The Alchemy of Turning Food Waste into Fish Feed with Diana Orembe

NovFeed was the Winner of the Sustainable Harvesting Spotlight Award presented by Auxilium Foundation at the Ocean Impact Pitchfest last year. In this episode of the podcast, we chat to founder and CEO Diana Orembe about her very personal connection to waterways and the fisheries sector in Tanzania, her career as a microbiologist, and her journey building NovFeed.

The Ocean Impact Podcast · The Alchemy of Turning Food Waste into Fish Feed with Diana Orembe

NovFeed is addressing two problems in tandem – the impacts of traditional fish feed on the ocean and biodiversity, and the problem of food waste and how it contributes to climate change – to bring both environmental and economic benefits to communities that need it most with their novel products.

See below for show notes & relevant links!

The fisheries sector plays an important role in social & economic development in many countries around the world, including Tanzania, which is where Diana joins us from in this episode. Diana has a really personal connection to both the industry and the importance of healthy waterways. Growing up, her mother was a fish vendor and her uncle was a fish farmer, and central to life in her community – a small village in Northern Tanzania – was a lake. The big question was, how do you sustainably manage the lake and its ecosystems and also grow enough food? Off to university, Diana became a microbiologist (her research was around the application of microbes and food) with a passion for entrepreneurship. And now – in a full-circle moment – she is helping to solve a problem uniquely connected to her own story.

Show Notes

Diana - Could you tell us a little bit about novfeed? the problem that you're solving and how you are doing it?

The problem:

One of our biggest challenges of the 21st century is to meet the protein demand of the growing global population, but to meet them without increasing significant pressure on our planet's ecosystem. And as articulated by the United Nations FAO, aquaculture has a significant potential – as the primary source of seafood production – to feed the growing global population with sufficient protein.

But the challenge with aquaculture is that it is still problematic. For decades now, aquaculture has been relying on over 20 million tonnes of small fish to be captured annually and grown up into a protein base that's called fishmeal and fish oil, which is mixed up with other ingredients to make a complete feed for the farmed fish.

But this act is very unsustainable because forage fish play a very important role in our oceans. They feed on plankton and transfer the energy from the bottom of the food chain to marine mammals, seabirds, and larger fish that feed on [forage fish]. And if you take those forage fish out of the ocean, it comes to a point where they disappear. And so does the life that depends on them.

In addition to that, according to a United Nations FAO report, it shows that global fish production is expected to increase from 179 million tonnes to 204 million tonnes by 2030 – and about 109 million tonnes of that production will be coming from the aquaculture industry. This means we'll need to triple the production of fishmeal and fish oil in order to catch up with this growing demand of the aquaculture industry. But this will cause the low genetic diversity in our ocean and the extinction of some ocean species.

Other alternatives:

The alternative that's available to this is a soybean meal. But you know what? Soybean meal is already linked with massive deforestation and loss of biodiversity, and still doesn't have all the essential amino acids that are required by different species in the aquaculture industry.

The solution is in another problem:

On the other hand, waste is still a global problem. Today, one-third of all the food that is produced globally ends up in [landfill]. And it's polluting everything, from what we eat, what we drink, and what we breathe. And it's accelerating climate change due to the greenhouse gases that are produced by this waste.

And that's why we at Novfeed saw these challenges and thought it was high time we apply science as a tool to solve them. We did research and discovered a technology that can we can transform market agricultural waste such as protein, vegetables, and fruits – all the food that is considered waste – and we use bacteria as a cell factor to transform this waste into a bacteria-based protein which is the perfect replacement of the fish meal and soybean meal in the aquafeed nutrition.

So we want to change the face of aquaculture with this new alternative protein.

That’s fascinating. How does it work?

Thank you so much. I usually say our process is simple, just like making yogurt, or making fermented beer.

When you're producing a beer, for example, you will need grain and also you will need yeast and microbes. But for us, we need food waste and we need we need bacteria cells. So for the beer, yeast still will feed on the grains and transform it into a beer. But for us, our bacteria feeds on the food waste and grow into a bigger volume of bacterial biomass. The process is called fermentation.

At Novfeed, we normally collect the market agriwaste from different market marketplaces around us and then process it to make the nutrients of the waste available to be used as a source of carbon by this bacteria. We did research to come up with a different bacteria species that has the ability to use the waste as the source of carbon and energy, and grow into a bigger volume of biomass.

After processing the waste, we put the waste on the fermenter and then we add our strains of bacteria. We have a consortium of bacteria that are able to work together in a symbiotic relationship, so they collaborate to degrade the waste and produce this valuable product.

What are some of the advantages of your feed?

The product is cost-effective – like 25-30% cheaper than fish meal – but it's also sustainable and it also helps the farmers cut their production cost and increase their profitability. It has a 70% protein profile and other essential amino acids which support the growth of the fish and the immunity of the fish, but also helps the fish attain market table size before the regular culturing time. So if you feed your fish with Novfeed, it will take like 6-7 months for harvesting. As opposed to around 9 months with traditional feed.