Last weekend master’s students at the University Centre took part in a MAKEathon innovation competition held by Matís, Iceland’s leading food R&D. The competition was held simultaneously in Ísafjörður and Bolungarvík as well as three other locations in Iceland.

The mission during the weekend was to add value to left-over raw material from the seafood industry in order to make the industry mor sustainable. The teams in the Westfjords focused on utilizing flesh is left on salmon bones after filleting.

On Monday the winning team was announced at the University Centre. The winning team, called SOS, produced a product similar to salami or pepperoni. SOS are Jake Mauril Thompson, Coastal and Marine Management alumni, Joyce Bos, first year CMM student, Frances Simmons, first year Coastal Communities and Regional Development student and Amanda Burman and Passion Taylor, master’s students of SIT Climate Change and Global Sustainability master’s program.

The award was handed out at the University Centre of the Westfjords and attended by many of the project sponsors. The award included dinner at Húsið restaurant, guidance to move on with the project by the Westfjords Regional Development Office and office space at Djúpið, incubator in Bolungarvík.

The products produced by the five teams that took part were surprisingly good according to the judges, but the winning product was in the judge’s opinion both credible and progressive.

Gunnar Þórðarson, at the Matís Office in Ísafjörður posed the idea that the winning team would produce a larger portion of the product and introduce it to the public in cooperation with one of the sponsors of the competition, local brewery Dokkan in Ísafjörður. So, it is possible that in the near future we will hear more about the project.

Matís is one of the 11 European partners of the project MAKE-it!, an EIT Food funded project, led by the University of Cambridge.