How do we get more value out of our seafood?
This article was featured in Eurofish Magazine 3 2025.
Royal Greenland catches and processes fish and seafood from the North Atlantic for delivery to customers in Europe, Asia, and North America. The company has developed an innovative method to add value to summer cod by changing the way it is caught and handled.
If you were faced with the challenge of turning a low value fish into a high value product, how would you go about it? At Royal Greenland they answered this question through a new concept that fundamentally changes the way summer cod (Gadus morhua) is fished and handled in Greenland to turn them into high value fillets for the global market. At the heart of this change lies innovative technologies such as fjord cages and a custom-built well-boat being applied at scale.
The concept of Nutaaq cod
The Nutaaq cod concept has been 10 years in the making and centres around increasing the value of the summer cod fishery in Western Greenland. Summer cod in Greenland is perceived as a low value product due to its high feeding in a short time, which has a negative impact on the firmness, visual appeal, and taste of the cod fillets. This impacted the sale of bulk quantities of fillets as buyers would often choose other suppliers’ products.
At the heart of the concept is a fasting period where the cod is kept in cages for a minimum of 14 days and up to 4-6 weeks allowing the fish to digest the eaten food, which improves the firmness, visual appeal, and taste of the fish. The fish is caught by local Greenlandic fishers using pound nets in the fjords of western Greenland. The fishers then translocate the cod into the fjord cage for fasting. During the translocation and fasting period, great care is taken to ensure that the cod is handled gently and monitored regularly to ensure its wellbeing. This focus on wellbeing has resulted in an overall mortality rate of less than 4% from capture to filleting.
After the fasting period, the fish is transported from the cages in the fjords with a well-boat to one of two larger holding pens next to the processing facility in Maniitsoq. The fish are kept in the holding pens to de-stress for one to two days, before being pumped into the facility, stunned with electricity, and then immediately headed and gutted. As of 2024, 9,972 tonnes of Nutaaq-compliant individuals have been processed into 1,200 tons of Nutaaq fillets and 4,000 tons of Nutaaq H&G products.
These value-adding procedures ensure a bloodless fillet that is highly sought after in the HORECA1 sector that sells it for a premium. This has also meant that the price for a Nutaaq cod fillet is on par with other fresh ocean cut fillets.
So, what are the new technologies that enabled the Nutaaq fillets in the first place?
New technology and overcoming challenges
The main new technology that Royal Greenland and private fishers had to adapt to, were the cages that are now found in the Greenlandic fjords for holding the cod. The mesh that constitutes the cage is specially built to integrate seamlessly with the traditional Greenlandic pound net fishery, by having one-way openings near the water line for the cod to swim through as the pound net is raised to the surface. This design ensures that the fish remain in the water during the entire transfer process, which eases handling for the fishers, making it more appealing for them to opt into the Nutaaq concept. Furthermore, it reduces any damage to the cod to near zero, which also has a positive impact on the mortality rate. The cage mesh is equipped with pingers, an acoustic deterrent device, that protects the cod from natural predators such as seals, and the cages from damage from larger mammals such as whales.
The design and placement of the cage must also consider one of the major challenges during the fishing season, which is the presence of meltwater from inland snow and ice. This is vital for the wellbeing of the cods during the fasting period, because when the meltwater mixes with fjord water that has a low flowthrough of ocean water, it creates unfavourable water quality conditions for the cods in the cage. This can lead to a higher mortality rate unless designed against. The cages are therefore dimensioned at 6 m by 6 m by 6 m or 216 m3, which offers the fish enough space to distance themselves from each other—about 10.6 litres of water per kg of cod at the maximum 20 tonne cage capacity. This upper capacity limit is set based on animal welfare considerations and to ensure the high quality of the raw material. This dimensioning also allows for optimal placement of the cages, as they can be firmly anchored to the fjords seabed in the currents of the fjord systems. This enables a better flowthrough of fresh ocean water which keeps the water quality at the level necessary to ensure the survival of the cod during the fasting period.
