Freshfish

In spite of drastic increase in the world production of fish since the mid last century, a large part of the catch is reduced in quality and value due to inadequate quality- and production management (FAO, Sunken billions re-port). Recent improvements in processing-, transportation- and cooling technologies have opened access for fresh fish to distant markets. Available tools today for quality management for fresh fish are inadequate. Sub-jective quality estimation is now performed by sensory evaluators but that does not provide numerical results and it is difficult to make comparison in fish quality between different stocks in fish trading. Enumerating the load of specific spoilage bacteria has been the most illustrative approach to determine fish quality and fresh-ness but existing methods requires conventional cultivation for 2-3 days.

The aim of this project is to develop and market a new test kit; "Fresh-Fish" to measure fish freshness and quality within 4 hours. The kit will measure the spoilage bacterial load by using real time PCR technique. The kit will provide numerical measurement of the fish freshness that is comparable between fish stocks and countries. The kit will provide an estimation of the shelf life of the fish. The users of the kit will be fisheries, fish process-ing plants, fish export- and importers and service laboratories.

Project manager

• Viggó Marteinsson
  Research Group Leader
  Tel.: 422 5135

Research field

• Food Safety, Environment and Genetics