Kenya: Im­proved fish pro­cessing by smoking and solar dry­ing

The pro­ject on Fish Pro­cessing by Solar Dry­ing and Smoking is be­ing con­duc­ted by Kenya Mar­ine Fish­er­ies Re­search In­sti­tute (KM­FRI). It is a pro­ject that in­volves im­proved tra­di­tional fish pro­cessing meth­ods by smoking and solar dry­ing to pro­duce high qual­ity fish for both local and wider mar­kets work­ing with local com­munit­ies at Gazi and Shi­moni in a bot­tom-up ap­proach. The meth­ods of pre­ser­va­tion em­ployed are en­vir­on­ment friendly and are set to im­prove on food se­cur­ity. The over­all ob­ject­ive of the pro­ject is to pro­duce, through com­munity par­ti­cip­a­tion, high value smoked and solar dried mar­ine fish products for the mar­ket. 

Un­der the trop­ical con­di­tions, fresh fish spoils with light­ning speed, cool­ing sys­tems hardly ex­ist and their main­ten­ance is ex­pens­ive. With the sup­port of the Light­house Found­a­tion, Kenyan re­search­ers in­vest­ig­ate meth­ods of smoking and dry­ing in co­oper­a­tion with local wo­men groups, who are tra­di­tion­ally in charge of fish pro­cessing. The type of smoking wood, the ideal tem­per­at­ure in­side the dryer, taste and shelf life of products are ex­amined as well as the mar­ket in the hin­ter­land. This sci­entific study com­ple­ments an­other pro­ject of the Found­a­tion with the fish­er­men of the re­gion to in­tro­duce sus­tain­able fish­er­ies man­age­ment.

The pro­ject is com­pleted.

Ap­pro­pri­ate tech­niques for smoking and dry­ing have been de­veloped and the cor­rect use was trained with the loc­als of vari­ous com­munit­ies. Product de­vel­op­ment was sci­en­tific­ally mon­itored and mar­ket­ing op­tim­ized.

Land­ing site mem­bers now use the dryer to dry and san­it­ize their fish. They were trained in the pro­duc­tion of smoked mar­ine fish and were in­volved in product de­vel­op­ment. The train­ing in­cludes ba­sics such as hy­gienic hand­ling in gut­ting and fil­let­ing and the re­fine­ment of exotic and local sauces. Es­pe­cially these products are very pop­u­lar.
 
In or­der to open new mar­kets in re­gions where smoked and solar-dried mar­ine fish are not yet wide­spread or even un­known, trips to the hin­ter­land have been un­der­taken, in par­tic­u­lar to­gether with fish pro­cessing wo­men from dif­fer­ent land­ing sites in or­der to pro­mote these products.

The mat­ter of fish safety came out as an emer­ging is­sue es­pe­cially re­gard­ing tak­ing the smoked or solar dried fish to the na­tional mar­kets like the es­tab­lished su­per mar­kets. The su­per­mar­kets in­sisted on know­ing the his­tory of the fish, where it is pro­duced and pack­aged. They also re­quire bar codes. We there­fore de­veloped for the first time a gen­eric HACCP (Haz­ard Ana­lysis crit­ical con­trol point) for dried fish. We also de­veloped a Qual­ity In­dex method for fresh Sigan­ids (“Taffi”) as a first point to­wards fish safety.

Pack­aging still re­mained a chal­lenge be­cause get­ting suit­able pack­aging for dried whole fish is not easy be­cause the sharp fins and bones pierce the pack­aging ma­ter­ial and for the smoked fish the chal­lenge is that the su­per­mar­kets to do not want even a whiff of fish smell in their shelves. This mat­ter is still be­ing ad­dressed to­gether with trace­ab­il­ity. It is easier to pack dried fil­let but then the price be­comes too high.

Since the in­tro­duc­tion of the Light­house pro­ject on im­proved fish smoking and dry­ing, grow­ing in­terest has been shown with other pro­jects also in­cor­por­at­ing such activ­it­ies in other areas. The World bank KCDP pro­ject has a func­tion on dry­ing, smoking and value ad­di­tion and there is an EU pro­ject that is also in­volving solar dried fish. The DVDs pro­duced are be­ing used as teach­ing aide in some uni­versit­ies.

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