The alga food supply chain is presumed to be one of the main drivers for future supplementation of protein sources within the sustainable food system based on utilization of organic wastes. The objective of this study was to position alga based food protein
in the food protein market (meat, fish, legumes, insects).
The method applied in the paper is grounded on the multi-criteria decision making method with alternatives. There were two stages of analysis (i) what is the consumer’s priority on food quality criteria, and (ii) assuming the given food quality criteria what
are the preferences to different sources of food protein, including algal protein. The 55 electronic questionnaires were collected from Belgium (13), Germany (5) and Poland (37).
It was showed that the most important features for consumers evaluating novel protein sources are healthfulness (55.6%), followed by sensory attractiveness (27.4%)
and availability (17.0%). In the evaluation of the healthfulness criteria, consumers chose food safety as the most important category (30.5%), assigning significantly less importance to nutritional value (12.7%), dietary value (7.5%) and calorific value (4.9%).
The overall comparison of protein sources within the food quality criteria revealed the highest preference for meat followed by fish, legumes, algae and insects (Figure 1). The results of this research suggest that in the short-term perspective there are no factors that could unequivocally affect consumers’ willingness to change traditional sources of protein for alternative ones, such as edible algae.
Acknowledgement. Project financially supported by a research project entitled “Sustainable up-cycling of agricultural residues: modular cascading waste conversion system”; research grant agreement No. FACCE SURPLUS/III/UpWaste/02/2020, research is supported by the National (Polish) Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR) (Project FACCE SURPLUS/III/UpWaste/02/2020).