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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultured fish

Steakholder Files Patent For Printing Flaky Fish

Steakholder Foods announced today it has filed a provisional patent with the US Patent Office for a new process to create cell-cultured fish with layers of tissue to achieve “the characteristic tender flakiness of cooked fish.”

The company, formerly known as MeatTech 3D, says the new approach will be created using its 3D printing technology and is expected to enable the production of a wide variety of fish, seafood, and cuts.

“The filing of this provisional patent application is another significant step forward in our ability to 3D print a wide variety of species,” Arik Kaufman, CEO of Steakholder Foods, said in the release. “We are passionate and committed to using our technological versatility to make both the terrestrial and marine animal protein industries more sustainable.”

The move into seafood is strategically a good move considering how sky-high fish prices have risen compared to other forms of protein. Po Bronson, head of IndieBio, said as much on the latest episode of The Spon podcast.

“The seafood companies look to be in a much better position because you’re competing with what is a very expensive product,” Bronson said. “Wild caught seafood is very expensive in market prices, so your competitive index is a more matchable price.”

The company partnered with Umami Foods in August, a Singapore-based cultured seafood startup. That announcement and today’s comes amidst a flurry of deals (and patent filings) for the company, which became one of the first cultured meat companies to go public on a US exchange. Unfortunately, the company’s stock hasn’t fared well over the past year, dropping from around $11 in initial trading to under $2 today.

While it’s unclear when and at what price we’ll see Steakholder’s fish product reach the market, if they can figure out how to create a viable cellag fish product, their stock price will no doubt benefit long-term.

We Talked to BlueNalu About Creating Fish Cell Lines From Scratch

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.”

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.