Upgrading seafood side-streams to high-quality food ingredients

15 February 2022

The EU-funded WaSeaBi project, with Danish participation from Food & Bio Cluster Denmark, DTU, Royal Greenland and Jeka Fish, is developing techniques to ensure that a larger portion of the fish ends up on your plate rather than being wasted or turned into animal feed. The project has now been running for more than two and a half years and has delivered many interesting results.

In 2021, the project has particularly focused on the following topics:

Implementation of a sorting technology for herring

The technology allows the project partner Sweden Pelagic to separate herring into head, backbone, viscera + belly flap, tail in addition to the fillet. The new side-streams can form the basis for development of new products at Sweden Pelagic.
 

Prolonging the shelf life of side-streams

The development of new solutions to prolong the shelf life of side-streams from cod and herring before they are used for the production of new products has been completed. The focus has particularly been on the use of rosemary extracts as antioxidants to prevent lipid oxidation. Dipping the side-streams in either a commercial (Duralox Manc) or a non-commercial rosemary extract have proven highly efficient.
 

Converting seafood side-streams into new ingredients

WaSeaBi has focused on the development of technologies to convert seafood side-streams into new ingredients for the food and feed industry. The partners have investigated and optimized the use of different flocculants to recover proteins from cod and herring brine as well as membrane filtration and vacuum evaporation to recover proteins from mussel cooking water. 

Furthermore, the pH shift method has been used to recover proteins from cod and herring brine, mussel cooking water as well as solid side-streams from cod and herring.
This work demonstrated the good potential for using the pH shift technology to isolate proteins from solid side-streams whereas other techniques are more suitable for liquid side-streams. 

As part of the work, a wide range of enzymes have been studied in relation to their ability to produce bioactive peptides with antimicrobial, antioxidative or antihypertension properties from salmon and cod side-streams or whole hake. Likewise, enzymes have been evaluated for their ability to convert these side-streams into savoury ingredients. The results obtained for savoury ingredients were the most promising. All this work has been performed in small scale. 

Tool to optimise the use of side streams in production 

The development of the so-called AHP tool, which will help seafood producers to make the optimal decision about how to use their different side-streams based on the information they provide on different technical, legal, environmental and economical aspects is running according to plan. The tool will be validated with real cases from WaSeaBi in 2022. Work on the social and physicological aspects of decision making has also been initiated. This includes the development of methods to debias decision making, which will be integrated into the AHP tool.
 

Expectations for the project in 2022

In 2022, WaSeaBi will particularly focus on upscaling the technologies described above and implement the most promising solutions at the facilities of the industrial partners. In addition, completion of the construction of theoretical value chain scenarios based on all the obtained results will be prioritised. This will include an assessment of the technical and economic potential of the created scenarios.

Next year, the AHP tool will be completed and the life cycle assessment and life cycle costing studies will continue at full speed. 

You can read much more about the progress of the project and upcoming publications on WaSeaBi’s website here in the coming months. 

If you want to know more about the project, please contact Anni Simonsen: asi@foodbiocluster.dk.

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