Innovation Award for fighting bacteria in aquaculture

The Scottish company Fixed Phage uses so-called "Bacteriophages", a natural virus that combats specific bacteria. Bacteriophages are highly host specific, and a "phage" attacks only particular bacterial species or only certain strains within the species. The company develops natural products that can combat specific bacterial strains in agriculture, health, food and aquaculture.

For the first time, the seafood industry´s innovation award was awarded on Seafood Innovation Day at the world's largest seafood conference, North Atlantic Seafood Forum, in Bergen, March 8th. The seafood industry itself has taken the initiative for the new prize aimed at stimulating and recognizing knowledge-based innovation and entrepreneurship.

The winner was selected by a live audience vote together with a professional jury. The award has a value of NOK 250,000 and consists of financial advice from Pareto, legal advice from Thommessen, participation in next year's North Atlantic Seafood Forum, membership of the NCE Seafood Innovation Cluster and a cash amount.

The conclusion of the jury:

The Award Committee evaluated the companies and selected the winner based on the following criteria: Innovation, Market Potential and Sustainability. The winner has developed an innovative product that addresses many of the major challenges of contemporary seafood production, like food safety, fighting antibiotic resistance and feed efficiency.The market potential is huge, and the winner has a product that is easily scalable and has also an operational plan for market penetration and commercialization in near future.The winner is addressing challenges that we are facing for developing of a sustainable seafood industry, and the product itself is environmental friendly.

"To reach the seafood industry's ambitious vision of production growth, we must facilitate innovation and digital development," said Tanja Hoel, general manager of The Seafood Innovation Cluster. "It is important to show exciting products that can contribute to new solutions in the seafood industry".

The Seafood Innovation Cluster

The Seafood Innovation Cluster represents one of the world's largest and most complete clusters that supplies 37 billion meals worldwide. Here we find the world's largest producers of Atlantic salmon offering sustainable seafood to customers in more than 70 countries worldwide. Overall, the cluster represents 90 players from the entire value chain, with a total annual turnover of 10 billion dollars.

Due to its unique global position and importance for Norwegian value creation, the 2015 seafood cluster became a Norwegian Centre of Expertise, one of 14 NCE clusters in Norway. NCE Seafood Innovation Cluster is a project to promote sustainable growth of Norwegian seafood through strategic cooperation at the intersection of business, research and education. The goal is a forward-looking, innovative and sustainable Norwegian seafood production.