Love them or hate them, anchovies could end up making your grocery bill more expensive.
A key ingredient in fishmeal — feed used for farmed seafood, pigs and even chickens — the polarizing fish is in short supply.
The retail price of fish in Canada was already up about four per cent in May compared to a year earlier, according to Statistics Canada, with canned salmon up a whopping 14.3 per cent over the same time span.
At the same time, fishmeal prices are skyrocketing.
A metric tonne of Peruvian fishmeal cost US$2,389.42 at the end of May, according to the International Monetary Fund. That’s up about 13 per cent from $2109.25 a month earlier.
Food economist Mike von Massow of the University of Guelph calls anchovies “a critical part” of the food supply chain, since roughly two-thirds of the fish people buy — including salmon — is farmed using fishmeal as feed.
“So we have this factor that is further up the supply chain, but that has the potential to significantly impact the prices of, particularly, fish.”
Here’s what’s going on.
Anchovies are considered high in protein and rich in nutrients like Omega-3 acids relative to their small size, which explains their critical role.
Peru is the world’s largest supplier of anchovies, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and it makes up about a fifth of the global supply.
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But high demand for anchovies worldwide has led to overfishing.
As a result, fewer mature fish are caught, leaving younger, or juvenile, fish. If fish populations are not given enough time to reproduce, they risk extinction if fisheries don’t scale back their catches.
This has led to catch quotas, where industries in Peru, like others, are limited by regulators on how much they can fish at a given time.
In April, the Peruvian government launched a refreshed fishing quota for anchovies used for indirect human consumption (like with fishmeal) that was 36 per cent lower than in 2025.
This means the global supply of anchovies is under pressure not only because fewer mature fish are being caught due to overfishing, but also because government regulations further limit the catch allowed per season.
“The shortage is, currently, because they’ve cut quotas on fishing, because there are too many juveniles in their catch. So what we’re doing is we’re trying to incur some shorter-term pain so that we have a long-term sustainable harvest of anchovies,” he says.
Similar biological challenges affecting supply chains have also led to higher beef prices in North America. Although for different reasons than with anchovies, it speaks to the sensitivity of biological necessities in food and agriculture that can have financial impacts on consumers down the line.
“If you harvest too many of those small fish, you don’t have the factory, you don’t have the source of additional stocks, so it becomes a much longer-term problem,” says von Massow.
Substituting all or part of anchovies for fishmeal ingredients, however, changes the nutritional makeup of the feed and, therefore, the aquaculture and livestock that consume it.
Von Massow says this is why anchovies are “difficult to substitute out.”
“We can do small degrees of replacement of fish proteins with other plant-based proteins like soy, which is, in fact, a cheaper source of protein. The problem is the profile of that protein isn’t the same, and so we don’t get the same kind of fish product on it,” he says.
“We get lower yields of fish, but also lower levels of omega-3 in fish like salmon. And that’s one of the reasons we eat that salmon. So you have this conundrum that you could grow those fish with other proteins, but then they wouldn’t be the same product anymore.”
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