This exporter in Nouadhibou is owned by Olvea Omega Solutions, a subsidiary of Olvea Group. It is listed as a partner of the FIP, along with Olvea Omega Solutions.¹ Although this site is not a fish oil plant, it serves as a crucial depot, receiving large volumes of fishmeal—and especially fish oil—from Mauritanian facilities for distribution across Europe. Winterisation was the “largest buyer of fish oil locally, buying, storing and exporting oil from the majority of surrounding processors,” according to “Feeding a Monster,” a Greenpeace report from 2021.² The Olvea Omega Solutions website listed the Nouadhibou location as a sourcing, storage, and onsite laboratory facility.³ A Friend of the Sea certification for this location expired in April 2024, although parent company Olvea said its certificate, which was renewed in 2025, also covered the site.⁴

Winterisation Mauritania relies partially on species that are unsustainable. Among the fish species processed by this plant are flat and round sardinella from Mauritanian coastal waters, according to a Fishery Improvement Project Tracking Database accessed in February of 2025.⁵ In 2023, these two species were classified as “overexploited” in this area, according to the FAO.⁶ This means that fish have been caught faster than they could reproduce, shrinking the population and reducing their capacity to recover to healthy levels.

Parent company Olvea said in correspondence with The Outlaw Ocean Project that Winterisation Mauritania does not use fish species which are not authorized for fishmeal and fish oil production under Mauritania’s regulations, and that it fully supports Mauritania’s efforts to promote the use of byproducts to produce fish oil in order to make the industry more sustainable.⁷

In 2017, Winterisation Mauritania joined the Mauritania small pelagics FIP, which is a program that claims to help make participating fisheries more sustainable.⁸ Plants and their parent companies routinely use involvement in FIPs and other such programs as evidence of their environmental stewardship, even when participation in them does not result in actual improvement in the health of the relevant fishery. As of 2024, Winterisation remained part of the FIP, despite the declining health of these species in the region.⁹ Subsequently, critics have questioned whether the Fishery Improvement Project makes genuine progress toward better fishery management or if it is merely a form of greenwashing.

“An FIP is a long-term project and regular progress is not linear,” Olvea Group told The Outlaw Ocean Project by email, and Mauritania is based in a region where small pelagic stocks migrate between several countries, making it more difficult to monitor and manage stock. Implementing an FIP is not an easy process nor does it quickly achieve a result, but FIP programs in Panama and Ecuador show that they take time to have an impact, the company added.¹⁰

The Olvea Group was the focus of criticism by the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, which has accused the company of greenwashing and gaming the FIP accreditation system.¹¹ A 2022 documentary by Arte TV followed the oil tanker Key Bay as it picked up fish oil from Nouadhibou, Mauritania and transported it to the Olvea company in Fécamp, France, and to Mowi in Valsenet, Norway. Mowi is among the world’s biggest salmon producers and supplies to other companies such as Auchan, Carrefour, Lidl, Aldi, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Monoprix. The documentary said that, for a single kilogram of organic salmon consumed in Europe, up to four kilos of wild fish are required to feed it.¹² This same ship was the focus of later reporting by the Financial Times, which also tracked the oil tanker Key Bay as it made another delivery of fish oil from Mauritania to a Norwegian fish feed factory owned by Mowi. This reporting highlighted food insecurity in West Africa and the extent to which Europe in general and Norway’s salmon industry in particular were culpable.¹³

Olvea Group also said that as a result of a series of regulations implemented by Mauritania concerning quotas and prioritizing human consumption, fishmeal and fish oil exports declined significantly from 2018 to 2024, while the small pelagics exported for human consumption increased over the same period. Half of the fish oil exported in 2024 was sent to Asia and half to Europe, Olvea said, citing reporting by the South China Morning Post.¹⁴

Olvea Group added that European vessels also have access to the Mauritanian waters as a result of the fisheries partnership agreement between the EU and Mauritania, allowing European vessels to catch more than 240,000 tons per year of small pelagics without any landing nor transformation in Mauritania.

Olvea was criticized during a 2023 food security workshop in Ghana organized by the FAO, the Global Roundtable on Marine Ingredients, and the Iceland Ocean Cluster. The workshop cited “growing global demand for fishmeal and fish oil” and the “proliferation of factories in the region, which use sardinella” among the factors that led to West Africa’s food crisis.¹⁵

Winterisation Mauritania’s parent company, Olvea Group, told The Outlaw Ocean Project that it did not participate in the workshop and its participants “reached a consensus based on nine points, which include the recognition that the socio-cultural context in Western Africa is very important and the level of reliance on aquatic food consumption varies across between countries.”¹⁶