In the first part of this conversation, Marcin Weltrowski — co-owner of Resko and the ambassador for everything we do — told us how our shrimp shells travel to Japan, where their high astaxanthin content makes an exceptional ramen broth. That pigment turned out to be the beginning of a much bigger story. So we sat back down with him to follow it — into an EU-funded research project built entirely around astaxanthin.
In the first part of our conversation, we ended on astaxanthin — the pigment that makes your shrimp broth so special. You said it was the start of a much bigger story. What is it?
It is. Everything we talked about with the Japanese broth — the colour, the character — comes down to astaxanthin, and the more we understood about it, the more we realised we were sitting on something valuable. So we started an R&D project to extract it. Not to throw the shells away, not just to send them abroad, but to recover the astaxanthin itself, here, from our own shells.
For anyone who hasn’t heard of it — what actually is astaxanthin?
It’s a natural pigment — it’s what gives our shrimp, and salmon, and flamingos, their pink and red colour. But it’s also much more than a colour. In nature it acts as a powerful natural antioxidant, which is part of why it’s so valued, and why it’s sometimes talked about as a kind of “superfood” ingredient. It’s sought after well beyond the kitchen. And the remarkable thing is that our wild cold-water shrimp are exceptionally rich in it — richer than farmed shrimp — thanks to their diet and their slow growth in cold water.
Tell us about the project itself. What exactly are you developing?
The full name is a mouthful — “Development of an Innovative Process for Extracting Astaxanthin from Wild Shrimp Shells Using Supercritical CO₂.” In plain terms: we’re building a modern, environmentally friendly way to extract astaxanthin from shrimp shells using supercritical carbon dioxide. It’s a serious research and development effort, co-financed by European Funds, and it’s genuinely innovative work — not something anyone has simply done before us.
“Supercritical CO₂” sounds highly technical. What does it mean, and why does it matter?
It’s a clever piece of technology. Under the right pressure and temperature, carbon dioxide behaves in a way that lets it pull the astaxanthin out of the shells — cleanly, efficiently, and gently enough to protect the quality of the astaxanthin itself. And here’s the part that matters most to us: it does this without harmful solvents. The conventional ways of extracting compounds like this often rely on chemicals we’d rather never use. Our process eliminates them, and it’s designed to use less energy too. So it’s high efficiency, high quality, and a genuinely low environmental impact.
Why is this so important to Resko — beyond the business side?
Because it closes the loop. Think about the whole journey: a wild shrimp grows slowly for years in clean cold water, building up all this astaxanthin. We use the meat. The shells already have a second life in Japan. And now, instead of anything being wasted, we can recover the most valuable thing the shell contains — cleanly, without harming the environment. For us, this is what sustainability actually looks like in practice: not a slogan, but a process. And through this project, Resko becomes a pioneer in ecological astaxanthin extraction — which is something we’re genuinely proud of.
Where does this go from here? What’s the ambition?
The ambition is to prove that you can do this the right way — efficiently, at quality, and without the environmental cost that usually comes attached. If we get it right, it strengthens our position in the market and it sets an example for how this kind of extraction should be done. It started with a shrimp shell that most people would throw away. That it might end with a pioneering, clean technology — that’s the part that still amazes me.
