The caviar renaissance is well underway. But what will it take to make sturgeon farming sustainable?
Ali Bolourchi is discerning with a seafood menu, careful to analyze the specifications: Key West pink shrimp, Alaskan king crab, oysters harvested from a tiny farm in the northeast corridor of the Puget Sound. But for the most expensive item on the list, caviar, traceability is rare. There are times when no one knows where it comes from — a mystique that somehow adds to its cachet. But the smoke and mirrors don’t work on Bolourchi, president of Tsar Nicoulai, the only certified sustainable sturgeon farm in the United States. And he’s hoping they won’t work on a growing number of 21st century caviar enthusiasts, either.
A year into what foodies nationwide have declared a great caviar renaissance, it’s clear this is not just a revival of the 1970s and 80s, when fish eggs belonged to the rich and famous. The caviar of the 21st century reflects the democratization of the internet age. Caviar’s TikTok-ification has paved the way for Ritz cracker playdate snacks and Doritos topped with fish eggs, and friend groups of all stripes taking joint “caviar bumps.” Global consumption patterns bear out caviar’s trendiness — the market is expected to reach $3.13 billion this year, and steady growth is expected to continue through 2029.
It used to be that the rarer the species, the more desirable. To make caviar “sustainable” was thought to cheapen it. But now that caviar has been steadily increasing in popularity, attitudes around its origins are changing. No longer does it have to be harvested from endangered species and flown in on the black market from Russia or Iran to be considered top-notch. It can be farmed here, from fish indigenous to the U.S., using the aquaculture equivalent of regenerative methods. But without a robust certification system to standardize ethical practices across the industry, sustainable brands like Tsar Nicoulai have few means to differentiate themselves from other caviar purveyors that import their product from dubiously regulated foreign farms. In total, the U.S. imported 95,000 kg of caviar from China in 2020.
There’s been a global crackdown on sturgeon poaching since those black market days of the 80s, including a U.S. ban on Beluga caviar from the Black Sea basin and Caspian Sea in 2005. But the overall ecological sustainability of the industry — reliant on the unfertilized eggs of giant, slow-growing, dinosaur-like fish — still lags behind. While there are plenty of institutional guardrails around the farming of other finfish like salmon, very few sustainability certifications exist for sturgeon farming. Bolourchi said he has been pestering the Aquaculture Stewardship Council for years to create a sturgeon farming standard, but there have been no takers. (Representatives from the council did not respond to a request for comment from Ambrook Research.)
The most rigorous standards that exist right now have been set by private companies like Whole Foods, which carries Tsar Nicoulai products. Through that partnership, Ecocert USA, a separate company that works with Whole Foods to assess an individual producer’s “environmental and social” impact, developed its first-ever sturgeon farming standards at the Tsar Nicoulai farm around 2018, Bolourchi said.
But he wants a standard that could be applied to all U.S. farms. “We want to do something that could be more of a broad brush, and allow other domestic farms to be able to utilize a way of differentiating themselves from imported products, especially from Latin America and Asia, where practices in terms of forced labor and feeds and antibiotics and growth hormones, none of that stuff is regulated,” he said.
Despite a lack of oversight, Bolourchi continues to bet big on sustainability as a 21st century selling point, and it seems to be working. Aside from the lucrative partnership with Whole Foods, top chefs nationwide source from him, as does Fishwife, the internetty tin fish retailer, which stocks Tsar Nicoulai at $99 an ounce in their signature cutesy packaging. Bolourchi also recently acquired nearby caviar farm Sterling — more than quintupling the size of his operation — and has invested heavily in sustainability projects like farm-wide solar panels and a state-of-the-art water-recycling system.
Every part of the fish gets used — from the collars and burnt ends that get made into paté dip, to skins that become chicharrones.
Tsar Nicoulai is also what Bolourchi calls “an A-Z operation,” where they not only spawn sturgeon and make caviar, but they have a fishmonger team to process sturgeon meat, and an onsite smokehouse. Every part of the fish gets used — from the collars and burnt ends that get made into paté dip, to skins that become chicharrones.
