India's Feed Ingredient Exports to Norway Hit $154 Million, Growing 14% Year-over-Year

Call it the invisible backbone of European aquaculture. Norway, the biggest producer of fish in Europe and the world's number one seafood exporter, used 2.26 million tonnes of salmonid fish feed in 2024. Few downstream players trace where those raw materials originate. The answer, increasingly: India.

Trade data from Norway reveals that $153.9 million worth of animal feed ingredients, residues, and preparations flowed from India to Norwegian buyers in 2025, up from $135.1 million the year prior. That's a 14 percent surge in a sector most commodity traders overlooked until recently.

The story is dominated by a single, unglamorous product: legume flour. Bran and flour milled from lentils, chickpeas, and other pulses destined for aquaculture — now $153.7 million of the total Norwegian import bill — has become India's fastest-growing export to Nordic feed mills. The main ingredients used in Norwegian fish feed are fish oil, fishmeal, soybean protein concentrates, rapeseed oil, and wheat gluten. But plant-based alternatives are muscling in. Why? Cost, sustainability, and the sheer volume India can produce.

A Sector Built on Remnants, Worth Billions Globally

Animal feed ingredients rank fourth in India's export portfolio to Norway, behind pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and leather. But the growth story here is different. While traditional commodity markets flatten, this sector is accelerating — driven by a confluence of European demand for sustainable protein sources and Norway's enormous scale in salmon and other aquaculture operations.

Global context: India currently represents one of the largest feed producers in the world. As of 2023, India is the largest producer of milk globally and ranks high in meat and egg production, which significantly influences the feed market. That domestic industrial muscle — the crushing mills, the processing capacity, the logistics spine — translates directly into export firepower.

India holds the 7th-largest share of the global animal feed ingredients market, competing against Britain, Denmark, Brazil, Iceland, Peru, Russia, the Netherlands, China, and Germany. In Norway specifically, India captures 8.3% of the total $1.85 billion import market for these products. For a developing-economy supplier, that's formidable ground.

The Competitive Landscape: Where India Stands

Britain leads Norwegian imports at $273.9 million, followed by Denmark at $246.3 million and Brazil at $204.6 million. But here's what matters: India and Britain are nearly matched — India at $154 million, Britain at $274 million. That gap is narrowing fast at 14 percent annual growth.

British suppliers benefit from proximity and established relationships. Danish exporters leverage biotechnology credentials and regulatory familiarity. Brazil floods the market with soy residues. But India competes on volume, price, and a product the market increasingly wants: plant-protein alternatives for aquaculture feed.

Within the sector, sub-products tell the competitive story. The category dominated by legume flour — representing 99.9 percent of Indian exports — faces competition from oilcake residues (sunflower, soy) and pet food preparations. India's legume flour advantage stems from one fact: India is the biggest producer as well as consumer of pulses in the world. That means processing infrastructure, regulatory expertise, and supply chain maturity other exporters simply cannot match.

Where It's Made: Industrial Clusters and Indian Geography

This trade doesn't happen by accident. It flows from three critical industrial clusters:

• Indore, Madhya Pradesh — The soy processing heartland. Madhya Pradesh is the largest pulses producing state in India, also known as the Pulse Bowl of the country. Mills here crush soybeans and legumes into high-protein meal for animal feed. Two of India's largest integrated agribusiness firms are headquartered here.
• Rajkot, Gujarat — Guar cluster, home to Vikas WSP Ltd. Vikas WSP Ltd. is a major producer of guar gum powder, guar splits, and guar meal, serving food, oilfield, textile, mining, and industrial applications. Vikas WSP Limited manufactures and sells guar gum powder in India and internationally. It offers guar products and polymer for the food, cosmetics, explosives, mining and minerals, oil fields, paper, pharmaceutical, textile, and tobacco industries, as well as for animal feed and wildfire control applications. Guar meal is a specialty feed ingredient.
• Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra — Logistics and export hub, where crushers and feed compounders pack products for global shipment.

