Heidie Kuehnle, CEO, and Gordon Wallace, CAO, of Kuehnle AgroSystems
In a competition among eight companies at the North Atlantic Seafood Forum’s (NASF) Seafood Innovation Day 2021, the seafood industry’s innovation award went to Kuehnle AgroSystems (KAS) from Hawaii for their fermentation technology to produce natural astaxanthin for the aquafeeds market.
Their patented technology is high yield cultivation of algae by dark fermentation, a process that enables greater output and lower cost than light-dependent algae production methods.
The audience at Seafood Innovation Day together with a jury, voted for the winner of the Seafood Innovation Award on June 8th, at the North Atlantic Seafood Forum, the world’s largest seafood conference. The initiative for the award comes from the seafood industry’s desire to stimulate and recognize knowledge-based innovation and entrepreneurship.
According to the competition’s jury, “The winner has developed a new and innovative technology that enables drastic improvements to the production of an important ingredient in the seafood industry. To increase the consumption of seafood in a growing global population, we need to produce healthy, tasty and sustainable seafood. We need natural and sustainable produced key ingredients — one of which the winner is producing — so the market potential is huge. Their fermentation technology presents a breakthrough as they enable cost-efficient and high-volume production of natural astaxanthin for the aquafeed market.”
NCE Seafood Innovation
The winner of the award receives NOK 100.000 ($11,716 USD), membership in NCE Seafood Innovation, participation at North Atlantic Seafood Forum 2022, and the opportunity to present themselves to the industry at NASF next year. “We are very happy to receive this recognition of our work,” said Adelheid (Heidi) Kuehnle, CEO at Kuehnle AgroSystems Inc., “and we are looking forward to taking part in the NCE Seafood Innovation network during the next years.”
NCE Seafood Innovation is a business cluster for the seafood industry. Together with members and partners, they are working together for sustainability and innovation, to drive forward digital transformation, and improve fish welfare in the seafood industry. The organization has around 100 partners and members from the industry, academic institutions, the finance sector, the public sector and entrepreneurs.
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