Pink and chum salmon. Photo credit: Scott Smiley.

Pasteurization of Salmon Caviar

Problem: The value of wild caught salmon has been reduced due to highly articulate competition from pen reared fish. With more than 130M pink salmon harvested annually, and markets available for only 60M in cans; new product forms for pink salmon are rather urgently needed. One area where additional value might be recovered lies in a shelf stable salmon caviar product.

Solution & Approach: There are extensive markets for pink salmon roe, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe. However, the value for pink salmon roe in these areas is limited. One possibility was that a pasteurization processes might be employed to develop a shelf stable salmon caviar. In collaboration with the Alaska Seafood company we developed processing conditions to produce a shelf stable jarred pink salmon product. Among the variations on this theme we tested was pink salmon caviar flavored with liquid smoke. This product did exceptionally well when test marketed in Japan.

Principal Investigator: Chuck Crapo