Our Commitment

EIT Food is a Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) supported by the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT). EIT Food seeks to transform the way in which we produce, distribute and consume food throughout Europe to improve consumer confidence and health. It is a unique partnership of over 50 leading companies, universities, and scientific partners covering the entire food value chain.

Next Tuna successfully applied to EIT Food’s call for Sustainable Aquaculture in 2021. Today, we are a proud partner of EIT Food and benefit not only from its financial support but also from its unique partner network. 

The Murcia Oceanographic Centre, belonging to the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO-CSIC) is the only place in Europe, with ABT full-cycle aquaculture research activity, and as such the most important partner of Next Tuna.

The IEO operates a recirculation facility for tuna brood-stock and a tuna hatchery in Cartagena and Mazarron, respectively, in Murcia (Spain). The learnings from IEO, operating a comparable, but smaller facility than planned for Next Tuna are key to avoid major mistakes in our farm. IEO is one of our partners under our EIT Food grant. IEO will share its knowledge and experience with Next Tuna. IEO will validate the production concept, based on the TRL 7 experience out of the ABT RAS facility operated by IEO. IEO will support Next Tuna in developing the protocol for the production of infertile ABT together with Wageningen University and Research.

Wageningen University and Research (WLR) is the leading European centre for animal breeding and livestock management, including aquaculture species. WLR and Next Tuna team members share a successful collaborative research history and have worked together on three projects. Two of these were EU FP-7 Projects in the aquaculture research and development area and one was developing the breeding and selection program for perch and pikeperch.

WLR is the leading institute in Europe when it comes to the combination of aquaculture and animal breeding expertise under the same roof. Next Tuna will highly benefit from knowledge transfer from animal breeding into aquaculture facilitated by WWLR. WLR is one of our partners under our EIT Food grant. Next Tuna will develop, with support of WLR, a dedicated breeding program for ABT, based on the latest insights in genetic improvement using genomic selection. In cooperation with IEO, WLR will provide the research required to implement a protocol for infertile ABT production.  

One of the biological/technical challenges of our land-based system will be the transfer of our product (juvenile ABT) to open sea water and their transport to our clients. We will be using a highly innovative approach: floating, RAS-based tanks for our juveniles. Seafarming Systems (SFS) is a leading developer of floating, semi closed and closed containment facilities in steel for other species such as salmon.

SFS and Next Tuna are in the process of jointly developing a concept for a floating RAS system based on the experience of SFS on floating semi closed and closed containment facilities for aquaculture production and on Next Tuna expertise in RAS design, construction and operation. SFS is one of our partners under our EIT Food grant.

With its head offices located in Denmark, CM Aqua helps water treatment solution makers to become more successful by disseminating technology solutions, equipment, knowledge, and experience in aquaculture. CM Aqua targets to manufacture equipment with long lifetime, solving the challenges with warm salt water by using high-tech polymers instead of the typical stainless-steel solutions.
Including its factory in Germany, CM Aqua has over 40 dedicated employees and more than 3 decades of experience from producing equipment to the aquaculture industry, like HEX drum filters and Ratz protein skimmers.

CM Aqua supports Next Tuna with design and engineering capacity to find the right solution for this major milestone in the aquaculture industry.

CFeed provides starter feed for marine fish which is easy to buy and use. C-Feed delivers copepod eggs to large scale commercial hatcheries, aquarists and researchers all over the world. Although small in size, a bottle of copepod eggs can give you more than 100 million copepods. The eggs are easily hatched into copepod nauplii, and can be further grown to larger copepod stages, using live micro algae, as the fish juvenile demands larger prey.

CFeed supports Next Tuna in hatchery design and developing optimal ABT larval rearing solutions based on Copepod feeding.