Niels Alsted, Executive Vice President of BioMar, has worked with fish since he was a teenager. Born in Denmark, he left school with the intention of a career in fish farming. “After high school I started as a fish farmer. I worked as a fish farmer in freshwater trout and learned all the basics about growing fish.”
After working on the fish farm for three years, Niels decided he wanted to study fisheries in a more academic sense, and did a Master of Fisheries. ”I ended up in Tromso where they have an institute for fisheries. So I stayed in Tromso in the very north of Norway for almost six years.”
After completing his masters degree, Niels returned to Denmark as the head of a department for fish processing including fish meal and oil at the North Sea Science Centre. He decided to begin a technical PhD on fish nutrition at the Danish Technical University, and also worked as an associate professor at the University of Aalborg.
“I was working with fish meal production, fish meal quality in relation to aquaculture. I did that for five years, from 1982 to 1987, and in 1987 I decided to approach a feed company here in Denmark which was called at that time Dansk Ørredfoder, which is now BioMar.”