PARTNERS - FutureEUAqua

Our Partners

FutureEUAqua’s consortium gathers 31 different SMEs, Associations, Research Institutes (RTD) and Other companies from 9 different countries.

Nofima is hosting FutureEUAqua and has the roles as coordinator and project manager, leading “Sustainable breeding” (WP1), “Consumer and regulatory activities” (WP3), and “Project management” (WP9). Nofima also has a contributing role in “Sustainable and resilient feed and feeding strategies” (WP2), “Quality and safety of aquaculture products” (WP6), and “Dissemination and communication” (WP8).

Akvaforsk Genetics main task in the project is in WP1 Sustainable breeding of important European aquaculture species. We will do genetic and genomic evaluations of production and robustness data from Atlantic salmon, European seabass and Gilthead seabream, discussing the application of results and are task leaders of the validation part. Currently, we are involved in running three of four breeding programs involved in FutureEUAqua and will contribute with knowledge of this conventional work.

Salmar is a vertically integrated aquaculture enterprise, whose production of Atlantic Salmon stretches from roe/broodfish to the sale of finished products. SalMar is an international concern with 100 fish farming licences in Norway and considerable shareholdings in the UK. Today, SalMar is Norway’s third largest producers of Atlantic salmon. Salmar also produce organic Atlantic Salmon. Salmar will provide salmon for feed testing projects in FutureEUAqua and know how on salmon farming.

Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is leading Task 4.2. “Sustainable and resilient production in Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS)”. Further, DTU is involved in WP2 as responsible for pilot experiments and farm test with feed for rainbow trout.

In the project FutureEUAqua Aller Aqua collaborates with DTU Aqua in supplying and testing organic feeds for trout. Tested feeds will contain newly available organic raw materials. Feeding trials will be conducted in DTU Aqua’s laboratory, and recipes leading to best fish performance will be used in farm trials in Denmark. The purpose is to expand the range of organic raw materials currently used for organic fish farming and thus support farming economy and growth performance of fish.

Leader of WP4 on Sustainable and Resilient Production Systems. The innovations from other WPs will be evaluated on economic profitability and environmental impact in production, on the use of alternative feed ingredients and by-products (such as seaweeds), use of different breeds, use of production in different systems (RAS, IMTA, cage) and innovations in packaging. WR will also participate in the state of the art and future needs for the use of sensor technology in aquaculture.

COISPA coordinates the WP5 activities, which can be summarized as follow:
1) Improving the aquaculture farm management by developing and implementing a real-time wireless communication system based on a network of environmental, biomass and physiological sensors.
2) Monitoring the impact of the housing environments and innovative diets on the fish health and welfare, during large scale demonstration activities, by analysing key performance indicators (KPI).

The DISTAL Department of UNIBO is leader of WP6 and will contribute to develop minimally processed high quality fish products, by testing, on pilot scale, innovative non-thermal technologies based on cold atmospheric pressure plasma and pulsed electric fields. Moreover, UNIBO will evaluate, by a metabolomics approach, the holistic quality of the most promising packed products and their shelf-life, by assessing the stability of their physicochemical, microbiological and nutritional parameters.

UNIVPM will lead Task 3.1.2 in WP3, assessing the effects of labelling and certification schemes on consumer perceptions, awareness and acceptance.

IZSVe, as National Reference Laboratory for fish diseases is fully equipped for bacteriological, molecular, serological and virological testing. Fish welfare is also an important task, so IZSVe will perform blood analyses and immunohistochemical tests and/or real time PCR to validate welfare indicators. Several sequencing platforms (i.e. Sanger sequencing, pyrosequencing, NGS) are also available to investigate GI microbiota.

Alintel develops a switching power supply for pulsed fields for the treatment of foods in the food sector.The SMPS is the main power source of the system. It converts the three-phase AC power line voltage to a regulated DC voltage. It charges up all the IGBT Switching Modules to a primary voltage around 2000V. An external trigger pulse enters the modulator, gating all the Switching Modules and discharging some of the stored energy.

