Cod and haddock products from the North Atlantic come primarily from sustainably harvested stocks, are healthy to eat and have comparatively low environmental impact. In an ideal world these favourable characteristics should provide these products with a competitive advantage and higher prices in the market, but currently this is not the case. A key reason for this is the lack of differentiation of cod and haddock products from the N-Atlantic compared to other whitefish species, for example similar products from Asia – e.g. pangasius and tilapia. The products are homogeneous, they do not stand out in comparison with competing products and there is little done to try to highlight the many positive properties that they have. The WhiteFishMaLL project was initiated to address these challenges.

WhiteFishMaLL, which stands for North Atlantic Whitefish Marine Living Lab, was a three year research and development project that ran from beginning of year 2012 untilearly 2015. The primary objective of the WhiteFishMaLL project was to build a branding platform for whitefish from the North Atlantic that facilitates market differentiation in termsof sustainability and superior consumer benefits. The project had also a secondary objective, which was to demonstrate how a Living Lab can be established in the marine sector, dealingwith a specific innovation challenges, where the solution is co-created, explored, demonstrated and evaluated with a user-centric approach in real-world environments. This meant applyingLiving Lab approaches to meet with the main objective, and using that process to demonstrate how Living Lab can be applied in the Nordic marine sector.