Frequently asked questions

It depends on the product. Typical MOQs are 50,000 for salmon eggs, 1 carton for live feed and 500 kg for seafood. Feed ingredients such as fish meal and vital wheat gluten move in full-pallet or container lots, and we will confirm the exact minimum for your item with the quotation.

Send a quotation request with the product, volume, destination port or airport and the delivery window you need. We reply with pricing, available Incoterms, the documentation set and the earliest shipping date; once you confirm, we issue a proforma invoice and book the shipment. No account is required to request a quote.Request a quote

Because a meaningful price depends on volume, destination, Incoterm, packaging and season — a Dubai air-freight pallet and a Rotterdam reefer container of the same fish are different commercial products. Quotations are prepared per enquiry and are normally valid for a stated period given on the offer.

Export invoices are normally issued in EUR or USD. Domestic Turkish sales are invoiced in TRY. The currency is fixed on the proforma invoice so the amount you approve is the amount you pay.

We provide free samples to corporate customers. Please request one via the contact form. Samples are sent for live feed, microalgae and feed ingredients; salmonid ova and fresh seafood cannot be sampled meaningfully in small volumes, so for those we share batch documentation and reference results instead.

Most enquiries are answered within one working day. Requests that need a fresh mill or hatchery price, or an air-freight rate to an unusual destination, can take two to three working days — we tell you which case yours is rather than leaving the request silent.

Volume and delivery-date changes are usually possible until the batch is allocated and the freight is booked. Split deliveries across several dates or destinations are common for live feed and feed ingredients; for salmonid ova the shipment is tied to a stripping and eyeing window, so changes there depend on the hatchery calendar.

VARS is a B2B supplier: hatcheries, grow-out farms, feed mills, distributors, retail chains and HORECA buyers. Aquarium retailers, breeders and clubs are welcome as trade customers, and our retail-format Artemia cans are made for exactly that channel, but we do not take single-unit consumer orders.

We ship regularly to 10+ countries across the EU, MENA, Far East and the Americas. Where a destination has import conditions we do not yet hold, we say so before quoting rather than after you order.

Live feed, microalgae and stocked feed ingredients usually ship within a week of order confirmation. Fresh Mediterranean seafood is harvested to order and leaves within days. Salmonid ova are the exception: they ship against the hatchery's stripping and eyeing calendar, so volumes are best reserved months ahead of the incubation date you are planning for.

By whichever the cargo tolerates. Eyed ova, fresh fish and HORECA orders go by air freight because hours matter. Frozen seafood, Artemia cysts, microalgae powder and feed ingredients travel by reefer or dry container, which is materially cheaper per kilo and perfectly safe for those products.

Artemia cysts ship in vacuum-sealed cans — 500 g and 1 kg for the retail and small-hatchery formats — packed into cartons. Vacuum sealing is what gives the cysts their long shelf life without cold-chain dependency, so the packaging is part of the product specification, not just protection in transit.

As eyed ova in insulated shipping boxes held at chilled temperature, moved by air freight and monitored with data loggers. Eyeing is the point at which the embryo tolerates handling, which is why ova are shipped at that stage and not earlier; on arrival they go straight to the incubator with minimal thermal shock.Salmonid ova solutions

Yes, and for HORECA and distributor accounts it is the normal arrangement. We agree a standing volume and delivery day, hold the allocation against it, and adjust ahead of seasonal demand peaks. Continuous programmes also make certification and documentation routine instead of a per-shipment exercise.

Import clearance is the buyer's side of the transaction under the Incoterms we normally trade on, but we supply the complete document set the clearance depends on, and we will work directly with your broker or forwarder. For border-inspection posts we have shipped through before, we can tell you in advance what that post typically asks for.

A commercial invoice and packing list, a health or veterinary certificate for products of animal origin, a certificate of origin, and the certificate of analysis or technical datasheet for the batch. EU-bound consignments are additionally pre-notified through TRACES. Any extra document your import permit names is added to that set.

Yes. Technical specification sheets and laboratory analysis reports are provided on quotation, and the CoA for the specific batch allocated to you is issued before shipment. If a parameter in your own specification is not on our standard analysis, tell us at quotation stage and we will confirm whether it can be tested for that batch.

Yes. Every batch carries origin traceability — for salmonid ova that means back to the broodstock and the hatchery of origin, for seafood back to the farm or catch and the processing facility. Traceability is what makes a health certificate meaningful; without it the certificate only describes paperwork.

Ova are sourced from certified, health-screened hatcheries and ship with the health certification their origin authority issues, covering the pathogens listed for the species and destination. Screening is done at the source hatchery under its own veterinary supervision — we supply the certificates with the consignment, we do not issue them ourselves.

TRACES is the European Commission's online system for notifying and certifying consignments of animals and products of animal origin entering the EU. Our EU-bound seafood is pre-notified through it, which is what allows the border control post to process the consignment against a certificate it can already see.