The water recycling system, also called a recirculating aquaculture system or RAS, has been fine-tuned over years, and now allows Tsar Nicoulai to recycle the majority of its water. It cycles nutrient-rich effluent from the fish ponds into a separate pond, where they’ve experimented with growing hyacinth — “Mother Nature’s filters,” as Bolourchi calls them. And, since 2018, they’ve been piping that water into a 24,000 square-foot greenhouse, where the staff has grown hydroponic lettuce and is testing out growing basil and microgreens, according to Bolourchi.
“For Tsar Nicoulai, there aren’t older farms, we are the road map,” he said. “Sometimes there’s some trial and error but … sustainability is a real tangible thing.”
Bolourchi’s next crusade is to boost the visibility of where exactly his products come from — Sacramento County — based on the belief that Tsar Nicoulai’s traceability is an asset, not a handicap.
Those uninitiated in sturgeon lore tend to be shocked by the volume of caviar produced from this inland region of California, which represents more than 80 percent of all domestic production. But Sacramento is actually where it all began. Russian-born scientist Serge Doroshov, known as both the “father of sturgeon aquaculture” and “the Baryshnikov of marine biology,” landed at University of California, Davis, in the late 1970s, and received California Sea Grant funding to research the local white sturgeon, native to the nearby Sacramento River. Within a few years, the original Sterling and Tsar Nicoulai farms were established, and their close relationships with the university have remained strong.
“Our efforts and our thoughts and methodologies will not change, because sustainable for the environment is sustainable for business.”
Today, Jackson Gross, aquaculture specialist at the UC Davis cooperative extension, offers scientific support to virtually every sturgeon farm in the state, including Tsar Nicoulai. He considers them to be a “very progressive farm,” noting that their partnership with Whole Foods requires them to adhere to strict feeding protocols. Still, Gross believes existing certifications fail to take a more holistic and farmer-first approach to sustainability.
Ecocert, for example, doesn’t take quality of life into account, Gross says. He believes true sustainability would be achieved by minimizing fish stress and improving worker safety, two things that will feature prominently in the welfare chapter he’s currently writing for the third edition of the Hatchery Manual for the White Sturgeon. From pioneering more humane end-of-life care for the fish, to using machine learning and AI to determine a fish’s sex without taking it out of the water, Gross is hoping to establish less invasive techniques that will not only improve welfare but also the quality of the end product.
Current certifications may be helpful marketing tools, he says, but they don’t actually make you a better farmer. “My farmers care about their animals,” he added. But there’s no certification for that.
With the Sterling acquisition, Tsar Nicoulai grew from 40 total acres to nearly 300. It’s a big job for production manager Austin Gabrielse, who moved to Tsar Nicoulai from Sterling just several months before the acquisition in October. He oversees the 62,000 white sturgeon on site, a number that will soon grow to more than 120,000 during the spawning season.
“It’s been a massive undertaking, but the existing [Sterling] people who stayed on are great individuals who have cared long and hard for the fish that are here,” he told Ambrook Research.
“Is it perfect? No. But they’re striving to do better.”
Rapid growth is often antithetical to sustainability, but Gabrielse hopes the acquisition will be an opportunity to modernize Sterling’s vast facilities and reduce waste. “I look forward to seeing the care and quality of life increase for these fish,” he said.
Gross confirmed that, compared to many other farms, Tsar Nicoulai is getting a lot right. “They’re not the only ones out there doing this, but they’re constantly striving to do better,” he said. “Is it perfect? No. But they’re striving to do better.”
Bolourchi agrees with Gabrielse that the Sterling operation “needs a little bit of love,” and he acknowledges that the additional acreage is “a lot of responsibility.” But maintaining a low environmental impact will always be a priority. “Our efforts and our thoughts and methodologies will not change, because sustainable for the environment is sustainable for business,” he said. “They can work together.”
In caviar’s past life, that ethos wouldn’t fly. But for anyone hoping to enjoy sturgeon for years to come, it’s a bump in the right direction.
