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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

eel

Forsea Foods Develops First Cell-Cultivated Eel Prototype

Today, Forsea Foods announced they have successfully created what they claim is the world’s first prototype of cell-cultivated freshwater eel. Working with Katsumi Kusumoto, executive chef of Tokyo’s vegan restaurant SAIDO, the Israel-based startup crafted two traditional Japanese dishes using the cultivated eel: unagi kabayaki and unagi nigiri.

The company chose cell-cultivated eel as its initial focus for a couple of reasons: First, the eel remains one of the most popular seafoods in Japan and sushi restaurants worldwide, which has put the population of this seafood under significant stress due to overfishing. Second, it’s a premium fish, which means initial pricing for the product will be much higher than commodified categories of fish or meat.

“Unagi is an enduring favorite in Japan,” said Kusumoto. “Its timeless appeal, however, is impacted by a growing awareness among the Japanese population of the need to take a more sustainable approach. It’s been a thrilling journey to join forces with emerging innovators, and working together to deliver the traditional unagi indulgence with a clear eco-conscience.”

Forsea’s novel approach uses organoid technology to create 3D microtissues of fat and muscle, which differentiate into edible cells without scaffold support. This simplifies production and enhances scalability, addressing major industry challenges.

“Forsea is at the forefront of addressing critical environmental issues,” says Roee Nir, CEO and co-founder. “Our cultured unagi aims to offer a genuine seafood experience without the ecological footprint.”

The company is eyeing commercial launch in 2025, targeting Japan, Asia, the EU, and the US.

Umami Meats Partners with TripleBar to Accelerate Cell Line Development for Cultivated Fish

Triplebar, a biotechnology company, and Umami Meats, a cultivated seafood company, have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on developing cell lines for sustainable cultivated seafood, starting with the Japanese eel according to a release sent to The Spoon.

Triplebar utilizes a microfluidics platform that it says can process thousands of complex assays per second with the noise characteristics of a liquid-handling robot. According to Triplebar CEO Maria Cho, these assays are processed using what she calls microreactors.

“The way to think about this is we take the test tube, and we miniaturize it to this very tiny microreactor that’s smaller than a human hair,” Cho told The Spoon. “And we’re able to put the thing that we want to test into this microreactor, and then the assay reagent that tests the thing that we’re looking for.”

With Umami, that “thing” they’ll be looking for is whether the cell line has the properties that it needs to grow in a bioreactor versus in an animal. That animal, in this case, is the eel, or unagi, a fish hugely popular in Japanese cuisine worldwide. Unfortunately, because of its popularity, unagi has become endangered due to overfishing. While much of the unagi sourced for human consumption is now produced via aquaculture, eel fish farms are incredibly inefficient due to the highly carnivorous nature of eels (researchers say it takes 2.5 tons of wild fish to make 1 ton of eel).

In describing how the Triplebar platform performs compared to traditional assay testing, Cho uses the analogy of the evolution of microprocessors. She says the company fits her microreactors on a chip that fits in the palm of your hand. That chip can process thousands of tests per second, millions per day, which she says is orders of magnitude more than tests run by humans or even liquid-handling robots. This increase is analogous to how a core-dense microprocessor performs compared to early computing technology.

In their partnership with Umami, Cho says they’ll look at how small changes to the genome produce the desired result in the cell line.

“We’re taking each of the individual base pairs in the genome and making a change in individual genomes,” said Cho. “And then, we’re oversampling that population to see what combination of changes give that final trait that we’re looking for which, in this case, are cells that grow in tanks versus animals.”

As for Umami, while its partnership with Triplebar will focus on eel, the company has plans to expand the collaboration to other types of fish. Umami says its “modular” production process works with various fish types, and the company says its platform will enable the manufacture of cultivated fish at different production sites tailored to local tastes. The company, which debuted its fish ball laksa last year in Singapore, says its product roadmap prioritizes endangered species that are IUCN Red Listed, particularly those that are unsuitable for large-scale aquaculture and face growing demand.

With $5.2M in New Funding, Forsea Forgoes Scaffolding in Attempt to Create Faster Path to Cultivated Meat

Cultivated meat, meet the organoid.

The rapid advance of technology used to create these small, three-dimensional collections of cells grown outside of a living being has created excitement over the past decade-plus in the medical research community, but now a startup named Foresea wants to use organoid technology not to save human lives, but instead that of eels and other seafood. The Israel-based startup, which today announced $5.2 million in seed funding according to a release sent to The Spoon, has developed a technology that utilizes organoids grown in bioreactors to produce eel meat.

According to the company, using organoids allows it to bypass the use of scaffolding, the technology typically used in cultivated meat creation to give meat its structure and texture. Forsea also claims that its technology can grow cultivated meat with fewer bioreactors as well as significantly less growth factors than is typically used in the cultivated meat creation process.

“While cell cultivation largely focuses on a system of directed differentiation, where cells are signaled to differentiate into a specific cell type and are then combined on a scaffold, our system grows the aggregate of the various cells already at the initial stage of the process,” Iftach Nachman, a cofounder of Foresea and inventor of the technology, explained. “The cells organize themselves autonomously into their innate, purposed structure, just as in nature.”

Forsea makes a point in their announcement that their technology creates standalone organisms utilizing an ex vivo methodology. This means that unlike in vitro (which literally translates to “in glass”) approaches where cells are isolated and separated from their natural biological surroundings, Foresea’s organoids are taken from living organisms and grown with minimal alteration from their natural conditions.

Forsea’s is one among a string of announcements over the past year focused on producing proteins at lower cost and with higher efficiency. Whether through new hybrid techniques, lower-cost growth factors, or new approaches to infrastructure, the cultivated meat industry’s focus has shifted beyond proving bench-scale viability to creating scalable solutions for mass-market production. With the introduction of the organoid as a platform for cultivated meat, Forsea has put an intriguing new approach on our watch list for the future of food.