Revive Artemia cysts typically hatch at ≥ 85 %, and each batch is tested before dispatch so you know the figure for the lot you receive. That figure assumes the incubation conditions the product is specified for — 25–35 ppt salinity, 28–30 °C, strong aeration and continuous light. Hatching outside that band will underperform for reasons that have nothing to do with the cysts.Incubation guide

Hydrate the cysts in clean freshwater for about 30 minutes at 20–25 °C, then incubate in a conical vessel at 25–35 ppt salinity and 28–30 °C, with vigorous aeration and roughly 2,000 lux of continuous light, at a maximum density of 2 g of cysts per litre. Nauplii are ready to harvest after 20–24 hours. Below 25 °C the hatch slows markedly.Full incubation protocol

Switch the aeration off after 20–24 hours and wait a few minutes: the nauplii swim down toward a light held at the base of the cone while empty shells and unhatched cysts float. Draw the nauplii off from the bottom, rinse them thoroughly, then feed them out or hold them in chilled seawater at 4–6 °C. Shell fragments carried into a larval tank are a biosecurity and clogging problem, which is why the rinse matters.

Standard shell-on cysts if you want live swimming nauplii and have the hatching setup — aeration, light and salinity control for a full day. Decapsulated cysts if you want to feed directly: they are shell-free and analyse at 61.0 % protein, 24.5 % lipid and 502 kcal/100 g against 45–52 % protein and 10–14 % lipid for standard cysts, because no energy has been spent on hatching.Compare both formats

No. The shell is removed and the remaining embryonic membrane is fully digestible, so they are rehydrated and fed directly — 0 % shell contamination and no 24-hour hatching cycle. That makes them a practical fallback when hatching capacity is the bottleneck, and a clean option for systems where shell debris is a problem.

Cool, dry and sealed. Vacuum-packed cans hold their hatch quality without refrigeration, which is exactly why the format is used for long-haul supply. Once a can is opened, keep it airtight and dry — moisture and repeated air exposure, not time on the shelf, are what degrade hatchability.

Yes. Ova ship with handling and incubation guidance covering tempering on arrival, incubation temperature and the degree-day expectation to hatch for the species and batch. Our Japanese and Korean hatchery clients received exactly this support alongside the consignments, and it is part of the supply, not a paid extra.

Yes — RAS engineering support, rotifer enrichment protocols and hatchery troubleshooting are part of our solutions work, not a separate consultancy business. It exists because a customer whose larval survival is limited by their system, not their feed, is not helped by selling them more feed.Consulting & solutions

As the feed for the rotifers themselves and as green water in the larval tank. In our Aegean hatchery work, replacing legacy paste feeds with Super Fresh Chlorella SV-12 raised rotifer biomass roughly eightfold within 72 hours. Live microalgae also stabilise water quality in the culture, which is usually what limits density in practice.

Product-specific protocols, incubation and enrichment guidance, and direct access to our technical team for troubleshooting. For larger programmes we work through the problem with your biologist against your own production data rather than sending a generic datasheet.

Four families: live feed and microalgae (Artemia cysts, decapsulated cysts, Chlorella), hatchery solutions (Atlantic and Coho salmon eyed ova), feed ingredients (fish meal, vital wheat gluten, potato protein meal), and Mediterranean seafood for export (sea bass, sea bream, meagre, amberjack, trout, shrimp, olive flounder and more).Browse the catalogue

Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), Coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) and rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) as certified fertilized eyed ova, including diploid, triploid and all-female strains depending on species. Supply runs through a diversified network of certified hatcheries rather than a single origin, which is what keeps a season workable when one source is disrupted.

Sea bass and sea bream are the volume species, alongside meagre, amberjack, rainbow trout, shrimp, blue crab and oysters. Sizes, grades and presentation — whole gutted, fillet, fresh or frozen — are set per order, because a retail chain and an airline caterer need different things from the same fish.

Frozen fillets, fresh gutted and live, depending on destination and transit time. Live and fresh formats are air-freighted and suit the Far East market and premium HORECA; frozen suits longer routes and stock-holding buyers. All three ship with TRACES, CoA and ASC documentation.

For salmonid ova, yes and unavoidably so — supply follows the broodstock stripping and eyeing calendar, which is why ova are reserved ahead rather than ordered off the shelf. Mediterranean seafood is farmed year-round with size grades shifting through the season. Live feed, microalgae and feed ingredients carry no meaningful seasonality.

Yes. Both standard and decapsulated Artemia cysts are available in shelf-stable 500 g and 1 kg vacuum-sealed cans intended for retail sale, so a shop can stock the format its customers hatch themselves and the ready-to-feed format side by side.For aquariums & retailers

For distributors and retail chains ordering at volume, yes — custom can labelling and carton configurations are quoted case by case. Tell us the format and annual volume you are planning at quotation stage; below a certain run length private label costs more than it returns, and we will say so.

