Who actually holds the levers in the caviar trade. Thirty-one people, each scored 0 to 5 on five separate kinds of influence, ranked by total. Every number is on the page, so you can argue with a specific score rather than a verdict.
Control of physical output. In a supply-constrained luxury category, whoever makes the tonnage sets the floor price.
Leverage over what may legally be produced, traded and called caviar under CITES and national law.
Ownership of knowledge that decides what is producible at all. Not eminence in general.
Control of cross-border flow and clearing price. Intermediaries move much of the traded value without farming a fish.
What the luxury tier accepts as legitimate: houses and channels whose endorsement changes the category.
| Name | Why |
|---|
Tap a column heading to re-sort. Totals out of 25. Read them as bands of roughly two points either way: below the anchors, the gap between a 2 and a 3 is judgement, not measurement.
Each axis has a fixed top anchor. A 5 on production means demonstrable control of a double-digit share of world output, and only Kaluga Queen clears it. A 5 on trade means moving multi-origin volume across borders at scale. A 5 on brand is a house whose endorsement changes what the category will accept. A 5 on regulation means chairing or directing the body that sets the definition. A 5 on science means owning a result the field cannot work around.
This is a market-influence index, and it is built to be one. That structurally suppresses pure scientists: Shigeho Ijiri identified the sturgeon maturation-inducing steroid and totals 5. Built as a scientific-importance index, the table would largely invert.
Capital is not scored, because reliable financial data doesn't exist for most entries; that understates the Gulf and the listed Chinese positions. Citation counts are excluded because they measure academic standing, not market power. Longevity is excluded because it would entrench incumbents. And there is no time axis, so people rising fast score on where they are today.
Sanctions are reflected in trade scores. Since 2022 the EU and US have barred Russian caviar and Russia has counter-banned imports, so Russian producers are scored on a market sealed in both directions.
The Index covers sturgeon caviar only. Seven parts of that trade have no scored entries yet: feed suppliers, recirculating-aquaculture and equipment engineering, processing and packaging, chefs and hospitality buyers, retail and e-commerce, ownership and private equity, and certification bodies. The Index also leans towards what publishes in English. Corrections and nominations are welcome and will be reflected in the next edition.
Every score is a single assessor's judgement against the anchors above. The matrix doesn't make the Index accurate. It makes it inspectable.
People with real standing in the field who can't yet be scored on market influence. Named, not ranked.
Roman Franěk, Taiju Saito, Linan Gao, Marek Rodina, David Gela, Radek Šindelka, Tomáš Tichopád, Miaomiao Xin, Yu Cheng, Vladimíra Tučková, William L. Shelton, Ryohei Surugaya, Yuya Hasegawa, M. N. Skoblina, B. F. Goncharov, Werner Kloas, Frank Kirschbaum, Molly Webb, Anne Todgham, Monika Żelazowska, Uroš Ljubobratović, Jenő Káldy, Gyula Kovács, Natalia Zinovieva, Anna Belous, Petr Otradnov, Igor Gusev, Xiaoqian Leng, Yacheng Hu, Pei Chen, Hongtao Huang, Jiang Luo, Zhigang Liu, Arjan Palstra, S. Pattabiraman.
Andreea Dudu, Sergiu Emil Georgescu, Maria Samu, Marilena Maereanu, C.-A. Barbacariu, Radu Suciu, Thomas Friedrich, Elisa Boscari, Nikolai Mugue, Zuogang Peng, Dietmar Lieckfeldt, Markus Boner, Ellen Pikitch, Phaedra Doukakis, Boyd Kynard, Rob DeSalle, Hiromi Shiraishi, Harald Rosenthal.
Allan Leung, Sally Davis, Elizabeth Mojica, Sebastian Rakers, Simon Fabich, Nichola Fletcher, Inga Saffron.
Serge Doroshov (1937–2020) would score highly on science and indirectly on production. Bringing female white sturgeon maturation down from a median of around 24 years in the wild to about 8 in culture is the precondition for every farmed producer in this table.