The feed came first: De Heus's Vinh Long plant and Vietnam's offshore aquaculture

On July 22, 2026, Dutch feed giant De Heus inaugurated a feed plant dedicated to marine fish and cold-water fish in Thanh Duc ward, Vinh Long Province, in southern Vietnam. The site covers 29,300 square meters, with an initial production capacity of 84,000 tonnes per year, reportedly expandable by design to 168,000 tonnes per year. Attending the ceremony were Vo Van Hung, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Environment; Tran Tri Quang, Chairman of the Vinh Long Provincial People's Committee; and Raisa Martau, Consul General of the Netherlands in Ho Chi Minh City. A robust supply line targeting marine fish has now run through Vietnam's aquafeed network, which has long revolved around catfish and shrimp. Given that Japanese sourcing of white fish is beginning to lean toward Vietnam, what happens on the feed side serves as a leading indicator for gauging a production region's real capability.

What was built in Vinh Long is a plant for "feed for marine fish and sturgeon"

The plant is located in the Song Dong area of Thanh Duc ward, Vinh Long Province. The production lines consist of automated equipment brought in from Europe and the United States, and quality control is ISO 22000、ASC Feed、BAP run in line with three standards, according to multiple outlets. Its production targets are described as marine fish, cold-water fish, and high-value aquatic species, aiming at a segment separate from the mainstays of Vietnamese aquaculture such as catfish and shrimp.

The capacity figures differ from outlet to outlet. Bao Chinh phu distinguishes between an initial 84,000 tonnes per year and a design capacity of 168,000 tonnes per year, while the originating articles in Nong nghiep va Moi truong and Dan Viet report 84,000 tonnes as the design capacity. Even within Bao Chinh phu, some articles describe 84,000 tonnes as the design capacity in the body text, so the figures are not consistent. Reading both straightforwardly, the posture is that the plant starts at 84,000 tonnes for now and was built first as a facility that can be scaled up to nearly double as demand is assessed. The investment amount does not appear in any of the reports.

Not "Vietnam's first marine-fish feed plant"

When this project is introduced in Japanese, it tends to be summarized as "Vietnam's first dedicated marine-fish feed plant," but that reading does not hold up against the original sources. Bao Chinh phu writes that it is "the first of De Heus's plants in Vietnam to specialize in making feed for marine fish," with De Heus firmly as the subject. A statement that it is the first in all of Vietnam was not found in any of the government or industry reports we checked.

This distinction has practical meaning for buyers. If it were the country's first such facility, it would mean that compound feed for marine fish had previously been unavailable within Vietnam, which would greatly change the assessment of the region's maturity. In reality, the accurate picture is that De Heus, a well-known foreign feed maker, has added a marine-fish and cold-water-fish segment to its portfolio. It is closer to the truth to read this as a product-line expansion the company reached over 15 years, having been in Vietnam for about 20 years and having started its first aquafeed plant in Vinh Long in 2011.

Against 84,000 tonnes of feed, marine-fish production is 48,000 tonnes

What best illustrates the character of this plant is the gap that appears when it is matched against the composition of Vietnam's marine aquaculture. In 2024, total marine aquaculture output was about 832,000 tonnes, up 5.0% year on year, but the breakdown shows mollusks accounting for the majority at 460,000 tonnes, while marine fish come to just 48,000 tonnes. Spiny lobster is 4,000 tonnes.

Mollusks are raised without being fed. In other words, the market that De Heus's new plant addresses is effectively the 48,000-tonne marine-fish segment. Onto that, 84,000 tonnes of feed per year is layered from the initial capacity alone. One caveat here: the weight of feed and the weight of fish are not one to one. Fattening a fish by 1 kg requires more than 1 kg of feed, so the two cannot simply be subtracted from each other. Even so, the initial capacity of a single plant alone reaches a volume that could feed the entire country's marine fish—that order of magnitude does not change. It makes more sense to read this as a facility that secured in advance a segment set to grow, rather than an expansion added to keep pace with rising demand.

Yen conversions are calculated at about 163 yen per US dollar and about 162 VND per yen (as of July 2026). The 2024 hectare figure is the mollusk farming area; fish and spiny lobster are managed by cage volume. The 2030 targets are based on the marine aquaculture development plan approved on October 4, 2021.

The average annual growth rate from 2020 to 2024 exceeded 8.5%. To reach 1.45 million tonnes by 2030 at this pace, increasing mollusk production alone is not enough; there is no path other than mass-producing high-value marine fish offshore. The feed plant being built first makes sense in that sequence.

The temperature shown by a ceremony lined with a deputy minister, a province chief, and a consul general

Johan van den Ban, President of De Heus Vietnam and Asia, framed the Vinh Long investment as "part of De Heus's long-term strategy of walking alongside the development of Vietnam's marine aquaculture and cold-water fish industries." The explanation is that this is a product-line strategy, not a one-off capital investment.

