Australians have a healthy appetite for seafood. We each eat around 16kg of it a year and it’s worth more than $2.2 billion to the economy annually, according to scientist Graham Fletcher.
Fletcher, who specialises in the latest innovations to improve seafood safety, packaging and optimisation for post-harvest processing, says there are some major changes afoot in the seafood industry, such as the dominance of aquaculture over wild catch. These changes, he says, will have implications for those involved in its production.
As head of the food safety and preservation research team in the seafood technologies portfolio of the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research, Fletcher and his team are tasked with understanding and improving the safety, quality and shelf life of NZ seafood.
Fletcher spoke about the latest trends and innovations in this area at the convention of the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology (AIFST), which was held in Brisbane between 14 and 16 July.
According to Fletcher, the move to aquaculture will make the industry less weather-dependent, and therefore more predictable. It will also mean less stress on product and a larger window of ‘pre-rigor’ time for processors.
“Basically it means having a more controlled raw material to start with and people are starting to capitalise on that and more will do so,” Fletcher says.
On the downside, he says, aquaculture is more labour-intensive, and therefore can be more expensive than taking seafood out of the ocean.
“That means we now need to be very careful in terms of what species we fish and farm so that we get high value out of those, and that means focusing our efforts on premium fish with high margins such as salmon.”
Fletcher says compared to the past, processors are now more focused on risk management, minimising exposure to recalls, and new consumer drivers such as health, sustainability, and animal wellbeing. He predicts the following new technologies will make a splash.
Transport
Polystyrene boxes used to transport seafood are on the way out. Though they offer good insulation and are strong, they are petroleum-based and can’t be readily recycled or composted, according to seafood scientist, Graham Fletcher. He says companies will increasingly look to paperboard insulated boxes, which have a better environmental profile. He says biologically-based expanded poly-lactic acid boxes that have good insulation properties and are also carbon neutral are in development.
Product quality
As demand for fish grows and prices rise, consumer expectations around quality will also grow. Fletcher says this will result in technology developments to improve handling of fish, and a greater emphasis on tracking fish from the point of harvest to the consumer or restaurant. Temperature control for chilled products must also improve, he says. Most supermarket fridges run at 4°C, but to extend shelf life, chilled seafood should actually be stored at 0°C or even better, at -1.5°C.
Automation
Grading of fish is traditionally done manually but increasingly, processors will move to machine vision technology to reduce handling and damage, speed up processing times and reduce labour costs. According to Fletcher, automated processing will also become more viable for smaller operators as processing systems become more intelligent.
Sanitary design
Many companies are currently spending thousands on Listeria testing, but by changing factory design using the latest standards with regards to surfaces and joins, processors will find incidences of Listeria in these samples will fall dramatically. Packaging innovations and processing techniques (for example for pre-crumbing products), will continue to evolve to minimise consumer preparation and handling of seafood end-products.
Shelf life
New technologies to improve shelf life,
such as high pressure processing, pulsed light, electric fields and
cold plasma, will continue to evolve. Modified atmosphere packaging
also will improve. Developments in soluble gas stabilisation and
antimicrobial films are also on the horizon.
