Love them or hate them, anchovies could find yourself making your grocery bill costlier.
A key ingredient in fishmeal — feed used for farmed seafood, pigs and even chickens — the polarizing fish is briefly supply.
The retail price of fish in Canada was already up about 4 per cent in May in comparison with a 12 months earlier, in response to Statistics Canada, with canned salmon up a whopping 14.3 per cent over the identical time span.
At the identical time, fishmeal prices are skyrocketing.
A metric tonne of Peruvian fishmeal cost US$2,389.42 at the top of May, in response to the International Monetary Fund. That’s up about 12.5 per cent from $2109.25 a month earlier.
Food economist Mike von Massow of the University of Guelph calls anchovies “a critical part” of the food supply chain, since roughly two-thirds of the fish people buy — including salmon — is farmed using fishmeal as feed.
“This [anchovies] is a very important source of food for Canadians and for the world. And so it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, well, anchovies, who cares? I don’t particularly like them,’ but they’re a very important a part of that food value chain for products which are, actually, very much in demand,” he says.
“So we now have this factor that’s further up the provision chain, but that has the potential to significantly impact the costs of, particularly, fish.”
Here’s what’s happening.
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Anchovy supply under pressure
Anchovies are considered high in protein and wealthy in nutrients like Omega-3 acids relative to their small size, which explains their critical role.
Peru is the world’s largest supplier of anchovies, in response to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and it makes up a couple of fifth of the worldwide supply.
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But high demand for anchovies worldwide has led to overfishing.
Consequently, fewer mature fish are caught, leaving younger, or juvenile, fish. If fish populations aren’t given enough time to breed, they risk extinction if fisheries don’t reduce their catches.
This has led to catch quotas, where industries in Peru, like others, are limited by regulators on how much they’ll fish at a given time.
In April, the Peruvian government launched a refreshed fishing quota for anchovies used for indirect human consumption (like with fishmeal) that was 36 per cent lower than in 2025.
This implies the worldwide supply of anchovies is under pressure not only because fewer mature fish are being caught resulting from overfishing, but additionally because government regulations further limit the catch allowed per season.
“The shortage is, currently, because they’ve cut quotas on fishing, because there are too many juveniles of their catch. So what we’re doing is we’re attempting to incur some shorter-term pain in order that we now have a long-term sustainable harvest of anchovies,” he says.
Similar biological challenges affecting supply chains have also led to higher beef prices in North America. Although for various reasons than with anchovies, it speaks to the sensitivity of biological necessities in food and agriculture that may have financial impacts on consumers down the road.
“If you happen to harvest too lots of those small fish, you don’t have the factory, you don’t have the source of additional stocks, so it becomes a much longer-term problem,” says von Massow.
Substituting all or a part of anchovies for fishmeal ingredients, nonetheless, changes the dietary makeup of the feed and, due to this fact, the aquaculture and livestock that devour it.
Von Massow says because of this anchovies are “difficult to substitute out.”
“We will do small degrees of substitute of fish proteins with other plant-based proteins like soy, which is, actually, a less expensive source of protein. The issue is the profile of that protein isn’t the identical, and so we don’t get the identical type of fish product on it,” he says.
“We get lower yields of fish, but additionally lower levels of omega-3 in fish like salmon. And that’s one among the explanations we eat that salmon. So you’ve this conundrum that you would grow those fish with other proteins, but then they wouldn’t be the identical product anymore.”
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