Happy Thursday, everyone, and welcome to Atlantic Sapphire's monthly update for May. I am Johan Andreassen, and with me to present today is Karl Øyehaug.
Good morning and good afternoon. For those of you who are new to the format of our monthly updates, we will open up for a Q&A at the end of the presentation. You type your question in the Q&A tab, but note that we will only answer questions from attendees that have identified themselves with name. Johan.
The April biomass gain came in with an uptick to 430 tons versus 400 tons in April. We harvested approximately 140 tons, and as we only harvested sufficient volumes to fulfill our program business commitments. The filleting line commissioning remains on track and is still expected to be done by June. Hopefully we will start running the first fish over the new line in the beginning of July. The fact that we are pushing volume to be harvested until the new filleting line is operational makes financial sense, as we will capture better yields to fillets, as well as lowering our processing costs. We are expecting to reach a phase I steady state biomass gain and harvest volumes sometime during Q3. Fish mortality rates were very low in the month of May.
Even though the farm is in general continuing to operate stable in May, our production was impacted the two first weeks of the month due to a malfunctioning of a well pump on our upper Floridan well. This led to salinity fluctuations in the farm and reduced feeding until the issue was resolved and stabilized. The reason why appetite drops with salinity fluctuations is that the fish spends energy adopting to the its osmoregulation system to the new environment. The opportunity loss related to this is estimated to be around 40-75 tons of gain in May. Both our Floridan aquifer wells has had pump issues the last two months, and even though this is not dangerous for the fish, it does impact our water stability.
We have improved our protocols and looking into other pump setups to reduce downtime during maintenance going forward. The new batches continue to outperform the initial batches, with the biggest batch being about 2.2 kilos on average after 18 months, with a lot of fish being over 3 kilos. We did a small test harvest of approximately 8,000 fish of B1 in late May, and as expected, we didn't see any elevated maturation in that harvest. If you look at our actual growth so far this year, we are tracking approximately 10% under our internal growth model. We have clear action items identified that gives us comfort that we will reach the targeted growth rate over time.
The [devil] is in the details to get there, and the focus is to execute on what we plan to do without delays that reduce growth, as well as always keeping everything stable. We now have only approximately 80 tons left of the old fish. Out of the 2,700 tons of total biomass, it only represents approximately 3% of the biomass. By end of May, we had approximately 65% of our planned phase I biomass stocked in the facility. In May, we had an average JEA index of 0.25 across the whole farm. The reason why it's a little bit lower than the month before is because we took more tanks in use in May that had been empty before. This is natural as we continue to build biomass.
With lower densities on average, the JEA index is reduced somewhat as you have more cubic meters of tank volume to divide the biomass gain on. We are happy that we will soon have a fully stocked farm where all tanks are in use. As we have said before, our steady-state projection for JEA index is 0.47.
Moving over to price achievement for May. In line with earlier guidance, we have had a relatively high share of downgrades year to date linked to the harvest of the initial batches. In May, we had an increase in the all-in price achievement month-over-month to $8.1 per kilo. The price achievement for our superior 3 kilo plus fish was $4.4 per kilo. We expect an uptick in price achievement with the consistent harvest of new batches over the next months. If you look at our store overview, it shows around 2,000 retail locations across the U.S. and a stable number month-over-month. This will increase once we ramp up harvest in Q3 this year. As of end of April, we have spent a total of $68 million on phase II construction.
As we discussed in the last monthly update, the global challenges related to longer lead times and cost inflation for construction globally have worsened, which has delayed the process of getting an updated budget and timeline in place. Like we talked about last month, our engineering team is working hard on value engineering to limit the effect on CapEx and timeline to the greatest extent possible. To get an updated budget in place that we are comfortable with. With the most recent developments, some more time is needed to get to a revised construction budget and schedule nailed down. Our focus right now is to ensure we have full control of the cost and quality of the project, which explains why it's the right thing to spend some more time now to ensure we maximize the return on the phase II project as a whole.
Our photo of the month is a bird's-eye view from the construction site once again. This photo is taken in mid-May and shows further progress on the erection of the phase II tanks, while you can also see our phase I facility on the left-hand side. In other updates, we are proud to announce that we've released our first consumer impact report on our brand webpage, bluehousesalmon.com. This was released in connection with World Oceans Day yesterday. The report is meant to be a consumer-friendly, condensed version of the full ESG report that we released back in April. The focus, as always, is on educating consumers on the advantages of Bluehouse Salmon technology to keep our oceans blue and our planet green, and can hopefully be a nice resource to all of our stakeholders.
