A NORTH Yorkshire farm which is home to the only ethical caviar producer in the world has welcomed a visit from a German investor.

KC Caviar is a family venture which farms around 300 sturgeon fish on a site in South Milford, near Selby.

The business is the only firm in the world to operate under the licence of a patented process for extracting eggs for caviar, without the need to kill the fish as per the normal practice.

Since registering KC Caviar in 2012, directors and father and son team Mark and John Addey started producing their first batches of the delicacy in October last year, and are now supplying renowned chefs across the region including Andrew Pern and Tommy Banks.

Talking about the development of KC Caviar, John Addy said: “Although the patent had been achieved and the process developed it hadn’t been fine tuned.

“We had to go down the road of putting it in to practice. It had been developed in a university we were putting it into a farm environment for the first time.”

The business has recently welcomed investment from German-based life science consultancy Ensymm to help it increase its market share and in turn step up production.

Alongside the investment KC Cavair welcomed Ensymm’s managing director Dr Pedram Dehdari.

He was shown around the farm’s polytunnels which house the fish, and feature climate controls to mimic the different seasons in the wild.

Mr Dehdari said: “We are delighted to be involved with the KC Caviar journey and would hope to bring more investment to the UK.

“This is a strategic investment, after taking into consideration how the world is moving towards vegetarian, organic, ethical, sustainable and high value food products.

“KC Caviar ticks all those boxes and has a unique place in the market, not only in the UK but globally.

“We will be including them in our news letters and placing them in the IcefreshQ (seafood distributors) catalogue.”