Aquaculture Research

Marbless Feed Improves Yellowtail Meat Quality

Nissui pursues aquaculture research, mainly on Marbless, containing red pepper, and other functional feeds formulated to improve meat quality for more attractive-looking and better-tasting yellowtail.

Our Marbless feed for yellowtail has the following three main effects:

  1. 1.Finishes the meat with the optimum amount of fat (prevents excess fat accumulation in muscle tissue)
  2. 2.Increases the firmness of the sashimi texture
  3. 3.Slows dark meat fading (helps slow discoloration of dark meat)

Functional fish feed Marbless improves yellowtail meat quality

Feed with Red Pepper

Farmed yellowtail, which consumers felt was too fatty, used to not be very popular. We discovered that compared to yellowtail ingesting a comparable amount of fish oil, yellowtail fed feed with red pepper developed just the right amount of fat, so we hit on the idea to add red pepper to the feed.
Because it reduces the amount of marbling("marble less"), we named the product Marbless.
After extensive on-site testing, we also discovered that Marbless helps improve firm texture and delays fading of dark meat.
Marbless is a registered patented product (patent nos. 3895133 and 4382795).

Color change of dark meat of farmed yellowtail fed Marbless or regular feed for meat stored at 4℃

Slowing dark meat fading makes the yellowtail look tastier

Another of the drawbacks of yellowtail is that the color of the dark meat fades quickly. Even when yellowtail is perfectly fresh, sashimi or filets with dark meat that has faded don't look attractive and are less valuable. Finding a way to prevent fading of the dark meat color means that we can supply customers with delicious-looking yellowtail.

Farming attractive-looking and delicious-tasting yellowtail

Our yellowtail research concentrated on improving three characteristics.

  1. 1.Finishing the meat with the optimum amount of fat (preventing excess fat accumulation in muscle tissue)
  2. 2. Increasing the firmness of the sashimi texture
  3. 3.Slowing dark meat fading (helping slow discoloration of the dark meat)

In our research, we focused on identifying some substance in our daily diet that would help improve yellowtail meat in order to enhance its innate tastiness.

Manufactured at the Nissui Group company FarmChoice Co. Ltd.

The main ingredients of Marbless are fish meal and fish oil sourced from within the Nissui Group, to which we added red pepper, Marbless is manufactured at Farm Choice Co.,F45 Ltd.'s Imari fish feed and oil plant and used by Kurose Suisan Co. Ltd., which farms Kurose yellowtail. Kurose Yellowtail which has been fed Marbless is spiked (Japanese ikejime techniques) immediately After being harvested and quickly processed before being sent on its way to customers' tables.

Imari fish feed and oil plant

Shipping Spiked (Japanese ikejime techniques) Kurose Yellowtail