Why an anchovy shortage will make your next slab of salmon more expensive – Nationwide
Love them or hate them, anchovies can end up making your grocery bill more expensive.
An important ingredient in fish feed – the feed used to feed farmed seafood, pigs and even chickens – split fish is in short supply.
The retail price of fish in Canada was already up nearly 4 percent in May compared to last year, according to Statistics Canada, while canned salmon rose 14.3 percent over the same period.
At the same time, the prices of fish food are increasing dramatically.
A metric tonne of Peruvian fishmeal costs US$2,389.42 at the end of May, according to the International Monetary Fund. That’s up 12.5 percent from $2109.25 last month.
Food economist Mike von Massow of the University of Guelph calls anchovies an “important part” of the food supply chain, as nearly two-thirds of the fish people buy – including salmon – is farmed using fishmeal as feed.
“This [anchovies] it is an important food source for Canadians and the world. And so it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, well, anchovies, who cares? I don’t particularly like them,’ but they are an important part of that food value chain in products that are, in fact, in high demand,” he says.
“So we have this factor that greatly increases the purchase of goods, but has the potential to have a significant impact on the prices, especially, of fish.”
Here’s what’s going on.
Related Videos
Anchovy supply under pressure
Anchovies are considered high in protein and rich in nutrients such as Omega-3 acids compared to their small size, which explains their important role.
Peru is the world’s largest supplier of anchovies, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and accounts for about a fifth of the world’s supply.
Get daily world news
Get daily Canadian news delivered to your inbox so you never miss the top stories of the day.
But the high demand for anchovies worldwide has led to overfishing.
As a result, fewer mature fish are caught, leaving smaller, or juvenile, fish. If fish are not given enough time to reproduce, they are at risk of extinction if the fishing industry does not reduce their catch.
This has led to fishing quotas, where Peruvian industries, like others, are limited by regulators on how much they can fish at a given time.
In April, the Peruvian government introduced a revised limit on the fishing of anchovies for indirect consumption (as fish food) which was 36 percent less than in 2025.
This means that the global supply of anchovies is under pressure not only because fewer mature fish are caught due to overfishing, but also because government regulations limit the catch allowed each season.
“Currently, the shortage is due to the fact that they have reduced the amount of fishing, because there are too many small fishers.
The same biological challenges affecting the supply chain have also led to higher beef prices in North America. Although for different reasons than anchovies, it speaks to the sensitivity of biological needs in food and agriculture that can have a financial impact on consumers down the line.
“If you harvest too many of those small fish, you don’t have an industry, you don’t have a source of additional stocks, so it becomes a long-term problem,” said von Massow.
Substituting all or part of anchovies for fishmeal ingredients, however, changes the nutritional composition of the food and, consequently, the aquaculture and livestock that consume it.
Von Massow says this is why anchovies are “difficult to replace.”
“We can do small degrees of replacing fish protein with other plant-based proteins such as soy, in fact, a cheap source of protein. The problem is the profile of that protein is not the same, so we don’t get the same type of fish product in it,” he said.
“We’re getting low yields of fish, but we’re also getting low levels of omega-3 in fish like salmon. And that’s one of the reasons we eat that salmon. So you have this problem that you can grow that fish with other proteins, but then it’s not going to be the same product.”
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
