2023-01-20
During the seminar "Taste the sea pantry - opportunities of sustainable seafood in public meals", several seafood companies presented products that are already available or will be on the market soon.
Musselbaren /Musselfabriken produces mussels, mussel stock, mussel batter and a mussel mash with an admixture of fish and/or legumes that can be used for everything from burgers to buns and nuggets.
Musselfeed produces a mussel powder that is a dry product with a long shelf life. The powder contains only mussels, giving it a strong umami flavor that works well with other umami-rich foods such as cheese, mushrooms and sauteed vegetables. The powder can be used as an additive to increase nutrients such as protein and omega 3 in everything from fish patties to bread.
Nordic Seafarm grows seaweed at sea off Fjällbacka and Grebbestad. They grow two types of seaweed with relatively different characteristics, sugar seaweed and sea lettuce. After harvesting, the seaweed is air-dried into flakes that can be used for stocks and topping, or blanched and frozen. This is mainly how it is sold to consumers today. Nordic Seafarm has a large number of recipes for how seaweed can be used in cooking which can be found on their website.
Marine Taste grows sea scallops, a mantle animal with a high cellulose content. The company has no residual flows in production but uses everything to make its products, sea bass tonic, sea bass stock, cream and sea bass mince. They currently sell the mince to institutional kitchens, but plan to launch it in supermarkets in the future.
Pelagic Seafood uses meat from the herring backbone to make herring mince. The backbone mince works well to freeze with retained taste and is a good ingredient in, for example, herring burgers. Today, herring burgers are sold in a food truck in Fiskebäck outside Gothenburg and the plan is to scale up the business to make herring mince available to food wholesalers.
During the webinar, some public actors also presented how they work with new seafood products in their operations.
Skövde Municipality, Food Developer Ida Henriksson and Food Manager Helena Gustavsson, talked about their collaboration with the international sustainability prize WIN WIN Award under their theme 2022 - sustainable aquaculture. On the one hand, the school chefs in Skövde got to try preparing food from bycatch and farmed seafood products such as sugar kelp, masked crab, sea urchin, sand crab and mussels. The municipality also developed seafood menus in collaboration between chefs, Coop Väst and seafood producers such as Gårdsfisk and Musselbaren - a project that will be developed in the future with more chefs, kitchens and producers.
Stenungsund municipality, Karin Hermansson, chef at Spekeröd preschool, told us about when their business took on seafood that was served in various forms at the municipality's preschools. There was lasagna, pizza, tacos, spring rolls, sea pudding, and more. Both staff and preschool children were involved in the project, which was also a media success. Her advice is to dare to test, have good communication with the manager and check with the buyers in the organization. In the case of seaweed, there were no competing products.
The County Administrative Board of Västra Götaland, Pernilla Fischerström, works with the initiative "More local food in public kitchens", which provides free advice to municipalities and producers to increase the proportion of local food in Västra Götaland's public kitchens. "It is not always easy to draw the line on what is local. In general, it is easier to determine the origin, ecosystem impact and environmental toxins of cultivated species. Some tips from Pernilla for public kitchens to make it easier for small producers:
- Help to facilitate logistics and sales, for example by developing suitable delivery intervals, reviewing the possibilities for self-storage or in other ways making it easier for small companies to deliver. Sometimes small producers can go through the suppliers the municipality already has agreements with. Small producers may also find it difficult to know what prices are reasonable; public kitchens can be helpful here by telling them what they pay for similar goods.
- Develop recipes and test new ingredients. It is important that chefs feel comfortable with new ingredients and have tried cooking with them. Once you have found recipes that work and are popular with the target group, it is good to share them with the producer so that the recipes can be disseminated.
- Communicate more. It is important to explain why the kitchens are working with new raw materials and that it is anchored with those affected. There are examples of things that have gone wrong because food units have not reached out with information.
- The Public Procurement Act (LOU). When working in public kitchens, the LOU applies. This means, among other things, that you cannot require food to have a specific origin. However, you can set requirements for different qualities and it is good to have good communication with producers to find suitable criteria. New raw materials often lack competition from similar products. Many such raw materials can also be purchased below the direct procurement threshold of EUR 700 000.
| Scallops, mussels and seaweed are so-called extractive species. This means that they survive on the sunlight and nutrients already in the water and do not require additional nutrients, energy or water. In the places where these extractive species are grown, we currently have problems with eutrophication, which means that the farms, in addition to producing good food, create environmental benefits in the sea. |
