Seafood industries generate effluents with a high organic polluting load. Among these, cooking juices contain potentially valuable aromas. Previous works have shown that a two-step integrated membrane process, combining a desalination by electrodialysis and a concentration by reverse osmosis, was technically feasible to recover natural marine aromas. This paper is focussed on a method allowing to estimate the membrane surface area needed to process a cooking juice with given characteristics (volume, concentrations of mineral and organic matter...) and then to estimate the process earning power. In the case of shrimp cooking juice concentration, such a process seems economically interesting as the pay-back time was shown to be inferior to three years. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.