The use of insect meal as a sustainable feeding alternative in aquaculture: Current situation, Spanish consumers’ perceptions and willingness to pay

By P. F. Llagostera, Z. Kallas, L. Reig, D. Gea. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The growth of aquaculture and the increasing demand of farmed fish have led to a rise in the price of fishmeal and fish oil used in fish feeding during the last years. The experimental use of insect meal as a sustainable alternative to fish meal has recently grown. Insects are easy to rear, have a small ecological impact and have high protein content. The present work analyzes through a Discrete Choice Experiment method, the preferences and willingness to pay of Spanish consumers towards an aquaculture production system based on this protein source as ingredient in aquafeed, using the gilthead seabream as a case study. It also analyzes the information level of consumers about aquaculture and their perceptions towards its environmental impact compared to other animal production systems. This study also summarizes research advances regarding the insect meals as substitutes or complements for fish meals focusing on fish species of interest in Spain and Europe. Special emphasis was made on the limitation of their use, its impact towards the conversion feed ratio and its main nutritional problems for fish feeding, such as fatty acids and chitin. The studies showed that the use of insect meal, in particular, from the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens), the common housefly (Musca domestica) and the mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) as an alternative of feeding in aquaculture seems to be promising both at technical-productive level and at consumer acceptance level. Results showed that Spanish consumers were willing to pay a premium for this type of fish compared to fish produced with the current feeding systems. Furthermore, the gilthead sea bream fed with insect meal was the most valued regarding its environmental impact compared to the current fish feeding systems. However, taste expectation for this fish type still low, highlighting the importance of including hedonic evaluation studies for further research.

Subfields: Aquatic Science, Insect Science, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f6618c32b522ca0bf771e13c99a9e625ebbe8d9

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Citations in the corpus

Insect and fish by-products as sustainable alternatives to conventional animal proteins in animal nutrition (2020, background): “…they responded positively to the question if they would eat meat products from livestock fed insect meals (insects as feed), when properly informed about current animal feed issues (Verbeke et al. 2015; Mancuso et al. 2016; Ferrer Llagostera et al. 2019; Macombe et al. 2019; Sogari et al. 2019b).”
The potential of insect protein to reduce food-based carbon footprints in Europe: The case of broiler meat production (2021, background): “Furthermore, the use of insect protein as a sustainable feeding-alternative in aquaculture is gaining significant attention in research and practice (Riddick, 2014; Llagostera et al., 2019; Lu et al., 2020; Toviho and Bársony, 2020; Poveda, 2021).”