Highland Park — The fillets that depart Motor City Seafood Co. are tidy, ready to be packaged, shipped and prepared fresh at a Metro Detroit kitchen.
They don’t start that way. The Highland Park seafood distributor mostly imports whole fish. Workers fillet them by hand or send them through a system of machines that remove the scales, heads, organs and bones before they are skinned and packed away.
Motor City Seafood is left with packages of carefully cut fillets and a big green bucket of the rest — skin, scales, heads, guts.
While unsightly when piled in the bucket, those offcuts could be a wellspring for the region’s commercial fish industry.
The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers, an intergovernmental organization of Great Lakes states and Canadian provinces, is trying to develop a supply chain for fish products beyond the bits that get fried, baked, broiled and stewed. They said the initiative, 100% Great Lakes Fish, will reduce waste in the commercial fish industry and create new businesses and jobs.
“There’s a tremendous amount of value within each fish, and right now we’re only unlocking one small portion of it, which is that of the meat,” said John Schmidt, program manager for the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers. “But these other pieces of the fish, the bones, the skin, the heads, the eyes, all of these different pieces of the fish also contain a lot of potential value.”
Almost 42 million pounds of fish were commercially harvested from the Great Lakes in 2020, according to Great Lakes Fishery Commission reports.
me_Fish Pledge
Great Lakes St. Lawrence Governors & Premiers, discuss the materials, leather products, and others made from commercial harvesting of fish at Motor City Seafood. January 18, 2024, Highland Park, MI.
There are plenty of possibilities for using commercially caught Great Lakes fish from tip to tail, Schmidt said. He demonstrated by laying out a suite of goods on a conference table at Motor City Seafood Co.
Skin can be tanned and turned into leather that could be sewn into clothes, wallets, bandages or other products. Collagen, a protein and trendy nutritional supplement, can be extracted from fish scales and added to food, drinks and cosmetics. Fish oil, another common supplement, could be extracted as well.
Other options for reducing waste require more of a culinary shift than a supply chain one, he said, such as encouraging people to cook with whole fish instead of just fillets, and promoting recipes using less meaty cuts like heads and skin.
“There’s a lot of value there,” Schmidt said. “At the end of the day, you’re also reducing waste, which is really important, when we think about our ways to protect our region and the fishery as a whole from the ecological and environmental perspective.”
Iceland shows the way
The 100% Great Lakes Fish initiative is modeled after a project in Iceland, the 100% Fish Project, that touts its successes for the country’s commercial fishing industry. The Icelandic initiative said that in the past 30 years, the fishery has vastly increased its use of byproducts — like skin, blood, scales and bones — and increased the export value of a kilogram of cod by four.
Iceland’s effort is pioneered by the Icelandic Ocean Cluster, an incubator for projects that reduce waste from the seafood industry. The cluster wants to export its 100% Fish idea and has worked closely with the Great Lakes governors and premiers, Schmidt said, helping to analyze Great Lakes fish to determine whether they also contain adequate levels of calcium, protein and collagen for use in other industries.
The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Governors and Premiers aims to protect the Great Lakes and grow the regional economy. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is its current chair. Schmidt said the 100% Fish team is collaborating with commercial fishing companies, processers, academics and industry groups to hone the initiative and get it more momentum.
There isn’t much money behind the initiative. Schmidt said the 100% Great Lakes Fish team is drumming up interest in the idea and trying to identify the most valuable and achievable product options.
“That’s when we have recommendations that can be given to state and provincial policy makers for ways that they can best support this,” Schmidt said. “Is it subsidizing some part of a collagen factory? What that looks like, I don’t really know, but that’s the next step.”
Marc Gaden, executive secretary for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, said developing a supply chain for more parts of the fish could be good for the Great Lakes. By raising the value of each individual fish, commercial fishers and fish processors could increase profits without having to increase their catch.
“Looking at how you could increase the value of an individual fish is a way of getting more value out of the fishery without the lure of, say, fishing in a way that’s not sustainable,” Gaden said. “That gives the fishery managers amazing tools in their tool chest to take steps that will allow for the continued realization of the fishery’s value without having to increase the amount of fish that are taken.”
The Great Lakes Fishery Commission helps to coordinate management activities and research among state, provincial and tribal governments in the U.S. and Canada, as well as federal agencies.
Great Lakes commercial and sport fishing is highly regulated by those governments, which have formed committees to manage each of the five lakes. The governments negotiate harvest levels and collaborate on research, fish stocking programs, enforcement and habitat restoration.
Initially, the 100% Great Lakes Fish team planned to focus the effort on whitefish. Harvest numbers of the popular and important fish have plummeted, and finding new markets for the fish byproducts could ease the financial strain for commercial fishers and processors.
“It’s a big part of the fishery,” Schmidt said. “Stocks have been decreasing and we need to figure out some way to provide more economic value to the fishers, the processers and others in the fish value chain that are hurting from this.”
The governors and premiers group has since expanded the initiative to include all commercially harvested Great Lakes fish.
First step: Separate fish parts
Motor City Seafood Co. doesn’t deal exclusively in Great Lakes fish. The company imports from around the world. But regardless of where the seafood comes from, the resulting waste sticks around.
Motor City Seafood’s offcuts are composted by a company that picks them up and takes them offsite to be turned into material used on farms. Finding a second home for fish parts wasn’t easy at first, co-founder Staci Hayman said.
Before moving the company to the 44,000 square-foot facility in Highland Park, it had squeezed into 3,000 square feet in Plymouth. Hayman didn’t want to throw away fish parts the company didn’t sell for meat, but couldn’t find a compost company that would come often enough to keep them from turning funky. Motor City Seafood didn’t have the freezer space or the volume of material to make it work.
“At our previous facility, in order for someone even to pick up our waste for composting, we would have had to have freezer space,” Hayman said. “So when you have someone coming once a week for a pickup, you have to freeze it — otherwise the smells and all of the things. Now that we’re in a much larger facility we have the space.”
Although not one of the high-value uses identified by the 100% Great Lakes Fish team, composting fish offcuts benefits the climate compared with sending those cuts to a landfill. Organic material releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, when it’s landfilled and left to break down in an environment without oxygen. Schmidt said about 40% of a fish’s biomass is fillet, so the rest could end up tossed unless it is used for another purpose.
Motor City Seafood was one of the first companies to sign on to the Great Lakes Governors and Premiers’ 100% Great Lakes Fish Pledge. Companies that sign the pledge promise to proactively use all parts of commercially caught Great Lakes fish, maximize the value derived from those fish, explore investment in new technologies, spread the word and be open-minded about taking the initiative further.
There is additional manpower involved in separating fish offcuts to be used for other products, Hayman said. It’s harder than just swiping everything into the same container.
At Motor City Seafood, one of the first steps toward meeting the 100% Great Lakes Fish Pledge was buying equipment that takes some of the labor out of separating the various pieces.
“These are easy first steps that we can take, and we are working with the Great Lakes governors and premiers,” Hayman said. “They’re reaching out to some different industries that we could potentially be working with (that could be) taking these offcuts and turning them into a new product, creating new jobs within the Michigan region.”
