Abagold featured on BizNews - The Food of Emperors

Our farm featured recently on BizNews, where our CEO, Tim Hedges, sat down with Chris Steyn of the Good Hope Project to discuss how Hermanus abalone came to be so prized across the Far East.

The interview traces our 29-year history, from a handful of experimental tanks to more than 3,400 tanks holding around 660 tonnes of Haliotis midae — South Africa's own abalone species, found nowhere else — raised over a five-year cycle in seawater pumped from our rugged coastline onto land.

Around 95 per cent of what we produce is exported, leaving Hermanus live, canned or dried for markets including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan, where abalone has long been, in Tim's words, "a very prestigious gift-type product", served at weddings, banquets and celebrations. At the first dried abalone auction we hosted in Hong Kong, every one of the 22 lots sold, fetching between US$400 and US$500 per kilogram.

The conversation also touches on what keeps us competitive for the decades ahead: converting the farm fully to solar and battery power, the Specialised Aquatic Feed facility we built in 2015 — which today also supplies the trout and pet food industries — and the roughly 420 people in permanent employment here, a mainstay for families in Hermanus. It was a fitting note in the year the Hermanus Business Chamber named us its 2024 Business of the Year.

Read the full article at BizNews.