BlueNalu

May 30, 2020

Food Tech News: Recipe Personalization, Curbside Pickup, and Cultured Seafood

Happy food tech news day! I hope it’s a sunny one where you are.

This week we’ve got stories on a new partnership for DNA-based personalized recipe suggestions, funding for cell-based seafood, and ALDI’s expansion of curbside grocery pickup. Enjoy!

Side note: This will be my last foodtech news dispatch for The Spoon! I’m moving on and will miss you all greatly.

GenoPalate and Edamam team up to further personalized dining
Personalized nutrition platform GenoPalate has partnered with Edamam, a nutrition data service, to make the world’s largest food and recipe database for those trying to eat a healthier diet. Through the partnership, GenoPalate customers will be able to better recommend recipes to their users, and Edamam will move “more seriously into the nutrigenomic space.” Beginning in the fall of 2020, GenoPalate members will be able to access information Edamam through both mobile and web.

ALDI to expand curbside pickup to 600 stores
Grocery chain ALDI announced this week that its Curbside Grocery Pickup service would be available in 600 stores across 35 states by the end of July. Customers shop for groceries online, select the closest location which offers curbside pickup, and choose a time for pickup. They drive into their designated parking spot and a grocery employee will put their groceries into their car. Maybe next they’ll start exploring geofencing?

Sumitomo Corporation of America invests in BlueNalu
Sumitomo Corporation of Americas (SCOA) has joined the Series A financing round for ‘cellular aquaculture’ company BlueNalu. The startup, which makes cultured seafood from fish cells, announced a $20 million Series A round back in February of this year. SCOA will help BlueNalu expand its production capacity and create global distribution partnerships.

February 26, 2020

BlueNalu Nets $20M Series A to Accelerate Development of Cell-based Seafood

BlueNalu, the startup focused on creating seafood directly from fish cells, today announced that it had closed a $20 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Stray Dog Capital, CPT Capital, Clear Current Capital, and New Crop Capital. Combined with previous funding raised in 2018, this Series A brings BlueNalu’s war chest up to $24.5 million.

Based in San Diego, BlueNalu was founded two years ago to create a platform to grow a wide variety of seafood — fish, crustaceans, and more — from cell samples in large bioreactors. Since then, the company has been quite busy. Bluenalu hosted a culinary demo of its cell-based yellowtail back in December. A month later, they partnered with Nutreco, one of the world’s largest fish feed companies, to accelerate the scaling of its cultured seafood in order to bring it to market more quickly.

When is that exactly? The company has stated that they hope to start selling their cultured seafood products (maybe starting with yellowtail?) in two to three years. In five years they hope to break ground on their first large-scale production facility. That’s part of what they’ll use their new funding for, according to a press release emailed to The Spoon. BlueNalu will also channel its fresh funds into expanding its team and accelerating its product’s path to market.

With its significant Series A complete, BlueNalu is in an advantageous spot to become a leader in cell-based seafood production. Compared to its competitors, like Wild Type, Finless Foods, and Avant Meats, BlueNalu is working across multiple fronts — legislation, R&D, and supply chain — at a very quick pace. BlueNalu has also unveiled plans to build a 150,000 square foot facility which could produce 18 million pounds of their cell-based seafood per year. If that comes to fruition, it’ll be hard to compete with.

Then again, cellular aquaculture isn’t a zero-sum game. Cultured seafood (or meat, for that matter) isn’t even to market yet, so there are plenty of opportunities for multiple companies to debut their own cell-based fish, shrimp, and more. Plus many startups are focusing on a particular species, so there’s space for everyone to stake their claim.

A rep from BlueNalu told The Spoon that they think this is “the largest A round to be secured in the cell-based food industry.” (Memphis Meats secured a hefty $161 million last month, but that was a Series B.) Twenty mill is nothing to sniff at, but it’s a metaphorical drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of funding that BlueNalu will need to make their goal — scalable, sustainable, affordable cultured seafood — a reality.