Finally, we have a comment that after the DKK 180 million Denmark insurance settlement was reached in May, we have since received the insurance proceeds on our account and can consider that case closed. With that final comment, we will open up for questions. To remind everyone, if you have any questions that you'd like to ask, then please go ahead and type them in the Q&A question box, and then we will answer them one by one. Please also remember to state your name when asking the questions. Our first question comes from Axel Jacobsen at Arctic Securities. His question is, how many tons of the new batches were harvested in May? Any explanations for why the new batches are tracking 10% below the internal growth model?
I could start with the first part, and then I'll hand it over to Johan. We harvested approximately 20 tons from the new batches in that initial harvest. Johan, you want to talk a little bit more about the performance of the new batches as it relates to the 10%?
Yeah, sure. It's a mix of a lot of things. As I said, the devil is in the details to reach the full utilization of the animal. Basically, when we have delays, for example, in the fish transfers, if we have downtime in our heating system, there's a lot of smaller things that happens during operations that somewhat has implication on our ability to feed all the fish in the facility optimal at any given time. This is just. It's nothing dramatic. This is just us becoming even better at executing on day-to-day operations. We know where the shoe is tight.
We have a clear path to improve month by month here.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Bjørn Mykland. Can you elaborate a bit more on price achievement for the test harvest and what kind of price premium you expect to Norwegian or Chilean salmon for the new batches going forward? I can start here and then you can fill in, Johan. We did that harvest actually at the end of the month, so it has not been. We don't have that price achievement as part of the May update. What we have shared in the past, and what we can definitely reiterate is that with the new batches, we expect much less downgrades versus what we had before. The premium price, which is what we sell all the 3-kilo superior fish for, is a price that we expect will increase gradually throughout the year.
This is of course helped by the fact that we have very strong multi-markets, but most importantly, that we have good quality fish, which makes it easier for us to comfortably go to our customers and take up the price. We really wanted to get to a product that we're really proud of before we do that move. Do we expect price achievement to continue to increase basically for all the next months going forward. Then I guess when it comes to the premium versus commodity salmon, we continue to expect that we will have a very stable price achievement that isn't so closely linked to whatever movements we see from the underlying commodity prices. The same stability that we've seen historically is also what we expect in the future.
I don't know if you want to add anything.
I can add that, you know, the program business that we have in place was negotiated last year. Obviously we haven't kind of done any new deals since the spot price skyrocketed in Europe and in the U.S. I think it's fair to assume we haven't had $11 average price achievement in our business plan for five years and five years ago, the commodity price was maybe half of what it is today. I think it's fair to assume that over time we will lift our prices on the superior fish as well. Yeah, I think there's an opportunity there for $2-$3 of tick over time. Not in the next quarter, but over a little bit more time.
It all depends also on how the commodity market is moving.
Perfect. Our next question comes from Christian Olsen Nordby at Arctic Securities. Will the insurance settlement primarily be used to repay the DNB $25 million three-month loan, or do you expect to get an extension on this loan? As you correctly point out, Christian, there is a June 30TH maturity date for that $25 million loan. Something is going to happen on that end, but we don't have any news to report on exactly how that will look as of now. We'll get back to everyone on that most likely later in this month. Our next question comes from Alex Jones at the Bank of America . His first one is. Can you give more details on the clear action items to improve growth rates?
The second one: Why have you removed the chart showing quarterly phasing of committed CapEx? Johan, would you like to go first on the-
Yeah, I think we can talk about this for a long time. I propose instead of spending a lot of time on this call is that we can offer you, Alex, a more in-depth conversation on this offline. As I said, it is small details in how we operate the farm, you know, keeping everything stable, making sure all the fish lights are on, the feeding systems are working. It is just a sum of many small things that we need to become a little bit better at. I don't think we can go into more details on this call.
Perfect. Your second question, Alex, on why we're not showing projections on the CapEx. That is simply because we are in the middle of nailing down an updated CapEx stretch, and we don't want to show numbers before we have them all with enough certainty. Rather than showing something that is going to change and is going to look a little bit different than what we project, we'd rather just finalize that work and then get back to you all with new updated projections. That is why we kept it to the historical spending in this monthly update. Perfect. I think so far we don't have any more questions. I'll give it a minute or so if there are any more questions here towards the end.
Seems like that was it.
Seems like that was it. I'll just thank everyone for once again joining our monthly update call, and look forward to present the next monthly update in four weeks or so. Johan.
Very good. No, thank you everyone for attending the call today, and enjoy the nice summer evening.