Leow Ban Tat, Founder/CEO of ACE, posing in front of the Eco-Ark
On Sunday, June 7, Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong mentioned in his speech about the country’s plan to diversify its sources of food as a measure to tackle the challenges that might rise up in a post-COVID-19 pandemic world.
Even before the global health crisis, as a land-scarce country, Singapore is highly dependent on foreign produce with 90 per cent of consumed food being imported, according to a Channel News Asia report. As part of an effort to tackle this challenge, Singapore Food Agency has laid plans to have 30 per cent of food to be produced locally by 2030.
This is certainly the kind of challenge that we expect to see local startups to rise and tackle —and ACE-Fish Market is one of those companies.
Founded by CEO Leow Ban Tat, The Aquaculture Centre of Excellence (ACE) offers two products: A floating containment fish farm called Eco-Ark, and a B2C e-commerce site to distribute the fishes from the farm.
Through these products, in addition to helping the country self-produced its own food supply, ACE also aims to do it a more eco-friendly manner.
The company is a recipient of a grant from the Agriculture Productivity Fund (APF), which is run by the SFA.
From the farm to your table
The Eco-Ark’s eco-friendliness principle works in several directions: From the lack of chemicals that it is using to treat the fish stock, the quality of water being discharged, to the use of solar energy to power its facility off the coasts of Pulau Ubin.
A press statement by the company detailed that farming fish in ozonated water greatly reduces the mortality rates of fish stock.
“We took an approach to make sure that the water is clean so that the fish can grow healthily without interference … [It is] different than what most farmers are used to in Singapore and the rest of the world,” Leow explains to e27 in a phone interview.
“The growing-more-on-less-and-faster approach that people tend to use when talking about food security will be meaningless if they don’t have the tech to achieve it,” he continues.
ACE projected the total harvest for 2020 to come to 166 tonnes, which is claimed to be 20 times more than the average minimum production level of coastal farms.
Once the fishes are being harvested, it is distributed through ACE Fishmarket, the e-commerce site runs by the company.
The site plays a crucial part in the company’s farm-to-fork approach, which covers every step from production to processing to delivery. While its launch was planned before the pandemic hit Singapore, the circuit breaker has provided the platform with momentum as more customers went online to get their groceries needs.
Also Read: Same same, but different: How local foodtech startups are driving Singapore’s public health goals
“But obviously the corona has given us a little bit more practice in being able to get a subscriber and getting notice from the market … The circuit breaker is indeed a blessing for us,” Leow says.
The past and the future
When asked about how food security in Singapore is going to be treated after the pandemic, Leow says that COVID-19 has taught the country “a great lesson” on the importance of innovation in ensuring food security.
“We aim to reach 30 per cent of local food production by 2030 … that is only 10 years from today,” he says.
Since the beginning, to help increase local food production has always been Leow’s ambition, the one that led him to create the Eco-Ark technology. To achieve that, in the near future, he aims to build a new hatchery for his fish farm.
Using the skills that he attained from his previous experience in the oil and gas industry, Leow aims to design the hatchery on a lift dock, built on a stable surface on the sea floor.
“If I can have a centralised hatchery, warehouse, and processing in just one spot … then I think I will be able to help Singapore achieve the true reality of 30 by 30,” he closes.
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Image Credit: ACE
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