Made from invasive Peacock Grouper (Roi),
speared by hand on the Kona coast
For fifteen years, that meant a problem to solve. A truck full of fish nobody could sell, and a long list of calls to find them a home before they went to waste.
Kona Coast Nutrients is what we built so the answer would stop being a phone call. The fish that doesn’t belong on the reef becomes the thing that feeds what grows. Slowly, in small batches, the way the land actually works.
Roi — the peacock grouper, Cephalopholis argus — was introduced to Hawaiʻi in 1956 from Moorea. It never fit. A single roi consumes about 150 native reef fish a year.
And it can’t be sold as food. Ciguatoxin turns up in roi unpredictably, fish to fish, and there’s no cheap test — so no market will carry it. A fish with no value doesn’t get removed. It stays, and it eats.
That’s the problem this company exists to work on. Every fish in our barrels was speared by hand, from shore, on the Kona coast — one fish at a time, by divers who know exactly what they’re looking at.
The fish go into the barrels the same day they’re speared. Whole — nothing to a landfill.
Then we wait. The ferment is cold and slow, in small batches, and it is never heated. Most fish products for the garden are cooked emulsions; cooking is faster, but it breaks down the very things worth keeping. In a cold ferment, the amino acids, peptides, and enzymes come through intact.
This is a biostimulant, not a fertilizer. It doesn’t replace your regular plant food — it works alongside it, in the soil your plant food lands in. Diluted 1 part to 500, a two-ounce bottle makes about eight gallons.
Batch 001 is bottled: two-ounce amber glass, each bottle numbered by hand, carrying the same story you just read. We’re putting it in front of people in person, on the Kona coast, one conversation at a time — the honest way to find out whether this is worth making more of.
So there’s no cart on this page and no price list. If you’d like a bottle from a future batch, the waitlist below is the door.
A business built on an invasive fish has to be able to say that out loud. This product is a byproduct of removal — never a reason to keep roi on the reef. We measure progress the only honest way available to us right now: in pounds of fish taken off the reef, not in claims about what the reef does next.
And if the day ever comes when there are no roi left to pull, this bottle goes away. That would be the point.
Reef to Root is the initiative that bridges the two things we do: Top Shot Spearfishing, where invasive roi come off the reef by hand, and Kona Coast Nutrients, where those fish become something that feeds what grows.
It’s how a small company gives back to the place it works in — the harvest on one side, the land on the other. Its goal is simple to state and slow to earn: more fish off the reef, counted in pounds, shared when the numbers are real. Nothing is promised here before it exists.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you when a batch is ready — that’s the only thing the list is for.
Prefer email? jeremy@topshotspearfishing.com