A sustainable seafood sausage to foster healthy, sustainable, and resilient UK food systems

The UK food system faces multiple concurrent threats, including growing diet-related health inequalities, environmental sustainability pressures, and over-reliance on food importation raising concerns over shocks, disruptions and food-security. To tackle these issues, new sustainable, healthy, and local food solutions are required. In this project, we propose research and development of a new product category - sustainable and nutritious seafood sausages - as a step towards addressing systemic challenges within the UK food system. The sausage is a major food product in the UK, with millions of Britons consuming pork sausages every day. A key benefit of the sausage is convenience, with ease of preparation and cooking recognised as a major driver of consumer choice in the food market. However, growing health and sustainability concerns are associated with consuming red meat products such as pork sausages. Meanwhile, despite seafood being a healthier, and in many cases, a much more sustainable food source compared to red meat, on average the British public consumes substantially less than the recommended weekly portion of seafood. Furthermore, this situation is even more acute in lower socioeconomic groups and families, where the nutritional benefits offered by seafood can be particularly beneficial. Seafood, particularly bivalves such as mussels, offer one of the most nutritious and sustainable food sources available. Mussels are rich in vitamins, minerals, protein, and essential fatty acids crucial for neurological development and health, while being low in saturated fats. Yet, mussels require no commercial feed, obtaining all their nutrition from phytoplankton in the surrounding seawater. Mussels filter seawater helping to clean it, and create important habitats for marine life, such as nursery environments for fish. Additionally, the UK is highly suited to shellfish production, having one of the longest shorelines in Europe. Seafood sausages incorporating shellfish offer potential to overcome key barriers to seafood consumption in the UK, such as a lack of knowledge of how to prepare seafood, a reluctance to spend time preparing seafood, and to some consumers, a perceived ‘ick factor’ associated with whole invertebrate foods. Sausages are convenient to cook, and their relatively uniform taste and texture can ameliorate off-putting qualities, thereby potentially increasing sustainable shellfish uptake across a wide consumer base. Seafood sausage is also strongly suited to maximising sustainability and increasing uptake of locally produced seafood. Seafood sausage is a shelvable product, easily preserved and pallet shipped, avoiding waste, unlike fresh seafood where shipping is resource intensive and risky. Fish bones can be ground up and included in sausages, providing nutritious calcium and reducing processing time. Seafood sausage also suits fish grades that otherwise risk wastage such as small, bruised, offcuts, underused species, bycatch, and fat, lowering cost and increasing sustainability. This project aims to harness the benefits outlined above, by providing key research into consumer receptiveness towards seafood sausages, to better understand how to foster development and uptake of the proposed product. We will also consider the food science challenges necessary to produce and preserve a sustainable, healthy, and convenient seafood sausage. These goals will be achieved through the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team of researchers in the social and biologically sciences, together with a business partner working in sustainable seafood, and a business advisor with considerable experience in the field of fast moving consumer goods.