Switzerland's first caviar, Oona, comes from farmed Siberian sturgeon in the Swiss Alps.
Reuters' Caroline Copley visited the facility in December 2011, during the first harvest.
Employees in white aprons and latex gloves meticulously hand-pick fish eggs to produce some of the world's finest caviar.
Caviar is the unfertilized eggs of fish, also known as roe. Caviar can come from several varieties of fish, but traditionally refers to fish eggs from wild sturgeon in the Caspian Sea. Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, which border the Caspian sea, are the world's largest producers of caviar.
Sturgeon have been around since before the dinosaurs, but today they are threatened from overfishing. Sturgeon do not reproduce annually — it can take up to 20 years for the fish to mature so they can produce roe — which makes the species especially vulnerable to over-exploitation.
As a result, several species of sturgeon are now farmed.
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