The two listed companies driving this export flow are powerhouses in their own right. Ruchi Soya is India's leading FMCG Company, India's number one cooking oil and soy food maker and marketer. It is also the highest exporter of soya meal, lecithin and other food ingredients from India. Adani Wilmar Limited exports its products to the Middle East and Africa, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and internationally. The company is headquartered in Ahmedabad, India, and is involved in a wide range of activities, including the production, refinement, and sale of various oils such as soybean, palm, sunflower, and blended oils. It also offers specialty and lauric fats for ice cream and confectionery, wheat flour, rice, pulses, sugar, besan, atta, soya chunks, bakery fats, and ready-to-cook khichdi.

Jobs and Livelihoods: The Multiplier Effect Across Indian Communities

This $154 million export corridor supports more than employment figures suggest. India's broader food and agricultural production sector employs 2.17 million workers across the crushing, milling, and packaging stages. That's the direct count. The indirect employment — transport, logistics, storage, equipment maintenance, input supply — pushes the real number dramatically higher.

Using standard sector employment multipliers, an estimated 10 direct jobs per 100,000 tonnes of output generate 18 additional indirect jobs. Applied to India's legume and oilseed processing complex feeding Norwegian buyers, this translates to approximately 2,000 direct jobs in processing and packing, with another 3,600 jobs in logistics, trading, and support services.

Women represent 30 percent of the workforce in food processing and animal feed sectors. 80 percent of suppliers are small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) — family-owned crushers, local mills, contract manufacturers serving the larger exporters.

The geographic story matters. Indore, Madhya Pradesh — the epicenter of legume and soy processing — pulses when export orders come through. Rural communities in surrounding districts in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra, where farmers grow the raw pulses and soybeans, see direct income uplift. Madhya Pradesh alone accounts for the bulk of India's pulse production, making this state the employment nerve center for this trade corridor.

For mill operators in small towns like Sriganganagar, Rajasthan (home to Vikas WSP), Norwegian orders mean capacity utilization, wage payroll expansion, and local infrastructure investment.

The Tariff Advantage: How TEPA Shaped This Growth

Tariffs matter less for this sector than for others, but they're not invisible. The applicable basic customs duty rates on animal feed ingredients ranging from 9 to 24 percent are still in play domestically. But from a trade flow perspective, India benefits from stable, non-preferential access to Norwegian markets — no tariff shock, no sudden restriction.

What accelerated growth is simpler: Norway imports large volumes of agricultural commodities, such as used for fish feed. With Norway being the biggest producer of fish in Europe and the world's number one seafood exporter, the country used 2.26 MMT of salmonid fish feed in 2024. This feed had an estimated value of $3.16 billion, of which $2.8 billion was imported. That staggering import bill — and the pressure on Norwegian feed mills to source cost-effectively — has opened doors for Indian suppliers offering competitive plant-based protein.

The Forward Look: Structural Tailwinds

India's animal feed sector is positioned for sustained expansion. India currently represents one of the largest feed producers in the world. And Norwegian demand will only intensify. Norway currently imports over 90 percent of the raw materials in salmon feed. A high proportion of this is soy, which could be human food.

For Norwegian aquaculture to remain profitable — a total of 2.8 million tonnes of Norwegian seafood worth NOK 175.4 billion was exported last year — feed costs must stay reasonable. That calculus pulls in suppliers like India, where labor costs, agricultural surplus, and processing scale create a structural pricing advantage.

The 14 percent annual growth in India-to-Norway animal feed ingredient trade reflects not a temporary spike, but a deepening of production networks. As European sustainability standards tighten and plant-based alternatives gain acceptance, India's legume and oilseed processors will anchor those supply chains even more firmly.

For mill operators across Indore, Rajkot, and Maharashtra, this is no longer a peripheral market. It's becoming a pillar of export revenue and livelihoods—one that hums quietly while the headline-grabbing sectors command attention.