Good start on the Nutaaq® season
The inshore trap fishery for cod has started in West Greenland, and so has the production of Nutaaq® cod. New this season, fishermen from more areas participate in the fishery and take part in securing a good raw material basis for the high-quality product.
The trap fishery for cod started in the beginning of May and shortly after, Royal Greenland’s Nutaaq® production facility in Maniitsoq in West Greenland opened its doors to the sixth season.
The special production in Maniitsoq is optimized so that the cod is slaughtered, cleansed, bled, sorted, fileted and then frozen in one continuous process – all within max. 2 hours from when the live cod left the seawater to the fillet enters the freezer. This very fast processing in modern facilities gives an outstanding cod quality that is perceived fresher, brighter and tastier than traditionally processed cod.
The Nutaaq® cod is produced both as fillets and as H&G J-cut (without collarbone). The H&G J-cut cod are either sold fresh or used as raw material in Royal Greenland’s “Chilled Selection”, a concept where the thawed cod is fileted and packed on ice in our European production in Cuxhaven, Germany. The Nutaaq® cod raw material brings much value to the chilled value chain due to the fact that the controlled, low bacteria level ensures up to 10 days of shelf-life on the chilled fish.
New in the 2020 season is, that the raw material base is expanded. The Greenlandic fishing quotas allows fishermen in more areas to participate in the inshore fishery, opening for the live, trap-cought cod from the fjords and inlets from Paamiut in the south to the Disko Bay in the north, to become Nutaaq® cod.
“We have 200 net-enclosures that we make available for the fishermen, every area gets 10-20 enclosures to start with. We can then add more enclosures to the best fishing areas.” says Sten Sørensen, Operation Manager for cod. The first indications from the fishermen show a good amount of cod in the traps and Sten Sørensen hopes that the season, that runs until October, will deliver a good amount of live cod to the Nutaaq® production.
Also in Greenland, Covid-19 impacts the production set-up despite the fact that the country is not suffering from the virus as such. However, closed borders prohibit season workers from travelling to the Maniitsoq factory, which puts the local workforce under pressure, with the result that it will be possible to fillet a smaller amount of cod than planned, and instead produce more H&G – Nevertheless, all sails are set on the factory to be ready to receive the catches from the local fishermen and produce the famous Nutaaq® quality.
