Blue Biorefining: a holistic solution for increasing resource efficiency in seafood industry (BlueBio)

Research Project, 2021 – 2024

Global seafood supply chains suffer harshly from inefficiency as up to 70% of the landed aquatic resource weight end up as by-products, mostly going to feed or waste. Sweden ranks below the global average regarding use of fish/shellfish resources, and only 17% of our total landed biomass ends up on our plates! This project aims to address this issue and bring together researchers, need owners and technology suppliers to develop and demonstrate a blue biorefinery platform to upcycle seafood by-products and small pelagics into multiple high value food ingredients such as proteins, fish oils, marine collagens and chitin as a holistic approach for increasing resource efficiency and value in the seafood chain. Within three work packages, researchers at Chalmers together with Leröy Seafood Smögen, Sweden Pelagic (SP) and Bua Shellfish (BS) will: (i) gather
world leading technology suppliers with state of the art equipment to develop the biorefinery platform in pilot scale, (ii) demonstrate the efficiency of the biorefining process, it technological requirement and operating conditions for different fish/shellfish by-products ready for industrial implementation and (iii) investigate economic viability of the technology and consumer acceptance of prototype food products made from recovered ingredients. Leröy, SP and BS will then use the project output for in house process implementation to upcycle their own by-products and researchers at Chalmers will disseminate
general findings also outside the partners.