These specially designed cages can fit into a 20-foot container for ease of transportation. Using them enabled Royal Greenland to reduce the mortality of the fish during the fasting periods. This has had a positive impact on the profitability of summer cod, as more live fish have become available for processing to Nutaaq fillets at Maniitsoq.
In total Royal Greenland presides over 200 cages and has access to another 100 privately owned cages that are made to the same specifications to ensure uniform holding conditions and mooring/handling when the well-boat comes to pick up the cod. The cages are leased out to private fishers who then catch and transfer the cods to the cages, before informing Royal Greenland of the location, time of transfer and quantity in the cage. This information is gathered in a central database that allows Royal Greenland to plan and plot the logistic operation of gathering the cods for translocation to the final holdings pens in Maniitsoq.
The eight tanks in the wellboat have a combined capacity of 120 tonnes.
The translocation is done by Royal Greenland with the retrofitted Tuneq well-boat that has a holding capacity of 120 tons divided over eight tanks. The well-boat comes installed with automatic graders and sorter systems to ensure only compliant cod are translocated. Undersized fish are released alive back into the ocean. Compliant cod are led into the well-boat and distributed over the eight tanks. This is an important step in the handling because it ensures that the water in each holding tank remains oxygenated at levels that mimic natural conditions to reduce the onset of stress or mortality.
Maintaining adequate levels of oxygen was one of the main challenges observed during the first years of operation, as the cod in the well-boat’s holding tanks would on occasion perish from a lack of oxygen. This led Royal Greenland to change the way sorting is conducted, to ensure that the water in the holding tanks remains well oxygenated throughout the translocation process. In practice this means that a maximum two tonnes of fish are led into tank number one if the water remains well oxygenated. Once the maximum is reached the inflow to tank one is then diverted to tank four if the oxygen sensors in tanks two and three report too low oxygen levels to take in more fish. This process repeats until the cage is emptied of fish.
Addressing this challenge had the benefit of ensuring that more cods were delivered to the holding pens in Maniitsoq for further processing into Nutaaq fillets. Dead cod still in good condition, could only be processed into general H&G products, that fetch a lower price than the Nutaaq fillets. Ensuring the reduction in the loss of live cod during translocation, therefore remains an imperative for Royal Greenland as improved conditions in the translocation process have had an overall positive impact on the profit margins on the summer cods.
The benefits of product innovation
Overcoming these challenges associated with the process and thus improving the final fillet product has resulted in several benefits for Royal Greenland:
- Turning low value summer cod into a high value cod fillet that is on par with ocean cut fillets and in demand by the HORECA sector.
- Lower the mortality rates associated with cod harvesting and thus achieving lower protein loss.
- Financial ability to offer higher prices to the fishermen for Nutaaq-compliant cod compared to conventionally caught cod.
- Consolidation of the cod fishery in Western Greenland to achieve economies of scale and enable future side-stream utilisation options for economies of scope.
The potential to achieve greater side-stream utilisation options once critical mass has been allocated to Maniitsoq, is a prospect that is of great interest for Royal Greenland moving forward. Here the knowledge and the many good examples from the 100% cod utilisation in neighbouring Iceland, are a great source of inspiration that Royal Greenland intends to follow.
Moving forward with technology to enhance the concept
While the technology behind the Nutaaq cod concept is already in place, technological development hasn’t stopped. To increase transparency with the fishers and to assist scientists in stock assessment, automatic counters have been installed on the well-boat to count the number of cod that are being let back into the ocean. This is intended to increase transparency and fairness regarding the number of viable cods the fishers can be paid for and provide valuable information for the yearly stock assessment by providing scientists with the exact number and biomass that was released back into the ocean.
Lastly, the installation and trial of scanners at the Maniitsoq facility that can detect internal blood spots in the H&G cod products prior to freezing. Being able to detect blood spots through fish skin would greatly improve the processing efficiency of the Nutaaq production as fish that are not up to the Nutaaq standards of a spotless fillet or H&G product are separated out automatically instead of manually, during the filleting process.
Søren E. Schrøder, Eurofish,
soren@eurofish.dk