Intensive agriculture for a growing population causes environmental problems locally and globally. Decline in species diversity in aquaculture and fisheries contributes to issues like bycatch, stock depletion, poor feed ratios, and eutrophication. To address these challenges, a holistic restructuring of production systems is necessary, focusing on waste recycling, sustainable production levels, and species diversity. Algae, a high-quality food with nutritional benefits, can help mitigate climate change through CO2 capture. However, current algae production systems are not efficient. While algae can improve sustainability in seafood value chains, broader changes are needed to ensure environmental responsibility and product traceability for consumer trust. Projects like NOVAFOODIES are working to enhance efficiency in the aquatic food industry, aiming to make seafood production profitable and environmentally sound. NOVAFOODIES will offer novel and competitive functional products to European consumers from a reliable, traceable, and sustainable fisheries and aquaculture value chains. To reach this, NOVAFOODIES is composed of an international consortium covering the whole value chain and expertise: production, processing, transformation, biosecurity, legislation, consumer associations, experts in business, IT, and sustainability. Within its main objectives, NOVAFOODIES will:
-Demonstrate, in 10 cases studies, cost-efficient and sustainable fish, micro- and macro- algae production processes that will benefit from natural ecosystem services.
-Develop an innovative and sustainable microwave-assisted algae drying process to maximising efficiency and lower costs.
-Upscaling an innovative biorefinery concept for separation of functional extracts from fish and seaweeds which will be optimised for the technoeconomic and environmental validation. Functional food prototypes will be prepared for human products and aquafeeds, which will be assessed in terms of properties, biosecurity, and standards, and will be brought to consumers by educative activities like showcookings.
-Develop an innovative process to make ecological packaging material from macroalgae.
-Design a process to convert the beach wracks material to invertebrate biomass for aquafeeds.
-Construct a process to valorise fisheries bycatches to create novel food for human consumption.
NOVAFOODIES will also develop a MarketPlatform and Mobile App using IoT technologies and advanced data analysis for tracing and wastes optimisation along the value chain, enhancing consumers trust. Partners are committed to the exploitation of developed technologies, being actively involved in the dissemination and exploitation, as well as education and training activities in local areas to promote sociolaboral inclusion and paving the way to the market entry of new products and processes.
