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MARINFORSKFISK-Marine ressurser og miljø - fiskeri

ERA-NET: Improved Processing to Enhance Seafood Sidestream Valorization and Exploration

Alternative title: Forbedret prosessering for å øke verdiskapning og utnyttelse av marint restråstoff

Awarded: NOK 6.0 mill.

The world population is continuously growing expecting to exceed 9 billion by 2050. It will increase the global food production by 60%, creating an urgent need to explore alternative sustainable sources of ingredients rich in protein and essential nutrients. At the same time, a considerable amount of food rest raw material is currently underutilized. Seafood side streams are abundant, sustainable and contain valuable protein and lipid compounds. Nevertheless, nowadays they are mainly used for low price commodities like animal feed, fish meal and silage, or are even wasted. IMPRESSIVE aims at facilitating the full exploitation of crustaceans and pelagic fish side streams in the food industry by using innovative technologies. A special emphasis will be put on optimization of stabilization and recovery of valuable ingredients by innovative technologies. The influence of different extraction and preservation methods on physicochemical quality, functional and bioactive properties of the resulting ingredients, as well as their joint incorporation into food prototypes to increase nutritional value of the final product, will be explored. This will increase resource efficiency and will reduce losses in the value chain, while minimizing the environmental impact of food processing. Life cycle analyses will be performed to develop optimized and sustainable production systems on zero-waste exploitation of seafood processing side streams for complete recovery of valuable compounds and their use in food applications.

The rapid growth of the world population in the last decades created an urgent need to explore alternative food sources for essential nutrients. Seafood side streams are abundant, sustainable and contain valuable bioactive peptides, lipids and polysaccharides with health promoting properties, which all together make them an excellent alternative ingredient source for the food and nutraceutical industries. The main aim of the IMPRESSIVE project is to improve the extraction of added value compounds such as LC MUFA-, PUFA-rich oils, bioactive peptides and chitosan from underutilized seafood side streams (fishery and crustacean) in terms of yield and quality by using emerging non-thermal technologies as advanced pre-treatments (pulsed electric field, high pressure, ultrasound, etc.) for further applications in the food and nutraceutical industries. The consortium will gather researchers with multidisciplinary background and expertise from 4 European countries along with manufacturing companies to optimize the recovery of bioactive ingredients. The project will use different eco-friendly chemical and enzymatic processes to separate, extract and purify protein, lipid, and polysaccharide fractions from seafood side streams. The obtained compounds will be characterized and analyzed for bioactivity and bioavailability, health promoting properties (antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, hypocholesterolemic and anti-diabetic activities,etc.), and further tested in food and nutraceutical products as new ingredients aiming to enhance the nutritional profile and quality of the end-products. Consumer studies will be conducted to assess consumer acceptance of the new products. Life cycle analyses will be performed to develop techno-economically optimized and sustainable production systems for improved recovery of bioactive compounds from seafood side streams and their use in different applications.

Funding scheme:

MARINFORSKFISK-Marine ressurser og miljø - fiskeri

Funding Sources