AlmaPlasma activities will be devoted to the investigation, by means of Fourier transform infrared, optical absorption and emission spectroscopy, of the types and concentrations of the reactive species produced by cold atmospheric plasma treatments performed in a wide range of operating conditions. AlmaPlasma will also collaborate to the definition of strategies for scaling laboratory plasma equipments up to the capabilities requested in the relevant industrial environment

The TP role in the project will be particularly the set-up of innovative PEF and cold smoking treatment in operational environment for the preparation of innovative smoked salmon. TP will participate in the design of the development of innovative non-thermal processing for system completion and qualification for cold smoked salmon manufacturing with the support of plant producers, in order to set up the PEF treatment and cold smoking application modality in real processing lines.

Leader of WP2, University of Thessaly’s role is to coordinate the research activity and efforts to develop innovative, species specific nutritionally adequate, tailor-made, low ecological footprint organic and conventional diets and validate them in different fish production systems. The aim of WP2 is to demonstrate sustainable and resilient nutritional solutions for highest possible fish performances that would be safe and commercially available for the European aquaculture.

HCMR will be involved in assessing the genotype by diet (GxD), and genotype by environment (GxE) interactions for European sea basss and gilthead sea bream and to validate best selection methods in breeding programs for these species. Furthermore, HCMR will perform tasks where the main objective is to select ingredients and design formulations for commercially relevant tailored-made aquafeeds for Salmon, Trout, Sea bass and Sea bream.

The main role of Galaxidi Marine Farm S.A. in the project will be the involvement in subtask 2.3.1. This includes a large scale fish trial. The designed tailored made organic aqua feeds will be given to organic sea bass, produced in Galaxidi’s organic hatchery, from 20-400gr, in duplicate populations. At the end, the overall performance of the fish fed the new organic feeds will be compared to the other fish that will be fed the existing organic feed.

Nireus will provide the necessary biological material (fish) for the validation of new selection techniques based on fish genome. It will implement feed challenge tests on candidate sea bream and sea bass breeders, to select those that perform better with feeds with high introduction of plant ingredients in their formulation. NIREUS will report fish growth performance based on industry’s KPI’s and will cooperate in GWAS.

Kefalonia Fisheries will take part in FutureEUAqua as one of the fish farming industry partners that will provide with infrastructure for large scale trials. Tailor-made feeds will be tested on organic and conventional fish in real operational environment. Also, cutting-edge technology will be implemented in the cages, in order to collect interdisciplinary data regarding quality, welfare, health and sustainability of the fish, aiming in the optimization of fish farming management strategies.

Marine Feed will supply a new type of feed ingredient based on Sea Squirts, cultivated, harvested and processed on the west coast of Sweden. Marine Feed will also use this cultivation technology to improve water conditions in aquaculture.

Project partner for Dissemination and Communication (WP8). FEAP will provide the foundations for effective communication and exploitation of the project’s activities and foreground developed, using these to address the target audiences, raising awareness of the relevance of the innovations and quality of the research achieved.

Campden BRI Magyarország Nonprofit Kft is the task leader of the.7.1 Knowledge transfer and Task 7.3 Implementation and exploitation. CBHU will integrate knowledge from different sources and convert it to practically applicable solutions, exploitation strategies for whole aquaculture value chain. It leads the stakeholder platform on sustainable European aquaculture, where needs, problems, skills, practices and ideas of the relevant parties will be discussed.

PANEPISTIMIO DITIKIS ATTIKIS (PADA) contributes to task 6.3 [task leader: Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR)], by pursuing the development and industrial validation of a prototype device, which based on an IP-protected method achieves rapid, non destructive evaluation of fish mechanical properties, and, hence, tissue texture. Since the latter is correlated to factors affecting muscle texture, i.e. fish freshness or dietary history, objective fish quality characterization may be obtained.

IFOAM Organics Europe is mainly involved in two areas: 1-In the training & capacity building IFOAM Organics Europe- through its partners – will organise both online courses and regional training workshops for key actors. 2-In the dissemination & communication the major involvement is in the organisation of the final conference of the project and in the networking activities. A small involvement is also foreseen in the production of a survey for consumers.