Cellular aquaculture pioneer BlueNalu was born out of a contradiction. The company’s founders noted that while technological development around mammal cell products was booming, there was a relative dearth of knowledge about fish cell development. Yet the market opportunity for cell-cultured fish—with global demand for seafood on the rise and wild stocks increasingly vulnerable—looked big.
In attempting to do for fish cells what its peers were doing for cow cells, BlueNalu and other cell-cultured seafood companies faced a steep learning curve. Mammal-cell companies could take advantage of existing cell lines and a wealth of research from the pharmaceutical industry, but fish-cell companies would have to start almost from scratch, unlocking the unique conditions required to propagate and stabilize fish cells.
For BlueNalu, the mission was not only to develop a stable cell line for a single species of fish. “It was about having the correct methods to be able to reproducibly extract stem cells from a wide range of species,” Lauran Madden, the company’s Vice President of Research and Product Development, told The Spoon this week over Zoom.
So the company developed a proprietary technology platform that would allow it to create stable cell lines, with the flexibility to switch from one species to another. Madden says that achieving that reproducibility was a special challenge because cell growth conditions vary between species. “For example, mahi and tuna are not exactly the same, but they’re more similar to each other than they are to a cow,” she says.
To identify a group of focus species, BlueNalu used a decision matrix that factored in a variety of species attributes. The team looked at how scarce or vulnerable a species was, and how heavily it was imported. They also considered species that pose health concerns—like tuna, which contains mercury. And they looked for species that couldn’t be raised using conventional aquaculture.
The search for suitable donor fish also had to be carried out carefully. “We try to find trustworthy sources for species, where they’re legally bred or caught,” says Madden. “And we do extensive testing on the sample tissue to make sure that it’s free of contaminants.”
The team ultimately succeeded in creating cell lines for eight different species of fish, including bluefin tuna, mahi mahi, yellowtail, and snapper.
With its proprietary tech platform and species flexibility, BlueNalu aspires to become more than a manufacturer of a fixed line of cell-cultured seafood products. “Our approach is to become a global brand, a supply chain of seafood products,” company President and CEO Lou Cooperhouse told The Spoon this week in a Zoom interview. In theory, the company could use its platform to respond to a decline of a given fish species.
Having invested extensively in building new technology, the company is eyeing a range of intellectual property opportunities. But Cooperhouse doesn’t expect to see the cell-cultured seafood space become as competitive as the plant-based meats arena in the near future. The technological barrier that still exists for budding cell-cultured seafood companies means that there’s still strong competitive insulation in this industry niche.
“This is a challenging category that requires quite a bit of capital,” he says. “In making cell-cultured fish fillets, there’s really, in my opinion, no other way to do this but through our technology.”
BlueNalu’s investments in research and development may eventually find applications outside of the alternative protein industry: The team believes that some of its discoveries could help to power scientific research and support conservation efforts. For instance, the company’s technology could help researchers to understand fish species’ responses to environmental contaminants at the cellular level.
“There’s so much that is unknown about fish species and the ocean in general,” says Cooperhouse. “We’re all about preserving biodiversity and ecosystem erosion. So yes, there could be some licensing opportunities and other opportunities for our technology to have some real value outside of BlueNalu.”
With its species cell lines ready to grow, BlueNalu is preparing to launch its products in the U.S. and abroad. The company recently announced a new partnership with European frozen food company Nomad Foods, the latest in a series of international partnerships. Cooperhouse believes the company’s tech platform will support its mission of supplying scarce fish species worldwide without competing with local, conventional aquaculture businesses.
“We’re not just making healthier products that are sustainable,” he says. “Our products also support food security, they create jobs, they build factories. It really is a bit of a holy grail opportunity for us.”
cell-based fish
Avant Meats Announces New R&D and Pilot Manufacturing Facilities in Singapore
Avant Meats, which makes cell-based fish, announced today that it is establishing new R&D and pilot production facilities in Singapore, created with the support of the Singapore Economic Board.
The Hong Kong-based Avant cultivates fish cells to make cultured fish products, starting with sea cucumber and fish maw. The company says it is the first cultivated meat startup in China and the first cultivated fish startup in Asia.
This new facility is just the latest move from Avant to scale up production of its cultivated fish and bring it to the mainstream. Last month, Avant announced that it had achieved a 90 percent cost reduction in the production of its cultivated fish, and that it had partnered with Chinese biopharmaceutical company QuaCell to bring those costs down another 75 percent.
