Most of what gets said about our shrimp comes from us. So for this one, we handed the questions to the person who knows the story best — Marcin Weltrowski, co-owner of Resko and the ambassador for everything we do. We wanted to talk about something most people never think about: what happens to the shells.
Most people throw shrimp shells away. Yours travel all the way to Japan. How did that come about?
For us, the shell was never waste — it’s a raw material that simply needed the right home. And we found one in Japan. What would end up in the bin almost anywhere else is, over there, a genuinely valued ingredient. Nothing from our shrimp is wasted: the meat reaches the customer as a clean, ready-to-eat product, and the shells begin a second life on the other side of the world.
How do the shells actually get there — and in what condition?
They’re frozen and shipped to Japan. Freezing is what protects them on that journey: it locks the shells at their best until they reach the kitchen that uses them. And they have to arrive in genuinely excellent condition, because Japan has some of the strictest food-quality standards in the world. Our shells meet those rigorous Japanese requirements — which, honestly, tells you as much about the quality of the raw material as anything we could say ourselves.
What happens to them once they arrive?
In Japan, a restaurant thaws the shells and uses them to make a stock — a broth — and that broth becomes the base for ramen. So the shell doesn’t just get used; it becomes the foundation of an entire dish. There’s something fitting about that: the part everyone else discards is, in the right hands, the part that carries the whole flavour.
Is the broth from your shells noticeably different from an ordinary shrimp stock?
It’s not just noticeably different — it’s on another level. The broth has a beautiful colour, a fresh, natural aroma, and a depth that’s simply incomparable to stock made from farmed shrimp shells. Anyone who works with it can tell the difference immediately.
Why is it so much better? What’s actually behind that?
It comes down to one thing above all: astaxanthin. Our cold-water shrimp are exceptionally rich in it — the same natural pigment that gives the shrimp its colour — and the shells carry a great deal of it. That high astaxanthin content is what gives the broth its beautiful colour, its character, its quality. It’s not an additive and it’s not a trick; it’s simply what years of slow growth in cold, clean water leave behind in the shell.
And that’s the part that fascinates me most — because astaxanthin turns out to be far more than a colour or a flavour. It’s something we’re now exploring in a completely different, and quite remarkable, direction. But that’s a story for next time.
