to iLaks. In June 2020 Equimar, a company owned by the founder's father, Rolv Aakerøy, which farms barnacles for Planktonic on Helgeland, applied to farm 50 tonnes of barnacles a year at Slåtterøya in Alstahaug, with the founder Håvard Aakerøy saying the company was "zeroing in on the technology we will use in large-scale production", according to iLaks (translated). By December 2025 the company described a mix of wild harvesting, "scraping barnacles from rocks in suitable coastal areas", and rope-based farming similar to mussel lines, according to The Fish Site. How much of its raw material comes from farms is not public.

What Planktonic Has Achieved Since the Award

The customer base has widened from Norway's cleaner fish farms. At the end of 2019 Planktonic supplied all ballan wrasse producers in Norway, Scotland and Wales and a third of Norwegian lumpfish and haddock farmers, according to iLaks. In 2023 it named cod in Norway and kingfish in the Netherlands and Denmark among its markets, according to WeAreAquaculture, and by 2025 it was targeting sea bass and sea bream in Turkey and the Mediterranean, according to The Fish Site. The same article cites trials in Greece in which fish fed barnacle nauplii as larvae had lower feed conversion ratios after 20 months in sea cages. Those trial data have not been published in a form that could be checked.

Public figures on output disagree. In October 2023 WeAreAquaculture reported that the Trondheim factory produced "one tonne of product per day"; in December 2025 The Fish Site wrote that "current production sits around 20 tonnes per year". The two figures cannot both describe the same annual output, and neither source explains the difference.

The Money

The accounts, filed with the Brønnøysund Register Centre and published on Purehelp and, for 2023 to 2025, in the register's own open accounts data, show a business that grew and then stalled. Sales revenue rose from NOK 15.97 million in 2019 to NOK 36.32 million in 2023 and fell to NOK 34.17 million in 2025. Total operating revenue, which also counts "other operating income", was NOK 26.03 million in 2019, the same figure iLaks reported in July 2020. Other operating income was largest in 2019 to 2021, at NOK 10.07 million, 13.25 million and 9.14 million, the years of MAXIPLAN; the public summaries do not say what it consists of.

Planktonic made a net profit in three years since 2016: NOK 1.59 million in 2017, thanks to a tax credit despite an operating loss, NOK 0.96 million in 2021 and NOK 2.33 million in 2023. In 2025 it lost NOK 8.03 million, with an operating loss of NOK 9.08 million, as depreciation rose to NOK 10.16 million. Capitalised development costs on the balance sheet grew from NOK 4.93 million in 2023 to NOK 11.23 million in 2025. The wage bill in the income statement fell from NOK 13.54 million in 2022 to NOK 4.53 million in 2025, while the register shows 52 employees in September 2026; the public data do not explain the gap.

The 2025 round repaired the balance sheet. Paid-in equity rose by NOK 28.47 million to NOK 85.54 million, total equity reached NOK 51.52 million, and cash rose from NOK 1.12 million to NOK 7.61 million, while long-term bank debt fell from NOK 13.19 million to NOK 10.99 million.

Why Europe Should Care

The MAXIPLAN application tied the project to the EU's Blue Growth Strategy and Atlantic Action Plan, and the Commission's strategic guidelines for EU aquaculture for 2021 to 2030 ask for a more resilient and competitive sector. Larval feed is a weak link in that chain. More than 90% of traded artemia cysts come from wild populations, and the World Bank expects demand to rise from about 3,500 tonnes to over 5,000 tonnes by 2035, according to the Global Seafood Alliance. Supply shocks are not hypothetical: in 1999 the Great Salt Lake harvest fell so low that it would "not even satisfy 20 percent of global demand", the Global Seafood Alliance reported at the time.

A feed farmed on European coasts is the kind of alternative those policies favour. Two caveats apply: Planktonic is in Norway, which is not an EU member but took part in Horizon 2020 as an associated country, and its volumes remain small next to a market measured in thousands of tonnes of cysts.

The Verdict

Planktonic has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.