Jacky Cartwright

Trawling for extra value from the wild caught prawn harvest

There’s more to the catch from wild caught prawns than what appears on the plate, and Jacky Cartwright, who built a first-generation Queensland family business with her commercial fisher husband, wants the industry to net some of those possibilities.

Introduced to the wild caught commercial fishing industry by her husband, Jacky has embraced the industry and their Silver Sea Seafoods business, which supplies the domestic retail and wholesale market and six export destinations from their base at Mooloolaba.

There’s little scope, Jacky says, to modify vessels for at sea processing, so extending and adding value through downstream processing could boost profitability.

Jacky has already tackled the challenge in their own business with the production of a prawn stock, and it’s given her a taste of the possibilities to extend value.  

Her quest led to her research “Extending value in wild caught prawns: Exploring international models and implementation pathways for Queensland’s commercial prawn fishers”, where she hopes to discover how other countries find a means to lift returns.

Scandinavia is her first port of call, where she will study how value-adding through nutritional, functional and medicinal uses can generate extra income from the discarded or imperfect prawns.

Her goal is to return with implementable solutions and practical pathways which can add value back to the Queensland industry.