Yes — fish meal, vital wheat gluten and potato protein meal for feed mills and on-farm formulation, in full-pallet and container lots with the analysis for each lot. They sit in the same catalogue as the hatchery inputs because most of our customers buy across both.

Türkiye is one of the Mediterranean's largest producers of farmed sea bass and sea bream, and İzmir sits within reach of both the Aegean farming region and an international airport. That combination is what makes daily fresh air freight to the Gulf and short reefer transit into Europe practical from one origin.

The consignment must come from an EU-approved establishment, travel with a veterinary health certificate, be pre-notified in TRACES and enter through a designated border control post. We prepare that documentation set as part of the shipment; your side is the import declaration and the clearance at the post.Export to Europe

Health certification accepted by the destination authority, Halal certification, and a cold chain that survives the last mile in summer conditions. Our GCC HORECA supply ships daily by air into Dubai, Riyadh, Jeddah, Doha and Muscat with SFDA-compliant Halal and TRACES documentation.

Yes. The HS code, product description and document list are given with the quotation, before you commit, so your broker can check the tariff treatment and any import permit requirement while the offer is still open rather than when the cargo has already left.

The importer does — permits for live aquatic animals and fertilized ova are issued by the destination country's competent authority to a party established there. We supply everything the application needs from the origin side: hatchery approval details, health status, species and consignment specification.

Yes. We built the cold-chain corridor that delivered the first certified Atlantic salmon eyed ova into South Korea via Incheon, and we supply Japanese commercial salmon hatcheries with eyed ova and incubation support. Those routes are established, not exploratory.

Stand C-237 in Hall C at Fuar İzmir, 24–26 September 2026. The stand is on the west side of the lower hall, between ADEC and Form Atılım, facing Taçmak across the central aisle. The interactive hall map above will walk you there from the registration desk.

Yes, and it is worth doing — stand time fills up across the three days. Send us the products you want to discuss and your preferred day and we will confirm a slot and have the right person and the relevant documentation ready.Contact us

The four lines we supply year-round: live feed (Artemia cysts, decapsulated Artemia and fresh Chlorella), hatchery inputs, certified salmonid ova, and Mediterranean seafood for export. Bring your protocol or specification and we can talk through the fit rather than the brochure.

Visitor registration is handled by the organiser, Eurasia Trade Fairs, not by us — register through their site before you travel. The registration desk is in the foyer directly outside Hall C if you arrive without one.

Yes. Our office is in Konak, central İzmir, about 30 minutes from the fairground, and we are glad to host buyers who want a longer conversation than a stand allows. Arrange it with us in advance so someone is there to meet you.Contact us

A B2B aquaculture supplier registered in İzmir, Türkiye, supplying bio-enhanced live feed, hatchery inputs, salmonid ova, feed ingredients and certified Mediterranean seafood to producers and buyers worldwide.About VARS

Since 2017. The company started with rotifer trials in Türkiye and has grown into a customer and reference network across South Korea, Japan, the Middle East, Canada and Europe.

Yes — our project record covers Aegean hatchery rotifer optimisation, the first certified Atlantic salmon ova delivered into South Korea, Japanese hatchery ova supply and RAS modernisation work, with the operators named where they have agreed to be. For a like-for-like reference in your own segment, ask and we will introduce one.See project case studies

We work with distributors in markets where local stock and local support genuinely serve customers better than direct shipment. Send us your market, the segments you already sell into and the volumes you expect; exclusivity, where it is granted at all, follows demonstrated volume rather than preceding it.

A registered account keeps your quotation history, orders and shipment documentation in one place, stores your delivery addresses and lets you build a quote cart across the catalogue instead of listing products in an email. Quotation requests do not require an account.

Through the contact form, by email to info@varsco.com, or on WhatsApp for time-sensitive logistics questions. Our office is in Konak, İzmir, and we work across European, Gulf and East Asian time zones — say which one you are in and we will reply inside your working day.Contact us

Yes. We exhibit at the major international seafood and hatchery expos, and buyers evaluating a supply programme are welcome to visit us in İzmir and see the Aegean supply base. Arrange it ahead of time so the right technical people are there rather than only the commercial team.

Yes. Production data, formulations and commercial terms shared during a consulting or supply engagement are treated as confidential, and we will sign your NDA. Nothing appears in a case study without the client's agreement — which is why some of our project work is described without naming the operator.

From our own supply and hatchery work, from our suppliers' product analyses, and from established aquaculture practice. Figures published here — hatch rates, incubation parameters, proximate analyses — are the ones we quote commercially; where a number is a general species reference rather than a batch analysis, the page says so.

Please do. Questions from readers are where most of this FAQ came from, and a question that reaches us twice usually becomes a new entry here or an article in Aqua MAG.