Community Spotlight: Could This Fish Be a Notebook? | Small Wins Matter

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Quick summary: This story highlights recent developments related to fishing, showing how constructive action can lead to meaningful results.

Forget AI — in Iceland, the truly exciting startups are working in fish. From medical bandages to sustainable furniture, the Icelandic fishing industry has learned to extract value from virtually every part of its catch, putting the country at the forefront of a global “blue economy.”

It wasn’t always this way. A collapse in Iceland’s fisheries in the ’80s and ’90s forced the island nation to look beyond the fillet and find new uses for its top export, from scales to tails. Today, Iceland cod fishers use more than 90 percent of the fish they catch, compared to roughly 40 percent of each fish caught in North America’s Great Lakes.

Now, the 100% Great Lakes Fish Initiative aims to follow Iceland’s lead, showing seafood companies from the region how using all of the fish can help keep their industry both profitable and sustainable. RTBC Founder David Byrne spoke with David Naftzger, executive director at Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers, which oversees the initiative, about Icelandic innovation, doing more with less, and Byrne’s method for cooking up homemade fish head broth. —RTBC Editorial Team

Tell me about how we currently use a lot of fish that are caught in the Great Lakes.

Right now we use about 40 percent percent of each fish — the fillet. The other 60 percent is generally disposed of in landfill or used for low-value things like animal feed. We’re looking to fully use each fish, and by doing so, drive more value through the fishery, create more jobs and improve the sustainability of our fishery. The idea was born in Iceland and we’re adapting it to our region, and we’re really excited about the potential to transform the way we do things.

Okay, I have so many questions. We know that you made a trip to Iceland to see what they were doing. What did you see there that you thought, oh, we could adopt this?

Well, I can say it wasn’t at all what I expected. In North America, we tend to have a traditional industry that’s doing things similar to the way they did 100 years ago. But in Iceland, we saw something completely different. It’s a growing fish economy, it’s attractive to entrepreneurs and young people. It’s hot, full of startups, and it’s fun, exciting and cool, which really shocked me. We saw things that just kind of blew my mind walking into the Iceland Ocean Cluster. The first thing that greeted me was a lamp shade that was made out of cod skin, and then they had a table full of all these products that they’re making from different parts of the fish, from collagen soda to nutraceuticals to medical bandages. And it kind of visually told the story of what they’re doing. It’s not just a fillet factory. It’s a fish-value factory that they’ve created, and I thought if we could accomplish even a fraction of what they’ve done, we would really be making a big difference here in our region.

These startups that are making these kinds of surprising products, are they the reason a younger generation is interested in staying involved in the fish industry there?

I think it’s a big part of it. It’s using new technology, so you’ve got people that are interested in machinery and engineering, and that brings a certain group of people. You’ve got the fashion industry. They’re creating fish leather out of fish skin. You’ve got people in the cosmetics industry that are using collagen. And a whole other group of industries that you don’t really think of when you think of fish. But they’ve been able to draw this interconnection with this industry that was the historical backbone of their economy, and transformed it into this hip, cool thing that is attracting young people and really changing the narrative around what fishing is all about.

I can imagine that kind of cultural change would be a huge change around the Great Lakes area.

Absolutely. As we’ve been doing this project we’ve reached out to students at several universities who have partnered with us and just the enthusiasm you get from new voices, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, brings this creativity to it. It allows you to get outside the box of just thinking, well, the way we’ve always done things is we catch the fish, we remove the fillet, and the rest goes out the door, and we don’t worry about it. That’s actually potentially the most valuable part of the fish that is going out the door.

Is there an uphill climb? I mean, when the idea first comes up, you think, I don’t think Americans are going to go for heads and tails and spines and stuff like that. What’s that process like — explaining that, no, we’re not going to ask you to eat heads.

Well, we will ask people to eat heads.

I’ve done it. I made a broth. I go to my local fishmonger here. They have a bucket of heads nobody wants, and there’s a lot of meat on them, a lot of protein in there, and I make a broth and freeze it. It lasts for a long time.

We’ve invited groups of chefs in to create menus, but they cannot use the fillet. They have to use everything else.

Wow!

My favorite dish so far was a fish head soup that was made with a curry and had some dried fish skin crumbled over the top and just a hint of roe. It was out of this world. It is a little bit of a cultural shift to think differently about the fish, but when you can connect with the fishers and the fish processors and help them understand that this has the potential to move from a loss, something that they’re paying to be disposed of, to a revenue generator, you then kind of get a lightbulb.

We reached out to the fish companies and invited them to commit to 100 percent utilization [of the whole fish]. A lot of them were already on the journey. We now have about 40 companies that have signed up that represent over 90 percent of the commercially caught fish from the Great Lakes.

In Iceland, was there an event or a trigger that caused that country to go in this direction of 100 percent utilization?

The story really starts in the 1980s and ’90s when there was a collapse in the Icelandic cod fishery. Fewer and fewer fish were available, and as a result, the Icelandic government instituted a strict quota system. So each fisherman was limited in terms of the number of fish that they could take. Resource managers went into overdrive, trying to identify strategies that could help replenish the stocks, but at the same time, there was this parallel effort to say, how can we do more with less? How can we create more value out of however many fish we were able to get? So the quota system and the 100 percent fish movement has been incredibly successful. Fast-forward 40 years. Today they’re catching half as many fish and generating three times the profit. And it’s all being done in a way that’s sustainable.

Looking at the Great Lakes, we’ve seen a similar decline in the lake whitefish, which is the historical backbone of our fishery. Stocks have declined more than 50 percent, and we still have a quota system, but what we need to do is embrace this alternate vision. How can we do more with however many fish we’re catching? And this partnership with Iceland has allowed us to really leapfrog, you know, decades of fits and starts that they moved through to accelerate, and really hit the ground running.

When you said folks in Iceland were thinking, how can we do more with less, did they look historically to people from 100, 200, 300 years ago in Iceland and go, okay, what did they do?

That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer with regards to Iceland, but here in the Great Lakes we’ve been working with a number of tribes in the region. We did a fish leather tanning workshop at one of the reservations last summer, and it was so cool to see a reconnection with this lost craft that historically was used for footwear and for clothing and for other kinds of things by the tribal members.

And this is financially sustainable? They’re actually making money?

There’s a value pyramid. The lowest part of the value pyramid is composting. Virtually anybody can do it, it doesn’t cost any money, but it avoids the cost of paying someone to put it into a landfill. Then you can move up that value pyramid with food products like we’ve talked about, making fish leather out of the skin, you know. And kind of over the rainbow, you can make collagen out of the skin in the scales, you can make a whole range of different products. In Iceland, they have taken a cod that used to generate $12 for the fillet and now the products that can be made from a single cod generate $5,000.

You tell that to people and they go, sign me up.

Exactly. The first Icelandic unicorn company, valued at over a billion dollars when it was sold, is a company that’s making medical bandages for severe burn victims out of cod skin and it’s transforming people’s lives. They have a picture of a guy at the Reykjavik airport, he was an electrician on a pole and his whole body was burned severely. He used this cod skin, it saved his life, and he’s holding a child, I think it’s his grandson or granddaughter, so it brought new life to him and it’s creating this revolution in medical bandages.

Okay, looking to the future, what are the prospects? What’s the future look like here?

The next step will be to incentivize and encourage some of these new products to start moving into production and really taking hold. In the near term, we’ve identified a strategy to roughly triple the value that each fish can generate, but if Iceland is any example, we can really look to the sky as the limit.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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