ABOUT US
The Idea
The turning point for Angela Köhler came, when she went to the Caspian Sea to a sturgeon symosium. During a demonstration of caviar production in front of 150 conference guests, caviar masters brought out a two-meter live female sturgeon, and cut the belly open after a blow on the head. “The masters suddenly became extremely nervous,” she recalls. “They went on to say that the eggs were too close to spawning and so they couldn’t use them as caviar. They discarded the entire fish and began the process again with a new one.
Back to her research laboratories at the AWI, she started a series of experiments with mature eggs harvested from various live aquatic animals. She was convinced that it must be possible to produce high quality caviar from mature eggs harvested without killing the sturgeon.
In fact, in Angela´s innovative processes, signalling molecules in very small natural concentrations activate a machinery of enzymes within the eggs that stabilize the egg envelope in milliseconds without changing the inside.
From the research lab the technologies have been evolved towards large scale production of caviar from sturgeon and eggs from other aquatic animals. (“From lab trial to large scale caviar production”)
ABOUT US
The Invention
Thanks to Prof. Dr. Angela Köhler, the marine biologist and internationally renowned toxicologist of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), premium caviar can now be obtained from mature sturgeon eggs without killing the valuable females.
The sturgeon suffer no damage and produce caviar, rich of valuable proteins and lipids and of increasing quality in taste, egg size and quantity per harvest.
The AWI has patented the processes, developed during many years of research in close collaboration with sturgeon farmers. A new advanced process (CAV2) is now applicable to all fish and crustacean species. The patents were granted already in Europe, East Asia (AM, AZ, BY, KZ, RU, TJ, TM), Georgia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam and China beginning of 2025 (see Patents & Licenses).
