Processing

Global growth in processed fish products This article was featured in EUROFISH Magazine 2 2021. Fish is a highly perishable food. Safeguarding its quality and nutritional value and avoiding damage, unnecessary waste and premature spoilage requires special efforts. For this reason, there has been an ongoing effort across the globe to extend the shelf life of sensitive raw products with suitable processing and preservation methods to further diversify the range of fish products on offer and to make these products more convenient.

Producing food requires huge resources but an estimated one seventh of the resulting products are lost before they are consumed, and in the case of fish and seafood as much as one third! Whether spoiled, destroyed or carelessly thrown away – losses on the way from origin to plate are high. New strategies are now being developed to reduce or, better still, to avoid food waste and losses altogether. This article was featured in EUROFISH Magazine 5 /2020. During the catching and processing of fish and seafood considerable amounts of waste occur. Some of it, roughly estimated at around 17%, is “disposed of” at sea immediately after the catch. About twice as much is lost during processing on land. And then there are also losses that occur during transport, at individual stages of trade, in the catering trade, or in consumers’ homes. A definition of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is often used to distinguish between “food losses” and “food waste”.

[caption id="attachment_2101" align="alignright" width=""]The relaunched seafood cocktail is now mixed and packed at the Seamark facility in Manchester to customers’ specifications.[/caption]Seamark supplies frozen fish and seafood sourced from different countries around the world to customers in continental Europe and the UK. Seamark started life as a grocery store selling meat, vegetables, and fish to consumers in the UK in the mid-70s. Today it is a multinational company with operations in the UK, USA and Bangladesh, suppliers across Asia, and well-known product brands. Frozen warm water shrimp of various kinds – freshwater, black tiger, and vannamei – are the company’s speciality, but it also distributes squid, scallops, seafood mixes, pangasius, tilapia and seabass, to wholesalers, retailers, industry, as well as the food service sector.

Riba Drazin, an expanding processing company, was founded in 2013 in the small fishing town Kastela Kambelovac in Dalmatia, Croatia, by award-winning innovator and entrepreneur, Zivko Drazin. For generations, people in the town of Kastela have been involved in fishing and fish processing, and especially in the traditional hand salting and marinating of anchovies and sardines. Among the oldest inhabitants of the town is the Drazin family, one of the few remaining that still nurtures the traditional manual way of production.

China has a vast network of fish buyers and sellers, catering to growing demand of fish and fish products. Markets are constantly changing and new products are being developed in order to fill rapidly increasing demand in the domestic market. Eurofish recently visited the company Kangbao Foodstuffs Co., Ltd in Qingdao during a study tour to evaluate the possibility of utilising high quality by-products from the EU fish processing industry.

Refrigeration technology and ice enable low temperatures that are necessary for guaranteeing the quality and freshness of sensitive foods such as fish during transport, in the production process, during storage, and at the retailer’s. However, some of the refrigerants that have been used so far in refrigeration units damage the ozone layer and promote the greenhouse effect which is why refrigeration technology suppliers are now using more environmentally friendly technical solutions.

Food must be free from metal contaminants and other foreign bodies that could harm consumers. All food producers are liable for their products and must carry out rigorous inspections to ensure that no risks arise from them. This responsibility results in an ongoing challenge for the producers because metallic impurities often enter the products during machine processing or packaging.

Fish and seafood contain valuable proteins and fats, plus a lot of moisture. This makes them on the one hand valuable foods but on the other hand prone to rapid spoilage. The most important measure for stopping bacterial and enzymatic decomposition processes is to provide sufficient cooling within the value chains or fast freezing that will guarantee preservation of all the essential freshness parameters over several months.

The majority of fish traded today has already undergone some form of processing. The best-known product is the largely boneless fillet which can be prepared – whole or in portions – without any further effort, both time-saving and waste-free. The range of fish cuts on the international markets is, however, much broader, even if some of them are hardly known and rarely used for value adding.

Deep water rose shrimp (Parapenaeus longirostris) and giant red shrimp (Aristaomorpha foliacea) are the most valuable demersal species caught by the Italian trawl fisheries and are widely appreciated across Europe. The national production of both these species in 2015 was about 12,000 tonnes with a value of EUR200 million. Almost 80% of the catch comes from Sicilian fleets. Despite their economic importance and the fact that they are a high value product, there is still a widespread tendency to use chemical additives, particularly sulphiting agents, that are necessary to inhibit post-mortem melanosis (blackspots) of external tissues during storage.