Farm Animal Welfare Fund — Humane Fish Slaughter

Humane Fish Slaughter RFP

Supports humane fish capture and slaughter innovation to improve welfare in aquaculture and fishing operations.

Eligibility · Global — open worldwide

Coefficient Giving's Farm Animal Welfare Fund issued this Request for Proposals to accelerate the development of technologies that materially improve welfare of fish at capture and slaughter. The program responds to a documented gap: over 100 billion farmed fish are slaughtered each year, of which only approximately 0.5% — primarily salmon — are reliably stunned before death using percussive or electrical methods. For the more than one trillion wild-caught fish harvested annually, welfare conditions are worse still, with asphyxiation in air or low-oxygen onboard tanks the prevailing method. Coefficient has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in scientific research since 2014 and frames this RFP as addressing a pressing and underfunded challenge in animal welfare.

Coefficient expects to spend approximately $7 million USD on this RFP, with potential for substantially more depending on application quality. The scope is broad: from exploratory research to advanced prototype development up to TRL 7–8. Priority areas include solutions practical on fishing vessels with limited power and space, solutions for small wild fish caught in large quantities, alternatives to or improvements upon existing electrical stunning technologies for farmed fish, and approaches in the immediate pre-slaughter pipeline that do not involve stunning. Eligible applicants include individuals, universities, research institutions, small and large companies, and public sector research organizations globally. Successful teams will likely combine expertise in biology, electrical or mechanical engineering, aquaculture, and animal welfare science.

Letters of Intent of 2,500–3,000 words are due July 1, 2026, submitted via a Fillout form. LOIs must cover approach overview, research and project plans, organizational structure, timeline, and budget. Coefficient pays a $4,000 honorarium to applicants whose submissions meet a minimum quality standard or rank in the top 125 qualifying LOIs, whichever threshold is reached first. From the LOI pool, five to thirty shortlisted candidates will be invited to submit full proposals by September 30, 2026. There is no stated nationality restriction.