“Be like water making its way through cracks. Adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it… If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
― Bruce Lee
Atarraya won’t stop until Sustainable American Shrimp Farming becomes the most successful protein industry in the US. This means embracing change when needed. In June 2024, we negotiated an off-take agreement for 200,000 lbs per year of the freshest shrimp possible for New York City.
The condition for signing the contract was to build a farm within 60 minutes of Manhattan and start harvesting before the year ended.
"Impossible!" some said.
"Challenge accepted," we replied.
Our flagship technology, the Shrimpbox Blue Whale, was not an option. Manufacturing and deployment take at least seven months to complete! And the best real estate we found was on the 3rd floor of an old industrial building in New Jersey.
Luckily, we had been working on something over the past year.
While our Blue Whale model is sturdy and movable, it is heavy and too rigid. We needed another option for situations that called for lightness and flexibility. We had a clear concept—and even a cool name for it: Shrimpbox Air. All we had to do was design it.
Our Shrimpbox technology consists of three main modules:
Microbial Communities Biotech that takes care of our water quality
A software platform that makes decisions and orchestrates our entire operation minimizing labor
Modular hardware, composed of six optimized engineering systems (the tank is just one of them)
So, we designed a new tank form while keeping everything else unchanged.
The Result:
On September 15th, we signed the commercial agreement and the lease for 40,000 sq. ft. on the 3rd floor of an industrial space in Plainfield, New Jersey—just 45 minutes outside Manhattan. Within 10 weeks, we: Renovated the space, adapted our design, tested it, manufactured in house the equipment, exported it from Mexico, installed it on-site, seeded, and hosted a party, before Thanksgiving.
Our customer is happy. We are happy—and proud.
We will always love our Blue Whale; it made us famous! It was the first iteration of our philosophy of hypermodularity in shrimp farming. It is still unmatched for farming shrimp outdoors, even in the froz en Indianapolis winter.
But for the NYC market, our strategy is that of a shapeshifter—our weapon of choice: The Shrimpbox Air.
Daniel Russek
Founder and CEO of Atarraya Inc
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