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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Finless Foods

Finless Foods Dual-Pronged Strategy Targets the Plant-Based and Cell-Cultured Based Tuna Markets

Environmental concerns, shortages in the supply chain, and a global focus on health are fueling excitement at the prospect of a cell-cultured food industry featuring meat, poultry, and seafood produced without the slaughter of animals. At this point, however, it’s an industry with high hopes whose players are willing to gamble time and money as the USDA and FDA ponder the establishment of guidelines for product safety, labeling, and other consumer considerations.

Finless Foods, based in Emeryville, California, is bullish on the future of its lab-cultivated Bluefin tuna. Still, the company is mitigating its risk by releasing a plant-grown tuna in the coming months. Armed with some new Series B funding to the tune of $34 million, Finless is anticipating government approval by the end of the year and is building out an 11,000 square-foot pilot production plant in Emeryville to meet what it hopes is consumer acceptance and widespread distribution.

“The FDA has already rubberstamped the blueprints for our facility,” Finless CEO Michael Selden told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We should be finished with construction in about three months.”

The dual-pronged strategy of initially releasing a plant-based tuna, the main ingredient of which is winter melon) makes sense for a company with more than $48 million raised. It purports to have a pleasing taste and color and similar mouthfeel to “real” tuna. Focused on Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, Selden said that it will help in brand building and drive revenue before its cell-cultivated tuna is ready for the market.”

Selden won’t give a specific date for Finless’ plant-based tuna release, but he claims it has received great reviews from its sampling at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival and New York Wine and Food Festival.

Once the joint efforts of the USDA and FDA establish guidelines for lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood, Seldon said that the initial focus would be on foodservice firms for distribution. He does not rule out a direct-to-consumer play as the market matures.

“That’s something I’d like to do in the future,” Selden said of selling to consumers via a subscription service. “Americans, at least from the data I’ve seen, aren’t used to doing that for seafood.”

“Because it’s a new thing, we wanted people to get used to it in typical settings such as in restaurants,” the Finless CEO added. “From there, If we build a strong brand presence, we can expand and create a more omnichannel approach.”

The is a method to Finless’ madness in selecting Bluefin as its first foray into the cell-cultivate fish business. Seldon said that while other species, such as salmon, have prior established research on their structure, with Bluefin, there is no existing work, making the reward for the company’s efforts much more lucrative.

“We wanted to come out with something people perceive as very high quality,” Selden said. “On top of that, it’s not democratized, which makes it very expensive. Skipjack or Blue Eye (tuna) is 15 dollars a pound. Bluefin is closer to $40 a pound. It also has much higher levels of omegas.”

Japan’s Dainichi Corp is among Finless’ investors, which makes sense given Japan makes up 90% of the world’s consumer consumption of Bluefin tuna. Having a home-grown financial partner will allow Finless to make a quick splash when the Japanese market has its regulatory approval completed.

“It helps with understanding the market,” Selden said of the Japanese opportunity. “For example, Japanese customers like a different cut of tuna. Americans like otoro, the fattiest cut of tuna while in Japan, they prefer chutoro, the second fattiest cut.”

Finless is not alone in the cell-cultivate fish business. Wildtype, a company that recently raised $100 million, is a healthy competitor, although Selden said its focus is more on Amberjack than the more costly Bluefin. San Diego-based BlueNalu is also in the space, but Selden believes the company has yet to develop a working prototype.

Regulation of the cell-based meat, poultry, and seafood world is being mapped out by a joint effort of the USDA and FDA. Although, once rules are finalized, the FDA will have jurisdiction over the seafood space. Singapore and Qatar are the only two countries with regulations for the cell-cultivated food industry. As reported in The Spoon, the Netherlands’ House of Representatives passed a motion to make the sampling of cell-cultured meat legal.

Cultured Seafood Company Finless Foods Expands into Plant-Based Tuna

Finless Foods, which is primarily known for its work creating cell-based seafood, announced today that it is expanding its product portfolio to include a new plant-based tuna offering.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the new plant-based tuna uses nine whole, plant-based ingredients that are cooked and seasoned to recreate the taste and texture of tuna. The new product is meant to act as a fish substitute in dishes like poke and spicy tuna rolls. The company said it plans to have its plant-based tuna in restaurants and food service channels by 2022.

Though it wasn’t specified in the announcement, the ability to get a product to market next year is most likely the driving factor in Finless Foods’ decision to expand into plant-based products. The cultured meat space is still very new and as of right now, there is only one company (Eat Just) selling cultured meat in one country (Singapore). In a story out today on iNews, Michael Selden, Finless Foods co-founder and CEO said that regulations in the UK and the EU were too restrictive, and that “there doesn’t seem to be a path to market at all” for cultured meat and seafood there.