January 21, 2020

BlueNalu Partners with Nutreco to Advance Cell-based Fish ‘Feed’

BlueNalu, a cellular aquaculture company growing seafood in the lab, announced a partnership with Nutreco, one of the world’s largest fish feed companies, late last week.

Speaking with BlueNalu CEO Lou Cooperhouse at the time, he told me that working with Nutreco will help BlueNalu commercialize its cell-based seafood in two ways. First, BlueNalu can tap into Nutreco’s extensive knowledge of fish feed so that BlueNalu can optimize its media: the nutrient-dense “food” in which cell cultures are grown.

Though Nutreco currently focuses on feeding live fish, Cooperhouse said that their solution has very similar components to what BlueNalu uses to grow its fish cells in a lab. In fact, he claims that making food for cell cultures is even simpler. “If you’re feeding a living fish, they need certain ingredients to maintain skin, brain, etc,” he said. “But we’re only trying to feed cells that we need.” Think: muscle and fat cells.

Once BlueNalu brings its cell-based fish to market — which he hopes will be within two years — Cooperhouse said that Nutreco could also serve as a supply chain partner for media ingredients. BlueNalu will need a lot of feed; in five years, the startup plans build a massive facility that will produce a whopping 18 million pounds of cell-baased seafood per year.

Media (or cell food) is typically one of the most significant hurdles for cell-based meat and seafood companies. Extracting cells from an animal is cheap; it’s growing them to a significant number in a short time frame that’s the real challenge. Currently media is quite costly, which is why cell-based meat is so costly (it’s typically at least 10x more expensive than animal meat).

Other companies are trying to solve the cell culture feed issue. Canadian startup Future Fields is developing an animal-free media to sell to cellular agriculture companies; in Japan, Integriculture is developing its own B2B feed solution. Some cellular ag companies, like JUST, are developing their own plant-based media internally.

The partnership with Nutreco could give BlueNalu a leg up over other cultured seafood companies. Nutreco’s expertise and existing supply chain could help the cell-based fish startup develop more efficient growth media, and scale it more quickly when the time comes.

But the partnership isn’t just beneficial for BlueNalu. It will also give Nutreco an “in” to the cell-based meat space, where it will join other large ingredient suppliers like Merck and Cargill. Talk about a big fish in a small pond.

December 17, 2019

Cellular Aquaculture Startup BlueNalu Unveils Cell-Based Yellowtail in Culinary Demo

Today BlueNalu, a San Diego-based startup developing seafood from fish cells through a process called cellular aquaculture, announced that it has done a culinary demo of its cultured yellowtail amberjack.

In a press release the company called the demo a “milestone” to support its plans to introduce cell-based seafood to market within the next two years. BlueNalu CEO Lou Cooperhouse noted that the company has also internally tested mahi mahi and red snapper.

Several other companies have already done taste tests of their cell-based seafood. Wild Type organized a dinner featuring its cultured salmon earlier this year. In Asia, Shiok Meats debuted dumplings containing cultured shrimp in March, and just last month Avant Meat unveiled its cell-based fish maw (edible swim bladders of fish) at the Future Food Summit in Hong Kong.

However, it seems that BlueNalu’s fish is unique in that it acts just like traditional fish in all cooking techniques, whether it’s served seared or steamed or raw. As Cooperhouse noted in the release, “we don’t believe that any other company worldwide has been able to demonstrate this level of product performance in a whole-muscle seafood product thus far.” In the tasting, the so-called “medallions” of yellowtail were prepared cooked in tacos and seafood bisque, as well as acid cured in a poké dish. Wild Type’s salmon, by contrast, can’t be cooked to high temperatures or else it falls apart.

BlueNalu’s next step is to scale, scale, scale. They’ll have to move pretty quickly to meet their incredibly ambitious plans that include a goal to break ground on a facility which will produce 18 million pounds of cell-based seafood within the next five years.

While a successful culinary demo doesn’t necessarily mean that BlueNalu will be able to achieve that goal in that timeline, it’s certainly a promising first step.

BlueNalu

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