100% Transformation: The Future in Action

Moderating the session Dr. Leeper first began by introducing Dr. Tracy White, Manager of the Scottish Ocean Cluster.

Dr White had been unable to travel to Iceland but, in a pre-recorded presentation, told delegates that, “‘…utilisation isn’t enough”, before going on to further explore, “Scotland’s transformation to 100% value creation”.  

Dr White confirmed, “A lot of our byproducts are (now) going to fish oil, fish meal, added value foods that are staying within the human food chain, supplements, agricultural uses as well as pet and animal feed and biomass for energy.” 

She pointed out there was a last piece of the puzzle – scallop shells, “These have represented quite a significant disposal cost and challenges around our utilisation.” 

She told delegates, “We’ve worked with processors to reroute these scalloped shells from waste streams and into agricultural applications and this is the first step along that kind of mountainous journey.” 

She went on to acknowledge, “there’s challenges around labour operational costs, oncoming quotas and policies and Scotland has really reached a tipping point. The barriers that have been identified are systematic. They cannot be solved by one individual organisation, or one business; they can’t deliver this transformation on their own.  

Dr. White identified that this is where the Ocean Cluster model helps, “It improves visibility, collaboration and commercialisation pathways that are going to be needed to transform opportunity to economic value.” 

The Scottish Ocean Cluster has already started this journey, hosting its first ever Scottish Ocean Cluster Summit a few weeks ago, “what started as 1/2-day networking session soon became a completely oversubscribed full day event…”. 

Dr White confirmed that,” we’re already seeing projects starting to unfold from this, from this event.” 

Her concluding thoughts were, “Scotland doesn’t need more fish to create more value. What we do need is stronger connections between industry, innovation and markets and helping unlink those systematic challenges that we are currently facing. The Scottish Ocean Cluster itself is now transitioning from concept to action and ultimately, we want to transform byproducts from utilisation to value.” 

Luis Bourillón, Business Consultant at COMEPESCA started the next presentation asserting that, “Mexico could unlock up to US$313 million in additional annual value by making greater use of seafood by-products”. 

He confirmed that the “diversity in Mexico is immense, across 11,000 km of coastline.” 

He detailed Mexico’s seafood potential; it lands more than two million tonnes of fish and shellfish annually. But he also noted that around 226,000 tonnes of usable raw material remains and this is ” The Untapped Opportunity “.  

Potential products include marine collagen, omega-3 oils, chitin and chitosan, protein hydrolysates, and premium pet food and aquafeed. Capturing 50% of the opportunity could generate US$86 million to US$313 million annually, a 5-19% uplift in the first-sale value of five key fisheries.  

Luis then shared Pesca Con Futuro’s “Platform for Action” with its mission to, ” Educate, Connect and Communicate – A platform ready to introduce and scale 100% Vision in México.” 

One of those connections is with restaurants, “chefs have been amazing spokespersons for us. Many do not even have a waste basket in the kitchen. They use everything and this really helps with our mission.” 

His final message was to urge everyone to create more value “without catching one additional fish.”  

The final presentation of the conference was from Allen Haroutonian, Lead at the Pacific Islands Tuna Ventures Programme (Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency) and Founder of Blue-X and Fiji Ocean Cluster. 

He began by saying, “Mars is for quitters. Let’s try to leave our planet in a better way than how we found it. Action is where results come from…” 

In a lively presentation he detailed how the Pacific Islands Tuna Ventures Programme has catalysed new products and profits, providing further information on what adopting a venture studio approach has delivered, “it has been effective is catalysing action leading to measurable commercial outcomes.” 

In a summary of the successes so far he also revealed that implementing tactical implementation through Tiger Teams does work, “Designing and running a sprint over a three-month period is a model that facilitates profits in rapid time frames…” 

Another inspiring Cluster story to end the conference presentations. 

Moderator, Dr Leeper thanked the speakers and commented, “it’s been an awesome day and a half of conference. It has just been wonderful, absolutely buzzing.” 

Chair of the conference, Dr. Þór Sigfússon then summed up the conference simply as, “So inspiring.”  

He went on to say, “When we started this whole thing it was like a small soccer team, and then we realised that the market needed people who were scoring, and we didn’t have that many people that were scoring!  

But now great days come with all the stories… so for me this (conference) has been much more enlightening than I thought.  

I am just so happy how things are moving (forward) which is the crucial part of the whole thing – that we’re not sitting here just to talk about things, we’re basically saying this is happening right now. 

And the brilliant thing here it’s a soccer team that needs the back benchers and the Clusters tend to become the back benchers. So, we’ve now got it all. The question is how are we going to get it moving even faster? 

Well, we need to do more of this… we need more of these connections to happen, to make sure we are realising the potentials in different areas.  

So, from my part, thank you very much .”