New TIDE Framework Reveals Why Seafood SMEs Struggle to Turn Fish Waste Into Profit

Every year, the world’s seafood industry discards mountains of heads, skins, bones, shells, viscera, and trimmings—material that scientists have long argued could be transformed into collagen, gelatin, chitin, hydrolysates, fertilizers, feed ingredients, and even energy. The chemistry is well understood, the markets exist, and the circular-economy logic is compelling. Yet in the small and medium-sized enterprises that dominate fisheries and seafood processing, most of these side-streams still end up as costly waste. A new study published in Results in Engineering by Lampros Lamprinakis tackles this puzzle head-on, asking not whether seafood valorization is technically possible, but under what conditions a small firm would actually find it credible enough to adopt.

The answer, according to the research, lies in a concept the author calls adoption credibility, captured in a new theoretical framework named TIDE—an acronym for Technological Fit, Institutional Enablement, Deployment Fit, and Economic-Organizational Fit. Drawing on survey evidence from Greek fisheries and seafood enterprises collected under the DORIS project, the study argues that modular valorization systems become adoptable only when all four dimensions align simultaneously. A technology that fits the material stream but overwhelms the operator, or a business model that works on paper but collapses under seasonal volume swings, will simply never leave the drawing board. Adoption, in this view, is a configurational outcome rather than the product of any single decisive factor.

The empirical foundation of the framework is a structured questionnaire administered to companies spanning fish and seafood processing, fisheries, aquaculture, and retail operations with on-site fish handling. Of 55 companies contacted, 16 completed the survey—a response rate of roughly 29 percent. Most respondents were processing-oriented firms: ten engaged in processing and packaging, four combined aquaculture with processing, and the remainder included a vertically integrated fishery-processing enterprise and a supermarket chain performing off-site filleting. The firms are concentrated in coastal and urban hubs such as Attica and Macedonia, but some operate on islands or in remote areas like Rhodes and Crete, capturing exactly the geographic diversity that makes deployment decisions so difficult.

The survey revealed recurring patterns that shape the four TIDE dimensions. By-product generation is continuous but marked by seasonal peaks, especially in summer, and streams are commonly mixed, only partly separated, and often frozen before handover to third parties. Disposal fees frequently exceed any revenue opportunities: among respondents who provided cost data, delivery fees ranged from approximately €0.08 to €0.50 per kilogram, while reported revenues from by-products were low and sometimes wiped out by transport costs. Space is tight, regulatory and permitting burdens loom large, and users strongly prefer systems that can be operated without additional specialized personnel. These observations became the raw material from which the framework’s dimensions were distilled through an abductive, theory-building synthesis.

Technological Fit, the first dimension, refers to how well a valorization system matches the temporal, compositional, and handling realities of the by-product stream. A modular unit that assumes clean separation, stable throughput, or abundant operator time will exhibit weak fit in real processing environments. Economic-Organizational Fit, the second dimension, concerns whether cost structures, financing mechanisms, labor demands, and managerial burdens match the resource profile of a small firm. Because by-product management is typically experienced as a cost center rather than a profit center, adoption rarely hinges on a high-margin value proposition. Instead, it depends on avoided disposal costs, modest value uplift, financing that lowers upfront exposure, and service-based or leasing arrangements that make adoption less ownership-intensive and more responsive to variable volumes.

Deployment Fit, the third dimension, addresses the geography of the industry. Some firms cluster in dense coastal and urban hubs where shared infrastructure is realistic; others sit on islands where treatment capacity is limited and transport, space, and infrastructure constraints are acute. The choice between on-site micro-units, shared hubs, and mobile services is therefore not a secondary design detail but an integral part of adoption itself. The framework illustrates this with three stylized archetypes: a high-fit SME with a balanced profile across all four dimensions, for whom an on-site unit becomes plausible; a cluster-based SME whose strong Deployment Fit reflects the advantages of shared infrastructure; and an island SME where institutional support and spatial necessity are strong but financial and operational capacity is constrained, pointing toward mobile-service solutions.

The fourth dimension, Institutional Enablement, receives the most distinctive theoretical treatment. Rather than treating regulation as an external barrier, the framework positions it as an active mechanism that converts technical and economic potential into implementable adoption. The study identifies four roles. Standardized permitting packs and classification guidance reduce compliance uncertainty around animal by-product rules, hygiene obligations, and environmental permits. Operating procedures, short training modules, and remote troubleshooting build operational capability. Traceability standards, documentation protocols, and facilitated offtake relationships create the market legitimacy that higher-value outputs require. And institutional structures stabilize the coordination and risk-sharing arrangements that shared hubs, leasing contracts, and mobile services demand. In short, institutions are not background conditions but adoption infrastructure.

From these dimensions the study derives six formal propositions, including the claim that Institutional Enablement not only directly raises adoption credibility but also conditions the effect of the other three dimensions—strengthening the relationship between technological, economic-organizational, and deployment fit and actual uptake when institutional support is high. The framework is then translated into an econometric operationalization: adoption credibility can be modeled as a perceptual, behavioral, or categorical outcome, with the four TIDE dimensions as explanatory variables and interaction terms testing whether institutional support amplifies the others. A second specification links the framework to cost-benefit analysis and technical optimization, incorporating indicators such as capital expenditure per kilogram of annual capacity, operating expenditure, expected revenues, avoided disposal costs, net present value, payback period, and breakeven throughput. The author is careful to note that these equations are conceptual specifications for future testing, not empirical results, since the survey sample is too small for full econometric estimation.

The study is explicit about its limitations. The framework derives from just 16 respondents in a single country, dominated by processing-oriented firms, and relies on cross-sectional perceptions rather than observed adoption behavior over time. It should therefore be read as a theory-building contribution rather than a statistically validated model. Still, the author argues that the dimensions of technological, deployment, and economic-organizational fit reflect challenges widely documented in the broader SME adoption literature and should travel well across sectors, while Institutional Enablement is likely to be more jurisdiction-specific, given how much permitting procedures and governance arrangements vary. Future research should test the propositions with larger, more representative samples, longitudinal designs, and cross-country comparisons.

The practical implications are striking. For technology developers, the message is that engineering a better machine is not enough: service design, deployment architecture, permitting support, traceability systems, and operator training must be treated as integral components of the innovation package. For policymakers, the findings suggest that institutional enablement should be viewed as adoption infrastructure in its own right, particularly in sectors characterized by resource constraints and regulatory complexity. And for the seafood industry itself, the framework offers a way to explain why two seemingly similar firms respond so differently to the same technological opportunity—one embracing an on-site micro-unit, another joining a shared hub, a third waiting for a mobile service to arrive. If the blue economy is to close its material loops, the study suggests, the decisive frontier is not chemistry but configuration: getting technology, economics, geography, and institutions to reinforce one another at the scale of a single, hard-pressed small business.

Subject of Research: Techno-economic optimization and adoption of modular seafood by-product valorization systems in small and medium-sized enterprises

Article Title: Techno-economic optimization of low-CAPEX/OPEX seafood valorization in SMEs using the TIDE framework

Article References: Lamprinakis, L. (2026). Techno-economic optimization of low-CAPEX/OPEX seafood valorization in SMEs using the TIDE framework. Results in Engineering, 32, Article 113281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113281

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113281

Keywords: seafood by-products, circular economy, TIDE framework, SMEs, blue economy, technology adoption, techno-economic analysis, waste valorization, institutional enablement, deployment models, Greek fisheries, modular biorefinery