The Blue Food Innovation Summit will take place in London on June 14-15 and explore the opportunities and challenges in scaling aquaculture production while protecting and restoring the ocean ecosystem.
David Henstrom, CEO of UniBio, will join a panel called Sustainable Aquafeed: Scaling Alternative and Novel Feed Ingredients. Unibio produces a sustainable protein, Uniprotein®, that will make it possible to feed the world’s growing population and preserve the planet’s scarce resources.
“We need new ways of producing protein to feed the world’s growing population as conventional methods are exhausted. Many are in development, but only a few have reached an industrial scale and can produce the large quantities required. It takes time to develop new technology and upscale it to an industrial scale and requires considerable investment. The necessary testing of new protein sources also takes time. In Unibio we have the technology and produce Uniprotein®, which is a uniform and high-quality sustainable protein with a protein content above 70%, that can easily replace fishmeal or soy protein. The production of Uniprotein® is proven at an industrial scale and is approved for animal and fish feed in the EU. Uniprotein® can be produced in almost unlimited amounts with very small land use, low water usage and a competitive carbon footprint making it a compelling solution to the growing demand for proteins,” said Henstrom.
Henstrom said that the aquafeed market will need to source new, sustainable, and traceable sources of protein to meet the requirements of their customers. “The future demand will be for a high-quality protein which is non-GMO, traceable, free from pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, fertilizers, and antibiotics and, of course, performs well in the target species.”
On how the consumer perception influence is changing the demand for certain aquafeeds, Henstrom said that there are “new demands from consumers in other food areas, such as animal welfare, sustainability, traceability, full insight into what the animals eat, etc. This is also the case for aquaculture. More than 30 million hectares of new farmland, equivalent to all the arable land currently used in Germany and France, would be required to produce enough soy to meet the world’s growing protein needs. New protein sources and production methods are required to avoid further deforestation. Unibio can help the world achieve that with Uniprotein.”
Henstrom will be joined by BioMar, The Co-Op and Innovafeed in the pannel.
See the full agenda here.
