Recently, a conference was held at Rimini in Italy, called the Mediterranean Seafood Expositon 2006, which is the largest seafood exhibition held in Italy. In connection with the exhibition, a meeting was held to discuss how the latest technology can be used to ensure the quality and safety of marine products. Among those invited to deliver a speech there was dr. Guðrún Ólafsdóttir, specialist at IFL.
Guðrún says that one of the reasons why she was invited to give a lecture at the meeting is that one of the main organizers of the conference was "Íslandsvinurinn" dr. Bianca Maria Poli, Professor at the University of Florence. Dr. Poli is also the president of the National Association of Fisheries Companies in Italy (L'Assoittica Italia - Associazione Nazionale delle Aziende Ittiche). She first came here for the TAFT 2003 conference and was fascinated by the country, the nation and - also how Icelanders run their fisheries and fish processing.
Speakers at the meeting came from various Italian universities, but two foreign lecturers were invited to speak at the meeting. In addition to Guðrún, there was Joop Luten from Fiskeriforskning in Norway, and he presented research from The Seafoodplus project, including consumer research in which IFL participates and has been reported before here on the site.
According to Guðrún, her talk was about rapid methods for quality, safety and species analysis of fish, where she explained the possibilities of using rapid measurements with various technologies, such as electronic noses. She also discussed other innovations in the water, such as "smart labels" for packaging, such as TTI (time temperature integrators) and rapid test kits for pathogenic bacteria and histamine, which concern the safety of marine products.
Guðrún says that the Italians continued to seem to modernize their fishing industry and were interested in hearing what other nations were doing in this field.