Thanks Angelina :)
In our Guesstimate model, the overhead costs to date are included in the bottom right (something like cell L15 if it were a spreadsheet) - between the total cost of the stunners, and the final overall cost titled SWP Total Expenses.

So the cost-effectiveness we report on our website factors in this cost, but when we're fundraising for marginal dollars, we often try to highlight the fact that marginal dollars are more cost-effective than the average dollar (which is unusual for an animal charity). But I agree that this is something of a judgement call, and the complex reality of marginal dollars is somewhere between those two numbers.

Hope that's helpful!

Good question Michael!

Our current estimate is that we’ll buy 50 stunners, but I’d take that number with a huge pinch of salt, as there are a number of factors that could influence how many stunners we ultimately need to buy (probably the most important one is that we want to focus on getting retailer commitments as our goal going forward (rather than a specific number of stunners), and it’s not super clear to us what the adoption curve will look like for retail commitments as we work with retailers outside of the UK).

We regularly evaluate our HSI program, and update our estimates if we think it’s appropriate. It could turn out we need fewer than 50, it could turn out that we need more. I guess a message I would like to emphasise is that we will use marginal funding in the most cost-effective way we can, whether or not the marginal funding goes towards a specific stunner, or towards more general corporate engagment work to reach commitments.

Thanks Angelina :) Yeah just to confirm The Navigation Fund (TNF) plans to fill SWP's funding gap left by OP, at least through the end of 2026. Our OP grant was set to end at the end of 2025, so the TNF commitment equates to approximately 1 year of funding for us.

OP is SWP’s biggest funder, representing 80-90% of our overall funding. So this grant covers SWP’s overhead expenses, in addition to a few electrical stunners.

We're keen on diversifying our funding, in order to not continue relying on a single funder, as well as to raise more money in order to deploy more stunners through our Humane Slaughter Initiative (SWP is in the unusual position in the animal movement that marginal dollars are often more impactful than the average dollar donated to SWP - as this funding can go directly to expanding the HSI program).

Hey Vasco! Interesting question, unfortunately I don't know the answer...

My sense is no, as you say, the intervention increases costs without an increase in productivity for the producers. But ultimately an incentive here is continued market access, which I'm sure an economist could model whether or not this could lead to an increase in the number of shrimps (over time).

Another point to emphasise though - it's my sense that the intervention should be modelled as electrical stunning replaces air asphyxiation, rather than (perfectly implemented) ice slurry. Ice slurry slaughter is just a very difficult thing to do correctly in practice (and I’ve not seen it happen) - as even if at some point the shrimps are submerged in ice for a short period of time, it's often not long enough to kill them (~30seconds).

Hey Angelina! Sure - happy to answer :) 
Yes we were affected by the Good Ventures announcement, and our current funding update is actually very similar to that of Wild Animal Initiative, as in:

• The Navigation Fund (TNF) plans to fill SWP's funding gap left by OP, at least through the end of 2026.
• We're keen on diversifying our funding, so as not to continue relying on a single funder

However we differ in that our budget is smaller than that of WAI, and the majority of it is put toward a single program (HSI)

Thanks so much Vasco for your work on this! As with MHR in the past, we really appreciate folks doing in-depth analyses like this, and are very appreciative of the interest in our work :)
 

In the spirit of this week’s Forum theme, I wanted to provide some more context regarding SWP’s room for more funding.

Our overheads (i.e. salaries, travel/conferences) and program costs for the India sludge removal work, are currently covered by grants until the end of 2026. Meaning that any additional funds are put towards HSI. (For context, our secured grants do also cover the cost of some stunners, but HSI as a program is still able to absorb more funding).

Each stunner costs us $55k and we ask the producers we work with to commit to stunning a minimum of 120 million shrimps per annum. This results in a cost-effectiveness of ~2,000+ shrimps helped / $ / year (i.e. our marginal impact of additional dollars is higher than our historical cost-effectiveness).
 

We’re having our annual team retreat (which we call “Shrimposium”) next week, during which we hope to map out how we can deploy stunners in such a way as to catalyse a tipping point so that pre-slaughter stunning becomes the industry standard.

We’ve had some good indications recently that HSI does contribute to “locking-in” industry adoption, with Tesco and Sainsbury’s recently publishing welfare policies, building on similar wins in the past (such as M&S and Albert Heijn).

This has always been the Theory of Change for the HSI project. Although we’re very excited by how cost-effective it is in its own right, ultimately we want to catalyse industry-wide adoption - deploying stunners to the early adopters in order to build towards a tipping point that achieves critical mass. In other words, over the next few years we want to take the HSI program from Growth to Scale.

I would be surprised if post-Shrimposium our targets regarding HSI required less funding than our current projections. In other words, though I don’t currently have an exact sense of our room for more funding, I’m confident SWP is in a position to absorb significantly more funding to support our HSI work.
 

If anyone wants to reach out to me directly, you can contact me at aaron@shrimpwelfareproject.org. You can also donate to SWP through our website, or book a meeting with me via this link.

While hustling might work for some people (at least for a while), I have certain reservations about the start-up hustle culture. More often than not, it makes people focus too much on the hours and intensity of their work instead of the value they create. This regularly leads to burnout among founders, and the image of the stereotypical hustling founder might discourage people from pursuing entrepreneurship when they would have made great founders.

I really liked this section :)

I think this idea of a hustling co-founder means I sometimes have a hard time communicating how "chill" my life often looks day-to-day

Absolutely - as I've hopefully made clear above, shrimp paste is one of the biggest areas in the shrimp welfare space that we think another project could have an impact!

There are a couple of reasons why SWP is not working on it:

• The contexts are very different
  • Our current focus projects all operate within the context of: whiteleg shrimps, in aquaculture, being globally exported/imported. 
  • Shrimp paste on the other hand, is likely to be different on all counts: Japonicus shrimps, Wild-capture fisheries, domestic Southeast Asia/Southern China markets
  • We essentially see this as requiring a different organisation with specialised knowledge
• We decided not to abandon whiteleg shrimps altogether to instead set up a "Shrimp Paste Project"
  • We felt much more sure that whiteleg shrimps would be tractable, and tractability was very important early on, as there were a lot of unknowns
  • We think the world needs both a Shrimp Welfare Project and a Shrimp Paste Project (and likely more!), so fully pivoting from one to form the other we didn't think would make sense
  • We think our focus plays well to the co-founder's (and now the wider teams) strengths - whereas a shrimp paste org would likely benefit from co-founders with different skills and deeper cultural insights

As a final note, I think it's worth mentioning that Rethink Priorities' initial research on shrimp welfare informed the Charity Entrepreneurship team and led to our creation. We're super thankful to both and I'm really hopeful that RP's latest work leads to similar outcomes :)

Hey Angelina - thank you so much for your kind words! It’s really heartwarming to see your enthusiasm and interest in our work :)

Shrimp Size
The corporate producers we're working with supply "headless peeled shrimps" (mainly to Northern Europe) which tend to be smaller on average for this market

This is different for example to "head on, shell on shrimps", which are typically larger (and are mainly supplied to Asia and Southern Europe)

As we sign more commitments globally, we'll likely want to supply ranges per producer depending on the market they supply

Adjusting for predicted follow-through
We decided not to discount our estimates in this first model because we're not sure how different this will look in practice between other types of corporate commitments and ours (i.e. comparing "hens & cage-free", to "shrimps & stunners")

The contexts seem different enough (producers, working in aquaculture, who are being bought equipment) that we don't think we can reasonably predict how this will translate 

Our plan is that hopefully in a ~year's time we will have had some stunners in operation for long enough that we can accurately report on adherence rates, and update our numbers