The Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation (CCFI), Memorial University of Newfoundland and the Marine Institute recently co-hosted Atlantic Canada’s first Seafood Industry Innovation Summit.
The themes of the summit (Nov. 14-17) centred around automation, digitization, innovation, by-product valorization and the blue economy. The stated mission, according to the CCFI, was to provide a new platform for learning and exchanging ideas through an assortment of sessional topics targeted at industry opportunities and challenges.
Media was invited to sit in on an hour-long panel entitled, “The Role of Innovation in Atlantic Canada’s Seafood Industry.” The panel consisted of five guests from the seafood industry — Carey Bonnell, Vice-President of Sustainability and Engagement at Ocean Choice International (OCI); Alastair Trower, Director of Business Development with Enginuity Inc.; Geoff Irvine, Executive Director of the Lobster Council of Canada; David Fitzgerald of Beach Point Processing Company and Keith Hutchings, Managing Director of the CCFI.
Each panellist spoke about how research, development and innovation played a role in their company.
Irvine spoke about technologies that may help the Lobster Council of Canada with issues they face, like eco-certification, labour shortages and traceability.
“In harvesting, we’ve got some challenges around possible eco-certification, so we may need to use AI to help analyze video of things that are happening on boats,” said Irvine. “In our plants, we have a chronic labour shortage, as I think everybody knows in Canada, so any technology that we can use to displace people that we don’t have in the plants is very helpful, so we talk about that all the time.”
For Bonnell, the biggest driver for innovation at OCI is in the processing side of their business. Like Irvine, Bonnell addressed the labour shortage in the industry and how automation has helped to fill labour gaps at OCI.
“Our company, up until last year, we hadn’t had any temporary foreign workers in our business. We introduced them last year for the first time — probably one of the latter companies to do so. It’s a must now,” said Bonnell. “At the end of the day, no matter how much you automate, you’re still going to need people. Automating is going to address labour challenges, and automating to improve productivity is another thing.”
Bonnell said that while OCI and its contemporaries are moving rapidly toward automation, Canadian companies have been slow in comparison to much of the world when it comes to adopting new technologies for seafood.
For Fitzgerald and Beach Point Processing, technology and automation have been helping them with their waste problem. Beach Point Processing processes around 10 million pounds of lobster per year. Around 3 million pounds of by-products like shells and guts end up in a nearby landfill.
“It’s a massive problem. In P.E.I., the number is somewhere between 20–30 million pounds that we dump. It’s a legacy problem with unintended consequences. It’s an environmental problem and it’s a health risk problem, as well,” said Fitzgerald.
To reduce the amount of unused by-products, Beach Point Processing has partnered with HPP Solutions, an Icelandic company that constructs the “HPP Protein Plant” to create fish meals out of organic waste.
“We started working with HPP, our friends from Iceland, on a cook and dry plant. We went into it with open eyes and quite a large investment for proof of concept,” said Fitzgerald. “Although it’s based on fishmeal plant technology, crustacean waste presents a lot more challenges than that. We thought we were at the cutting edge; we ended up on the bleeding edge. But we have a past proof-of-concept, and we’re ready to roll out the next machine that takes care of all our processing waste and the eastern side of P.E.I.”
On the topic of waste management, Bonnell talked about the full utilization of catch. He said OCI is almost at 100 per cent utilization, but the shells of lobster, crab, shrimp and other shellfish present a challenge in utilization that they have yet to overcome on a full-scale commercial level.
“We’d like nothing better than making use of that and making value of it, but we haven’t yet seen a scalable business case to do so,” said Bonnell. “We take advantage of opportunities. We work with local farmers for composting. We’ll do whatever we can to find utilization opportunities, and if the innovative minds in this room, or in the region, or in Iceland or anywhere have a solution to this, I think we’d be more than happy to be a part of finding better ways to make use of that.”
Another topic of discussion was the United States’ Food Safety Modernization Act, which will require full traceability of all seafood products sold to the United States by January 2026. Irvine spoke on some of the challenges and solutions of making lobster completely traceable by 2026.
“We don’t have third-party verification of catch yet for lobster. We could use AI, potentially, to analyze the video rather than people looking at the video. With new generative AI, I think that’s very achievable, and I think it would be cheaper and actually more practical,” said Irvine.
As the panel wrapped up, the topic in the room turned to the second annual Seafood Industry Innovation Summit. These summits, according to the organizers, are likely to move to a different locale in Atlantic Canada every year to discuss the most pressing challenges and the biggest opportunities in the industry as the years go on.