Adding a plant-based tuna allows Finless to actually start selling something and generate revenue and is also being introduced at a time when sales of plant-based foods are on the rise. According to the Good Food Institute, the plant-based meat category grew by more than $430 million in sales from 2019 and 2020 in the U.S., and is now worth $1.4 billion.

Finless Foods isn’t pivoting away entirely from cultured fish, however. The company said it “will continue to build out the technology and undergo regulatory approval for their cell-cultured tuna” with plans to bring a full portfolio of plant- and cell-based products to market in the coming years.

Finless Foods’ move comes on the heels of another plant-based fish announcement this week. Hong Kong’s Omnifoods, maker of the plant-based Omnipork, announced its own line of vegan fish products this week, including an OmniTuna. These products will start rolling out in Hong Kong starting this month. Here in the U.S. we’re starting to see the plant-based fish space heat up with products like Good Catch already in stores and New Wave Foods launching its plant-based shrimp with food service companies this past spring.

Today is World Ocean Day, which aims to generate awareness around ocean conservation issues, including overfishing. Through its plant- and cell-based fish, Finless Foods, and other companies like it, can hopefully ween people off conventional fish stocks, which are being rapidly depleted and on to a more sustainable alternative.

Finless Foods Raises $3.5 Million for Cultured Bluefin Tuna

Today cultured seafood company Finless Foods CEO & Co-founder Mike Selden wrote a piece on Medium announcing that they had closed a $3.5 million seed round. The round was led by Draper Associates, with participation from Softmatter VC, Blue Horizon, Hemisphere Ventures, Yakumi Investment and more.

In the piece, Selden wrote that this invesment would bring them “to the end of our initial R&D phase,” and give them “the tools necessary to move into production pending the closing of a Series A.”

Finless Foods uses cellular biology to grow fish (and, eventually, other seafood) in bioreactors. They’re doing similar work to Memphis Meats or JUST Foods, but are focused on fish instead of meat. Wild Type is another startup using cellular agriculture to develop seafood (specifically salmon) grown outside the animal, and similarly raised $3.5 million a few months ago.

The company got its start in the legendary IndieBio accelerator program in 2017, where they created the first fish product grown in a lab. They later got investment from Hatch, a Norwegian aquaculture accelerator, as well as Hi-Food, an Italian company focused on sustainability in food.

Their first product will be bluefin tuna, a species which is threatened with overfishing. They plan to bring it to market by the end of 2019 — and with this funding, they just got a lot closer to that goal.

Lab-Grown Meat Just Got Another Shot of Investment

This week, Tyson Foods’ venture capital arm invested an undisclosed sum into San Francisco-based Memphis Meats, who is one of a few different companies developing lab-grown, cultured-meat alternatives.

Tyson joins DFJ Venture Capital, Bill Gates, Atomico, billionaires Suzy and Jack Welch, and several other investors. Those parties, along with heavyweight food producer Cargill, led a Series A funding round for Memphis Meats this past August that totaled $22 million.

Memphis Meats unveiled the world’s first cultured meatball in 2016, which was followed by the world’s first cultured poultry in 2017. The goal behind such products, along with those from companies like Mosa Meats, Finless Foods, SuperMeat, and Hampton Creek, is to offer consumers all the benefits of real meat without the environmental damages and foodborne illnesses associated with it.

To get it’s product, Memphis Meats uses on an ingredient called fetal bovine serum, a fascinating and slightly gross substance extracted from cow fetuses. The process of using fetal bovine serum won’t win the vegans over anytime soon, but it does enable the creation of an animal protein without the greenhouse gasses, deforestation, and host of other issues associated with raising livestock.

But cultured meat is expensive to produce, whether using fetal bovine serum or an animal-free method, as Memphis Meats is purportedly working on. Consider Mosa’s 1.2 million-per-pound lab-grown burger unveiled in 2013. And while the price of cultured meat is said to have dropped 99% since then, it’s still not low enough to make these products truly scalable (unless you’re okay with $6,000 chickens).

It’s technology that will eventually enable that scale. SuperMeat, for example, is developing technology to eliminate the need for animal serum. Finless Foods, meanwhile, has slashed prices by 50 percent and plans to have an affordable lab-grown bluefin tuna available by 2019. Memphis Meats aims to bring its product to market in 2021.

Lower costs will also make cultured meat a more realistic competitor to traditional meat products. Consumers spend about $1 trillion on meat globally, and demand is expected to double over the next few decades. Many are also betting on taste as the element that will convince traditional meat eaters to try alternatives. But it seems likely that alternative-meat producers will also need to offer competitively priced products in order to entice grill masters, tailgaters, and other die-hards.

I expect the future of alterna meat will be a combination of both lab-grown and plant-based products. Tyson’s investment in Memphis Meats also suggests we may see some acquisitions in the future, as more and more companies look to combine traditional meat products with science and technology to give the world its much-needed calories.