Deputy Minister Vo Van Hung said that marine fish and cold-water fish are a field of great potential for Vietnam, with its long coastline and distinctive ecological zones, and added that the industry's focus is shifting from volume expansion to quality, added value, and sustainability. The effect of connecting the feed supply network, farming, research and technology transfer, processing, and consumption into a single chain is explained in the body of the articles. It can be read that the administration treats feed as upstream infrastructure. Tran Tri Quang, Chairman of Vinh Long Province, praised the plant for boosting production capacity and helping farmers gain access to advanced nutrition solutions, and touched on Vinh Long's role in attracting industrial investment for agriculture and aquaculture and on the formation of a value chain across the entire Mekong Delta. Note that positioning this plant as "a key node in the input-materials supply chain of the aquaculture industry" comes from the body text of the news outlets, not from the Chairman's remarks, so it is inaccurate to cite it as the administration's words.

Raisa Martau, Consul General of the Netherlands in Ho Chi Minh City, said that De Heus's continued expansion of investment in Vietnam is an expression of the "great potential" that Dutch companies hold in Vietnam's agricultural sector. The lineup of a central-ministry deputy minister, a provincial leader, and the consul general of the investing country at the same ceremony shows that this plant is placed in the context of national goals and foreign-investment attraction, beyond a single company's production facility.

What Japanese sourcing should watch shifts to the "provenance of the feed"

For Japanese buyers, the significance of this plant lies not in output but in the chain of certification. The ASC Feed and BAP standards that the new plant upholds are standards for the feed itself. Under the ASC system, the requirements for the feed used when a farm obtains ASC certification are said to be examined, so whether certified feed is available domestically ties directly to whether a production region can obtain international certification. The region's cost structure and the hurdle for obtaining certification differ between a situation where certified feed had to be shipped from abroad and one where it can be loaded domestically in Vinh Long.

This move meshes with changes already underway on both the hardware and institutional sides of fish cages. In Khanh Hoa Province, efforts to replace wooden rafts with HDPE cages are advancing (Ditching wooden rafts for HDPE cages: Khanh Hoa's bid for typhoon-resilient marine aquaculture), and on the institutional side, national standards for marine aquaculture are being established, opening the way to insurance and financing (Vietnam's first national standard for marine aquaculture, a move to break down the walls of insurance and financing). The three prerequisites of cages, standards, and feed have come together over roughly two years. When the Japanese side evaluates a production region, the items to check go one level deeper, from the former "which sea it was caught in" to "what it ate as it grew, and to which standard that feed was made."

In terms of the sourcing timeline, what should move now is contact, not purchasing. Since the feed side has been prepared in advance to a scale matching the country's current fish volume, marine fish in enough quantity to consume all of it will come to market a few years from now at the earliest. If you go to negotiate only after the volume appears, the terms will already have been set by buyers who entered earlier. Grasping now who controls both the cages and the feed leaves wider room for negotiation later.

What it means that cold-water fish share the same line

Easily overlooked is that this plant houses both marine fish and cold-water fish together. Vietnam's cold-water fish are mainly sturgeon and salmon, raised in high-elevation inland areas such as Lam Dong and Lao Cai. Production areas where European-native fish have taken hold in headwater regions have also emerged, such as the Krong No River basin that flows through Dak Nong Province (A European fish lives at the headwaters: the real picture of the Krong No River sturgeon-producing area）。

The weak point of this field has long been feed. As of 2021, the industry magazine Thuy san Viet Nam noted that in cold-water fish farming, feed accounts for more than 60% of production costs and that roughly half of salmon-farming feed is imported, and reported that the number of provinces handling cold-water fish had reached 25. The figures are five years old, but it is hard to imagine the structure of import dependence itself being resolved in a short time. If cold-water fish feed is mass-produced domestically, it will bite into the heaviest part of the cost.

There is distance from Vinh Long in the Mekong Delta to the northern mountains and Lam Dong, and how far logistics costs will close the gap with imports cannot be judged without seeing actual prices. Still, the very design of combining marine fish and cold-water fish on a single line expresses De Heus's read that these two are Vietnam's high-value aquaculture.

Basic information to grasp before negotiations

The priority marine-aquaculture regions assumed as supply destinations are cited as Khanh Hoa, Phu Yen, Kien Giang, and Quang Ninh, among others. When planning the order in which to visit production regions, checking the overlap between areas where cage renewal is progressing and the logistics zone this feed reaches wastes less effort.

Summary

The new plant in Vinh Long is not Vietnam's first marine-fish feed plant but a facility through which De Heus has added a marine-fish and cold-water-fish segment to its Vietnam business. However, the fact that a single plant's initial capacity of 84,000 tonnes is large enough to cover almost single-handedly the feed needed to raise the current 48,000 tonnes of marine-fish production shows that this investment was made with an eye on the national target of 1.45 million tonnes by 2030, not on today's demand.

There are three moves Japanese sourcing managers should make next. First, confirm with Vietnamese marine-aquaculture operators that are trading partners or candidates the brand of feed used and its ASC Feed/BAP compliance status. Second, list farms in Khanh Hoa and Phu Yen that have completed the switch to HDPE cages, at the stage before volume appears. Third, for cold-water fish, actually verify in next term's quotes how domestic feed mass production affects prices. In a production region where the feed arrived first, the few years until the fish arrive become a preparation period for negotiations.

References: Nông nghiệp và Môi trường／Báo Chính phủ／Báo Chính phủ／Nhân Dân／Dân Việt／Báo Tin tức／Tuổi Trẻ／Thủy sản Việt Nam