Tru Shrimp Creates Two New Companies But Zero Shrimp in Madison

Still not changing Lake Madison is Minnesota’s Tru Shrimp, which promised in 2019 to build a new shrimp farm and start making Madison richer in 2021. It’s 2022, and there’s still no shrimp farm in Lake County. Last winter, Tru Shrimp proposed seeking investors on the stock market, but in February it postponed its $15-million initial public offering. The company has reduced the scope of its project but still hasn’t drawn the investors it needs to start building.

Tru Shrimp CEO Michael Ziebell made the long drive from Balaton last Monday to tell Madison’s Rotary Club that the company has what the Madison Daily Leader calls, with complete journalistic objectivity and none of my mock quotes, “an exciting new vision“, which is the same three-product plan laid out in Tru Shrimp’s January SEC filing: make shrimp for people to eat, sell shrimp waste to make pet food, and grind up shrimp exoskeletons to make chitosan, which has antimicrobial qualities that have had South Dakota Biotech pushing the firm since 2019. The only new development appears to be that Tru Shrimp is spinning those non-human-edible product lines into separate companies, Tru Protein and Tru Chitosan, for which Tru Shrimp has cool new logos but apparently no incorporation papers on file with the secretaries of state South Dakota or Minnesota.

So now instead of just one shrimp company stringing it along, Madison now has three. CEO Ziebell told the Madison Rotary that Tru Shrimp, Tru Chitosan, and Tru Protein all plan to start building their production facility in Madison next year.