A second year of digitized quality monitoring is coming to the Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fishery, measuring everything from the fat content to the temperature of the fish delivered to tenders.
Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, Certified Quality Foods and Digital Observers are teamed up for the project, which met its goals during the 2020 season despite pandemic challenges.
For the 2020 season, the project did quality measurements from over 6,000 sockeyes off 200 boats delivered to five tenders throughout Bristol Bay. Certified Quality Foods cloud-based business intelligence platform analyzed the data and allowed for key takeaways around trendlines, comparisons between regions, seasons, boats, tenders and more.
BBRSDA officials said generic reports were shared with leading industry professionals and detailed reports with individual boat and tender names is available to customers.
For the 2021 fishing season, Quality Control technicians plan to work on 15 tenders in Bristol Bay to measure the quality of salmon at the point of delivery using the noninvasive Certified Quality Reader, a device using electrical currents to measure cell degradation of the salmon. This is a fast, objective way to measure the freshness of salmon that accounts for more than just temperature.
BBRSDA officials said the project will help determine better handling practices to continue to improve salmon quality.
