Cod Milt – Oil and Protein Processing

Background

With food production comes unused biomass. The government has affirmed its commitment to orchestrating strategies for enhanced value creation within the seafood industry. This commitment aligns with the principles of the circular bioeconomy, focusing on sustainable production and maximizing the utilization of raw materials. Utilizing marine resources more efficiently offers economic, ethical, and environmental advantages. It should be a goal that the raw material follows the “food first” principle, ensuring that raw materials are initially allocated for direct consumption before exploring opportunities to extract their highest value.

This guiding vision propels the Cod Milt – Oil and Protein Processing (TOPP) project.

Similar to other marine raw materials, cod milt contains high-quality proteins and fats with diverse applications. The most lucrative avenues include human consumption and pet food. Cod milt is also recognized as a source of DNA, with a small volume utilized daily for nucleic acid production.

The finest quality cod milk, fresh and light, currently finds its way into human diets, notably in sushi for the Asian market. To ensure optimal utilization and financial returns from residual raw materials resulting from whitefish slaughter, it becomes imperative to utilize all cod milt.

The project’s core focus is on developing and refining hydrolysis processes to generate valuable products encompassing protein, oil, and DNA derived from cod milt. By identifying versatile applications for cod milt and other cod biomass, the project takes significant steps in the right direction towards total utilization of cod.

What we do

In the TOPP project, the focus will be on optimizing the enzymatic hydrolysis process on both fresh and frozen raw material. The resulting products (aqueous phase/hydrolyzate, solid/liquid, as well as oil phase) will be analyzed to determine possible areas of use.

Nofima has experienced that in order to succeed with an upscaled process on an industrial scale, it is critical that the process is first optimized and quality assured in the laboratory. It is important to establish an optimal process that can be carried out on a large scale and investigate whether there are quality differences between frozen and fresh raw material. Good quality of the raw material is essential for further processing.

One way to ensure the freshness and quality of the raw material is by using compact and mobile hydrolysis plants that can be placed where the raw material is landed.

Nuas will focus on relocation, installation and pilot production in Nuas’s facility in Senja.

Products produced in the project will be introduced to potential customers for testing. A literature study will also be carried out to assess the total utilization of all fractions of offal from cod, as there is already a lot of literature documenting both nutritional content, volume, as well as processing and product possibilities for marine residual raw material.