The University of Georgia Department of Food Science and Technology’s Kevin Mis Solval and his team of researchers have secured a nearly half-million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to aid in creating safe food ingredients from cannonball jellyfish.
Harvested on the southeast coast of the U.S., cannonball jellyfish, commonly called jellyballs, have become a prominent catch for fisheries located within the region, and a way for shrimpers to diversify their catch during the off-season for shrimp. But history has shown that there has never been a domestically sustainable market for jellyfish food products.
“Large amounts of jellyfish are harvested on the coast of Georgia,” said Mis Solval, a food process engineer specializing in developing novel food ingredients in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. “But what is harvested is sold almost entirely to Asian markets. A big challenge in creating a more domestic industry will be building the demand by creating a product that people can use in their everyday lives.”