
Stefan Kraan
Chief Scientific Officer, Aquaceuticals Ltd, IRL
Stefan Kraan
Chief Scientific Officer, Aquaceuticals Ltd, IRL
Born in The Netherlands he graduated with a
M.Sc. degree in Marine Biology at National University of Groningen, The
Netherlands. He moved to Ireland to pursue a PhD on phylogenetics and
aquaculture of edible seaweeds at the National University of Ireland, Galway in
1998. He became manager of the Irish Seaweed Industry Organisation in 1998 and
finished his PhD in 2001. He established the Irish Seaweed Centre in 2001, a
dedicated R&D centre for seaweed-based research and development, which was
launched in 2001. After managing the seaweed centre for 9 years, Dr Kraan
resigned from University life in 2009 to pursue and develop some commercial
ideas using seaweeds for a variety of purposes amongst them functional food ingredients
for fish farming and novel algae cultivation systems for biofuel production. Dr Kraan is
currently Co-Founder and Scientific Director of
Aquaceuticals Ltd a company producing and marketing seaweed based functional
ingredient and extracts for human food product and consumption. Furthermore he
is involved in the development of large-scale seaweed biomass cultivation
programs for the bio-refineries and other nutraceutical applications. Dr Kraan
is currently president of the International Seaweed Association. His main fields of
expertise are aquaculture of seaweeds, sustainable development of algal
resources, industrial applications of seaweeds and usage of seaweeds in human
consumption, biotechnology and biomedicine.
Presentation
Seaweed use for food and feed, their status and levels of nutrients
and metals is currently a bit of a mess as highlighted in Dominquez (2013). The
last decade has created many opportunities to address public health issues
through diet and lifestyle in which seaweeds are playing an interesting and
growing role resulting in a higher demand, leading to cultivation,
certification and sustainability.
Seaweeds or their constituents have great potential as products in
the functional food markets and as food ingredients and many novel products
based on macroalgae have entered the market in recent years. However, this
brings also rules, standards and regulations. If we look at the current EU
legislation (EC 710/2009 and EC 834/2007) there is standards in place but
inadequate or outdated or not applicable. Companies producing seaweed for food and feed
need to comply with legislation like the novel food list and threshold levels
currently in place, but on what are these standards based? In this presentation
legislation and challenges at EU level will be evaluated together with the
novel food category. Ingredients (like fucoidan) extracted from currently
accepted edible seaweeds also need to undergo authorisation under the Novel
Food Regulation. Strangely legislation on metals is only applicable to seaweed
use in food supplement and not as whole food and needs addressed sooner than
later. The challenges around this will be examined together with some outdated
issues around feed use of seaweeds such as arsenic levels or iodine. Fortunately the European Commission for
standardisation is addressing these issues for algae in several workgroups and
sub committees in order to arrive with one set of standards and threshold
levels for seaweeds to be applied for the food, feed and cosmetics sector based
on real time values.
Keywords
Food, feed, legislation, metals, standards