Today’s food systems face numerous challenges, with climate change being a major one. Seafood plays a key role in transitioning towards sustainable and nutritious food systems. The seafood processing industry results in considerable side-streams, often discarded and underused, rich in bioactive compounds for high-value markets like nutraceuticals and functional foods. The project aims to increase the efficiency and resource optimisation of existing seafood systems through seafood side-streams valorisation into high-value-added nutritious food using green technologies.
FOODIMAR aims at contributing to full utilisation of marine side streams (fish heads and backbones) and by-catch (jellyfish) from several European regions: North sea, Baltic sea and Mediterranean sea. Analyses so far in the project shows that side streams from Norwegian whitefish fisheries are protein-rich with low lipid content, while seabream side streams from Turkish aquaculture contain higher lipid levels. Baltic Sea jellyfish showed a very high mineral content (around 75% on a dry matter basis), indicating the need for a desalting pre-treatment before the extraction process. A deboned separator was successfully used with all fish side streams for fractionation and to create both a protein rich mince (approximately 80% yield after deboning) and a collagen rich bone fraction for further processing. Amino acid composition analyses showed that this pre-treatment concentrated hydroxyproline, proline and glycine amino acids (markers specific to collagen) accounted for 30% of total amino acid, and highlighting strong potential for collagen from the cleaned fish bones. However, seabream bones still contained elevated lipid content, requiring technologies leading to de-fatting before or via collagen recovery. Since bone fractions from heads and backs have similar physical properties and chemical composition, both were merged to produce a single bone fraction per species. Pre-tests evaluating the impact of time, temperature and chemicals conditions on gelatine and collagen peptides extraction yield and quality from whitefish bones indicating promising yields ranging up towards 9,4 g of gelatine/100g of raw material.
The project aims to increase the efficiency and resource optimisation of existing seafood systems and fisheries through seafood side-streams valorisation into high-value-added nutritious food using green technologies. The valorisation of processing by-products and a shift towards a circular economy contribute to the physical and economic resilience of EU seafood processing value chains, as well as to the environmental and ecological sustainability of the seafood industry. This will be achieved through the exploration and characterization of bioactive compounds sourced through 3 EU pilots: North sea whitefish, Baltic sea jellyfish and Mediterranean seabream. Additionally, FOODIMAR focuses on the development of tools and guidelines to showcase the economic potential of these resources in the context of a climate-proof sector. The FOODIMAR concept centers around three main pillars: (1) maximizing the utilization of seafood side-streams and by-catch to reduce food loss; SINTEF Ocean will be responsible of the value chain mapping from the 3 seafood pilots as well as the complete chemical and quality characterization in order to identify the most relevant raw material for each pilot (2) raising the value of seafood side-streams by transforming them into high-value products, rather than low-value applications or waste; Laboratory gelatin and collagen peptide extraction from the most relevant raw material will be conducted by SINTEF Ocean by following yield of the process as well as quality of the final product (3) promoting capacity building and the development of business models to foster the growth and reinforcement of the seafood side-stream valorization sector;