In the press announcement emailed to The Spoon, Carrie Chan, Co-founder and CEO, Avant said “Singapore provides Avant with regulatory clarity, international talents, and sufficient space for the next step of scaling up.”
Indeed, Singapore has been a leader in the cultured protein space. Singapore became the first country in the world to authorize the sale of cultured meat back in December of 2020. Singapore residents can now even order cultured meat for home delivery, thanks to a partnership between Eat Just and foodpanda.
But Avant is also the latest cultivated meat company to build a pilot production facility. BlueNalu, a U.S.-based cultivated fish startup, raised $60 million this year to open its pilot facility in San Diego this year. And Israeli startup Aleph Farms announced its plans to have its BioFarm pilot plant operational by 2022.
Getting these pilot production facilities up and running is a key step in cultivated meat achieving mainstream adoption. When the BlueNalu facility goes live, it will produce 200 – 500 pounds of commercial grade cultivated fish a week for restaurants and other foodservice operators. As the production of cultivated fish and other proteins ramp up, the cost will come down, bringing much-needed price parity with traditional, animal-based meat.
Podcast: BlueNalu CEO on Building a Cell-Based Fish Tech Company
As a long-time food industry exec, BlueNalu President and CEO Lou Cooperhouse knew there were established food industry techniques his company could borrow from when building cell-based seafood.
“It’s a much bigger toolbox,” said Cooperhouse. “You can embrace some of the technologies that industry uses, and create a product that absolutely can meet the sensory expectations and experiences of fish, which will be much more challenging on the meat side.”
One of the tools from the food industry toolbox, according to Cooperhouse, is layering.
“The concept of layering plays itself very nicely with the food industry,” said Cooperhouse. “There’s extrusion technologies, there’s folding technologies and there’s lamination technologies like in packaging.”
But while BlueNalu was able to leverage some of the technologies and processes from the food industry, the company had a much smaller set of knowledge to borrow from when it comes to replicating fish cells. That’s because the vast majority of work in the cell-based meat space has been done with mammal cells, while fish cell replication for human consumption was largely unchartered waters.
“There was little to no intellectual property around anybody ever growing and propagating successfully stable cell lines of fish,” said Cooperhouse. “So we began with a clean piece of paper on the technology side.”
And so BlueNalu set about to build a set of IP to create cell-based fish products, which Cooperhouse describes as an “end game” of a “product that has the same nutritional, functional, and sensory characteristics as seafood.”
Three years later, the company is ready to move to pilot production with the goal of creating up to 500 pounds of fish per week in its new pilot production plant it has started building in San Diego.
If you want to hear about Lou’s story and how he went from concept to pilot production of cell-based seafood, you won’t want to miss this podcast. You can hear my full conversation with Lou Cooperhouse, and all of our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or by clicking play below.
BlueNalu Announces New, Expanded Facility to Bring its Cell-Based Seafood to Test Markets
BlueNalu, which creates cell-based seafood, announced today that it is expanding its R&D and manufacturing space with a new HQ facility in San Diego.
According to the press announcement, BlueNalu has leased 38,000 sq. feet (a six-fold increase over its current space), which will house a pilot-scale food production plant “that will be designed for the commercial production of BlueNalu’s various cell-based seafood products in its initial test markets.” It will also feature the first BlueNalu kitchen and demo space.
The space will undergo renovation with a plan to open during the second half of 2021. Once up and running it will be creating anywhere between 200 – 500 pounds of its cell-based seafood per week to be sold to restaurants and other food outlets in test markets.
BlueNalu is working on a number of cell-based fish products including mahi mahi, red snapper, tuna and yellowtail. The company did a public culinary demo of its yellowtail at the end of last year. BlueNalu has plans for an even bigger, 150,000 sq. foot facility to be opened in the next five years that is capable of making 18 million pounds of cell-based seafood a year.
There are a few companies currently racing to bring their cell-based seafood to market. Wild Type does salmon while Shiok Meats does crustaceans. BlueNalu is focusing on finfish, and says that its different from other players in the market in that its product can be prepared raw, cooked multiple ways (seared, grilled, fried, etc.), as well as through acidification (ceviche, for example).
Getting this facility up and running will be an important step in BlueNalu’s path to commercialization. Products in R&D are one thing, but getting to scale and price parity with traditional animal-based seafood will be critical to its long-term success.