It’s been less than a week since Tropic Marin made its first acknowledgement of issues regarding the ‘Turkish Blend’ of their Pro Reef aquarium seawater salt mix but we’ve already received a follow up statement with a limited but pertinent expansion of specific details. One of the most important things reef hobbyists want to know is which products are affected, and how to tell if the Tropic Marin salt in your possession is among the offending batches.
First of all it is only the ‘Pro-Reef’ version of Tropic Marin salt that is of concern, so not the Classic Sea Salt nor the Bio-Actif salt. Tropic Marin goes on to state that the Turkish-produced Pro-Reef Salt is clearly labeled on the packages of 100, and 160 gallon boxes as well as the 200 gallon buckets which are blended at that specific location. To our surprise Tropic Marin also elaborated that they ‘believe the impacted product from (the) Turkish facility started arriving in the US in April of 2021′.
We want to emphasize that Tropic Marin does not say that they knew about the issue back in April – this is an important distinction that can easily be misrepresented in the ‘post now, verify later’ attitude of social media and online discussion. Tropic Marin could have easily withheld this one crucial detail but we believe it is important to help customers of Pro Reef determine whether or not their tanks were or are affected.
Reef tanks are susceptible to many potential challenges so some users might be experiencing problems that they haven’t yet attributed to the salt they are using. We appreciate that the company is doing its best to engage with the community, some readers will opine that this should have happened sooner but to be frank, many other companies have experienced the same or more detrimental batches of salt without ever acknowledging the issue publicly. The full official statement from Tropic Marin is published below in full and we’ll be keeping abreast of the developing situation as it unfolds.
Update regarding our January 27th statement regarding Tropic Marin® Pro-Reef sea salt manufactured in our Turkish production facility. We have confirmed that the issue described in our January 27th only impacts certain batches of Tropic Marin® Pro-Reef sea salt manufactured in our Turkish production facility packaged in 100-gallon and 160-gallon boxes and in 200-gallon buckets. The salt produced at our Turkish facility can be identified from our other manufacturing sites, as follows: A label on the front of the 100-gallon and 160-gallon potentially affected boxes states, “Manufactured in Turkey under the authority of Tropic Marin AG”. The 200-gallon buckets have this statement as well on the side of the bucket. We believe the impacted product from our Turkish facility started arriving in the US in April of 2021 and have been sold from then until the current time. We are diligently working to narrow this down further to specific batch numbers.
For the current time, all new salt shipments from Tropic Marin to the US market, will come from one of our German manufacturing facilities. We apologize to anyone who may have received anything but the best from us. We are working on implementing a plan with your retailers, and our distributors, to address the replacement of affected product and will provide updates as soon as practicable.
We will do our best to post updates as soon as we have new information. Please check our website www.tropic-marin.com for authorized updates directly from Tropic Marin.
