A journey through the farmed cod value chain

Further upstream, Ode acquired a hatchery from Mowi several years ago and has exclusive use of a grow-out plant as part of a long-term lease arrangement.

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Stadsbygd: The Hatchery

The plant began life as a small shipbuilding facility before being refashioned as a cod hatchery in the early 2000s. Later, salmon farmer Mowi bought the plant and ran it for eight years, expanding it as a breeding facility for cleaner fish. Ode took over the facility on Jan. 1, 2021, and inserted its first fish within three months.

In Norway, eggs are supplied by two providers: the Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture Research, better known as Nofima, and Havland, a private company.

Cod produces many more eggs than salmon: a liter of cod eggs contains approximately 400,000 individual eggs, compared with just 5,000 for salmon. Cod eggs also hatch three months earlier than salmon. Anything between a quarter and a third of the eggs survive to become juvenile fish.

After hatching, the larvae are fed live prey, such as plankton and barnacles, for 20 days before dry feed is introduced – a process analogous to weaning. After 46 days in the tanks, the juveniles have transitioned entirely to dry feed.

At around 2-3 grams, after four to six months in the hatchery, the fish are vaccinated in a dip to protect against two bacterial diseases: vibriosis and atypical furunculosis. Then, they are transferred by truck to the grow-out facility, approximately three hours’ drive along the coast.

The hatchery could theoretically grow five batches per year. Currently, it produces three batches and sources two further batches from an external provider – a policy that reduces sourcing risk on genetics and biology.

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Tjeldbergodden: The Grow-Out Facility

The plant is owned by an independent company, Lumarine, and operated exclusively for Ode on a long-term lease arrangement.

The main building houses 24 tanks of 38 cubic meters and 20 tanks of 150 cubic meters. Outside, eight tanks of 750 cubic meters, arranged in two parallel rows and each under a separate marquee, host the fish on their intermediate stage of development before moving to sea.

A tunnel through an adjacent mountain provides a continuous supply of hot water to the tanks, ensuring the cod always has optimal water temperature. The water comes from another local company, an example of energy recirculation between two parties, where one needs cooling and the other needs heating.

The fish are vaccinated again, this time by automated injection, and water in the tanks is UV-treated to eliminate pathogens. Later, the fish are sorted by weight, affording smaller cod the time to grow further in a controlled environment while the larger fish are prepared for transfer.

These varying rates of growth – Kvalheim calls it “the fan effect” – allows harvests to be staggered and helps ensure year-round availability of fresh fish. After five to six months, most of the fish will have grown in weight to approximately 200 grams.

Some fish, of course, don’t make it: dead fish are removed from the tanks by net. Deformed fish are removed the same way.

Before transfer, feeding is paused for 48 hours to prevent excrement accumulating in the wellboat. Hungry fish will become more agitated, so the lights in the tent are dimmed as a calming measure.

Sludge, mainly excrement and feed residue, is treated at a small facility attached to the plant. Clean water is pumped out into the fjord and biogas produced from the waste is sold as fertilizer.

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A five-hour journey by wellboat from the grow-out facility, the Aukan site comprises eight netpens in the waters of Korsnesfjord, with room for two more. It is the closest sea farm to the grow-out plant – the company wellboat also plies routes to more distant sites, a full day’s journey to the south.

The netpens have a circumference of 120 meters, a smaller surface area than the 160 meters typical of a salmon pen. The nets, however, are deeper, reaching 38 meters below the surface. This reduces the energy requirement for the artificial lighting required to cut the seasonal and daylight awareness of the fish, as the hours of daylight in Norway vary greatly between seasons.

Deeper is better for cod, which moves naturally toward the bottom of the pen to avoid low surface temperatures in winter and high surface temperatures in summer. A temperature of around 8 to 10 degrees Celsius is the “sweet spot”, said Kvalheim.

“We want the same cubic meters, but more vertical than horizontal,” he said. The company plans to test submersible cages later this year.

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Another 250 kilometers (155 miles) to the south, in Voldsfjord, Alida is the closest farm to the processing plant. Here, 10 netpens are in use, red buoys in the center of each marking the start of an underwater chain of lights, switched on 24x7 (the cod never sleep).

The farm is connected by underwater cable to the electricity grid, while additional power is generated by an old salmon netpen refashioned as a circular set of floating solar panels.

Ode has a three-year supply deal with Norway-based feed giant Skretting. The physical feeding process is managed remotely from the company’s headquarters in nearby Alesund, where trained employees monitor banks of screens and study images beamed in from underwater cameras.

Cod feed is less fatty and more protein-rich than salmon feed. A pellet will typically contain around 50 percent protein, 16 percent fat, 14 percent carbohydrate, 10 percent water and 10 percent micro- and other ingredients.

“We like to have a very high marine diet,” said Kvalheim. “Sixty to 80 percent of our feed is marine raw materials, focusing on maximizing marine byproducts from salmon and pelagic processing.”

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The processing plant, or harvesting facility, is where the cod’s life comes to an end. Its journey, however, is far from over: from the small town of Vartdal, on the fjord of the same name, the packaged product ends up on supermarket shelves and in sushi restaurants around the world.

Ode acquired the plant from salmon farmer Masoval in February 2024, paying NOK 30 million (€2.6 million/$2.8 million). Including the acquisition price, Ode has committed to an investment of NOK 140 million (€12.0 million/$13.1 million) and is roughly halfway through its 18-month “masterplan” to overhaul the facility.

When Ode bought the plant, it had been shuttered for more than six months, its employees furloughed after three decades of harvesting 10,000 metric tons of salmon a year came to an end.

“We knew it was old, and that we really needed to invest in modernizing it and adapting it to our needs,” said Kvalheim.

Ode has built a new cold store, renovated the staff quarters and nearly doubled the square footage of the facility. Running one shift, the plant has capacity of 20,000 metric tons a year head-on gutted equivalent, an amount it could double – and perhaps even push toward 50,000 metric tons – with the addition of a second shift.

There is plenty of room to grow: this year’s throughput target is a more modest 12,500 metric tons.

Ode has recently installed a pre-rigor filleting line that could process up to 60-70 percent of its total volumes, depending on customer preference, following in the footsteps of how the salmon industry made its big breakthrough in sushi by filleting the fish only hours after slaughter.

In terms of markets, it exports most of its cod to western Europe, with shipments to the United States picking up this year and small volumes also sold to Asia, including the Middle East.

“In the UK and US, the breakthrough in terms of big volumes will be this year,” Kvalheim said.

It takes around 90 minutes for the cod to move through the processing plant. Two days later, it arrives in the Netherlands by truck; to Spain, the journey will take an extra day.

The product stays fresh for 17 days and is typically on a European supermarket shelf within five – leaving plenty of time for the retailer to sell it. For long-haul deliveries, for example to Asia, the cod is trucked to Oslo and air-freighted to its destination.