Orange Salmon Color Affects Its Quality? Here's The Fact

JAKARTA - salmon is famous for its bright orange meat. Not infrequently people measure the quality of salmon based on the bright orange color on the meat.

Launching from the Daily Mail, on Wednesday, February 19, 2025, some people think that the salmon color is getting brighter, so the quality is getting higher. However, it turns out that this assumption is not true.

Orange meat color cannot always be a reference for quality when buying salmon. This is because each type of salmon has different characteristics that affect the color of the meat.

Orange salmon meat may not be entirely natural. The color relies heavily on salmon habitat, whether it lives wild in the ocean or is cultivated.

In the salmon species that live in the wild, they look for their own food, namely shrimp and zooplankton, which has a rubberoid asthaxanthin pigment. Pigmen is what makes salmon meat orange.

For farmed salmon, you can't find the same food as wild salmon. salmon farmers also tend not to feed shrimp, because the cost is expensive.

Therefore, cultivation salmon is given astaxanthin pigment. If there is no astaxanthin pigment added, the farmed salmon has a natural gray or white meat color. This color makes many people question its quality, so that eventually it is given astaxanthin pigment.

In fact, the salmon color actually varies from white, pink, orange, to bright red. salmon meat with these colors does not mean the quality is not good.

Meanwhile, the astaxanthin pigment is harmless, actually increasing the nutritional value of salmon. Pigmen is part of a carotenoid and contains anti-inflammatory substances, which can reduce human-stress-related diseases.

It should also be noted that the pigment is partly made synthetically, but some are naturally made. Among them are made of more natural phaffia microalga or yeast.