Kona Butterfish Company is seeking at least $5 million in investments to set up a new sablefish operation on Hawaii Island.
The company's co-founders Don McQuarrie and Hiroshi Arai plan to farm sablefish, also known as butterfish, at the Hawaii Ocean Science and Technology, or HOST, Park, operated by the state of Hawaii and located off Queen Kaahumanu Highway in Kailua-Kona.
McQuarrie and Arai are also working with the James Beard Award-winning Chef Alan Wong, who is an advisor for the company.
Initially, the company is seeking $5 million to farm 300 tons of butterfish per year, with plans to eventually raise another couple million and increase annual production to 500 tons per year, Arai said.
"There's a lot of interest, but so far it's a little bit too big for individuals [or] somebody outside the industry," Arai said.
The company has permits to import the fish, as well as approval from the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, or NELHA, for a pilot site at HOST Park, McQuarrie said.
Since 1974, Hawaii has invested more than $130 million to create HOST Park, according to NELHA's website. NELHA operates the park, which has three sets of pipelines that deliver cold, deep sea water from up to 3,000 feet below the ocean's surface, as well as warmer surface water, which can be mixed to achieve temperatures conducive to aquaculture.
Ideal temperatures for growing sablefish are 12 degrees Celsius when they're small, 10 degrees Celsius for adults and 6 degrees Celsius to get them to spawn, McQuarrie said.
"All of those water temperatures are available [at NELHA's HOST Park] without heating or chilling," he said.
Currently, HOST Park has equipment capable of pumping up to 100,000 gallons of water per minute throughout the 900-acre park, according to NELHA's website.
The wild catch of butterfish has declined from 90,000 tons in the 1970s to 25,000 tons in 2022, according to Kona Butterfish Company.
In 2003, McQuarrie ran a pilot program at NELHA's HOST Park that included butterfish, he said.
"The fish grew very well," McQuarrie said. "We had a test market — a number of high-end restaurants, primarily on the Big Island. It was only a pilot that we ran. Our initial investors decided that aquaculture was not their game, so we ended up selling our company to Troutlodge. They worked for a while, and then decided they didn't want to carry on in Hawaii with sablefish."
In 2018, McQuarrie joined forces with the late Syd Kraul, owner of Pacific Planktonics at NELHA, and Arai, the CEO and general manager of Big Island Abalone, to try again. When Kraul died, Dave Mowry, the new owner of Pacific Planktonics at the time, stepped into the role.
"We've worked with NELHA quite extensively to promote our pilot and we've got a preliminary proposal accepted for a 10-acre site at NELHA," McQuarrie said. "In the interim, we've been looking for money to get the thing going, and of course, it's not the actual best time to be doing that, with banks crashing and Covid and everything else."
The Iceland-based Eyrir Invest is interested in the company but is not willing to be the first investors, McQuarrie said.
For more information, visit konabutterfish.com.
