With the advent of COVID-19, many companies have turned to webinars to disseminate information about their products and advances made in the industry. On Thursday June 4th, 2020, AlgaPrime DHA and Corbion hosted a joint webinar to promote the advances made in algae-based fish feed, and to report on its acceptance and expansion into the aquaculture industry.
The seminar featured speakers from the whole salmon supply chain ranging from researchers to fish farmers and experts in the retail industry.
The moderator was Jill Kauffman Johnson, Head of Global Development, Corbion Algae Ingredients (a Dutch food and biochemicals company headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands) who hosted the panel discussion alongside:
• Keterina Kousoulaki, PhD, Senior Researcher, Nofima: Keterina spoke about the increasing consumer demand for healthy and sustainable seafood. Salmon is an important fish in aquaculture and one of the species with the best ratio of omega-3s-to-omega-6s. In the wild, salmon eat high levels of forage fish and thereby accumulate omega-3s. However, even with one million tonnes of fish oil produced each year, marine fish production cannot catch enough to satisfy the needs of aquaculture. To answer the demand, the aquaculture industry has been researching many alternative proteins to reduce or eliminate the use of fish meal or fish oil in feeds. Algae has been one of the first ingredients to be approved by regulators. Corbion is growing microalgae, one of the original sources of omega-3s in the food chain. This effort is supported by the EU as part of their farm to fork initiatives. The result has been an increase in use of microbial algae in fish and animal feeds, with up to 25 percent of Norwegian salmon feed using microbial algae
• Vidar Gundersen, Global Sustainability Director, Biomar: Vidar explained that 1990 represented the tipping point in global aquaculture, when wild marine fisheries peaked globally. Since then there has been a slow decline, which means that traditional marine fisheries are already fully exploited, and aquaculture cannot take anymore to use in fish feed. This means two things: Firstly, aquaculture must increase its output to meet with global demand; Secondly, fish meal and fish oil from marine ingredients, as the primary components of fish feed, decreased to around 20 percent. The result has been that EPA and DHA levels in farmed fish has also dropped dramatically. Microalgae has been an answer to this. One of Biomar’s customers has replaced the DHA EPA content of their fish by use of microalgae.
Read more, HERE.
The Aquaculturists
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