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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

Investment in Alternative Seafood Startups Totaled $175 Million in 2021, Up 92% From Previous Year

According to a new report published by the Good Food Institute, investment in alternative seafood companies totaled $175 million in 2021. The total represented a 92% jump over 2020.

GFI’s new report, which looks at the entire alternative seafood category across plant-based, cell-cultured, and fermentation-based products, said 2021 investment brought the total invested in the category to $313 million from 2013 through 2021. Cultivated seafood startups commanded two-thirds of all investment in alt-seafood last year at $115 million, compared with $58 million invested in plant-based seafood startups and $2 million in fermentation-based seafood.

A few large investments dominated investment in alternative seafood startups, including a $60 million convertible note for Blue Nalu, which the company used to invest in their commercial production facility. Another $34 million was raised by Finless Foods, a startup developing plant-based and cultivated seafood products.

While a near-doubling of capital raised is impressive, the total for alt-seafood is just a fraction of the total amount for cell-cultivated meat investments. According to GFI, the total cultivated meat investment in 2021 was $1.38 billion, nearly 8x the total for the entire alt-seafood category and 12 times the size of the cultivated seafood. It’s worth noting, however, that a large chunk of that $1.38 billion was capital raised by a small handful of companies raising late-stage growth capital, including $467 million in Series F funding raised by plant-based/cultivated meat pioneer Eat Just.

Total deals were up 20% in 2021, jumping from 20 in 2020 to 24 in 2021. While nine investors were active in the category with two or more investments in alt-seafood, one investor – Big Idea Ventures – stood out with six investments in the alt-seafood space. Big Idea invested across all three categories, plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation. Aqua Cultured, a fermentation-based seafood startup that raised a $2.1 million pre-seed round from BIG and others, was the lone fermentation-based startup that raised funding in 2021 according to GFI.

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.

The Kingfish Company Wants to Lead a Tech Revolution in Aquaculture

Earth’s ocean ecosystems are deteriorating. Wild fish stocks are increasingly vulnerable. And yet by the year 2050, global demand for seafood may have increased by as much as 80%, according to research from the Blue Food Assessment.

The Kingfish Company wants to help satisfy some of that demand while reducing the environmental toll of seafood production. The agtech company launched its first land-based aquaculture production facility in the Netherlands before introducing its flagship line of yellowtail kingfish products in Whole Foods Markets across the U.S. Soon, Kingfish will bring its production operations to the U.S. with a new facility in Maine.

Earlier this week, The Spoon joined Kingfish founding partner and CEO Ohad Maiman on Zoom to find out more about the company’s aquaculture technology and plans for expansion.

Why land-based aquaculture?

Traditional aquaculture has raised global seafood production capacity in recent decades, but alarms have been raised recently about the industry’s environmental impacts. Traditional fish farms can create toxic algal blooms and ocean dead zones; farmed fish can also transmit diseases to already-vulnerable wild populations. In response to these concerns, Washington state banned salmon farming in 2018, and Argentina became the first country to ban the practice this year.

Kingfish aquaculture farm

Traditional aquaculture can’t solve the seafood industry’s supply bottleneck problem, which is why the Kingfish team saw the need for an alternative model. “Thinking about the next 30 years of continued growth in demand for seafood, we saw the need for a technological solution,” Maiman told The Spoon.

Kingfish aims to solve some of the problems of traditional aquaculture, the biggest of which is ocean pollution. In underwater cage farming, animal waste and uneaten feed get released into the surrounding water. In Kingfish’s system, the flow of water is more controlled: Water is cleaned on its way into the system to maintain optimal conditions, and cleaned again on its way out to the sea.

The controlled nature of Kingfish’s farm environment also allows the company to prevent parasites or diseases from entering the system, eliminating the need to administer antibiotics or other medications (another problem of traditional aquaculture).

There’s also the problem of seafood feed: Some traditional aquaculture operations use massive quantities of wild fish to feed their farmed species. The use of lower-grade feed in traditional aquaculture can also lead to less nutritious seafood products. Because Kingfish operates in the premium seafood space, the company can source higher-quality feed options and cut down on marine ingredients—replacing fish meal with insect meal, for example.

Inside a land-based fish farm

It would be counter-intuitive if Kingfish’s land-based aquaculture system involved pulling fish from the sea and ranching them. Instead, the company maintains several broodstocks of yellowtail kingfish on-site, and uses them to sustainably generate new generations of fish.

Kingfish’s system mimics the seasonal light and temperature conditions that the fish would experience in the wild. “When the light lasts longer and the water temperature rises, and they feel it’s spring, they spawn eggs,” Maiman said.

The hatchery and larval rearing phases are key for the company, as there are no commercial sources for yellowtail kingfish fingerlings or eggs. The fish spend about 15 days in this phase, at the end of which they measure about an inch in length. Then they’re transferred to the main system, where they live for up to 11 months.

Juvenile fish at Kingfish aquaculture farm

To slaughter the animals as painlessly as possible, the company uses an electric stunner. “By the time they are harvested, they are stunned,” Maiman said. “They immediately lose consciousness at that moment and then they die in cold water, but no longer feel it.”

At Kingfish’s Netherlands facility, the system that supports the animals throughout their life cycle is run using 100% renewable energy. At the planned facility in Maine, the company anticipates that they’ll be able to source about 50% of their energy from renewables. Kingfish is also seeking out partnerships with new renewables projects in the area, as the company can commit to the long-term offtake that new projects need to take off.

The future of fish farming

As a high-value, import-dependent species, the yellowtail kingfish was an ideal pilot fish for the company. “If you go to Nobu and have yellowtail jalapeno sashimi, it will typically be flown in from Japan or Australia,” Maiman said. “We are the largest local producer in Europe and are working toward doing the same in the U.S.” By offering a domestic source for yellowtail in Europe and North America, the company can both cut the product’s transportation footprint and provide fresher fish.

Kingfish began by addressing demand for yellowtail kingfish from Japanese and Italian restaurants, but the company also sells its products in grocery stores. According to Maiman, the team is aiming for a roughly 50-50 split between sales in restaurants and high-end retail stores.

The company went public in Norway last year, and is using that fundraise to grow its Netherlands production capacity. The team is also working on pre-construction and engineering for the new Jonesport, Maine facility, and scouting out future sites in southern Europe and the West Coast of the U.S.

With this expansion, Kingfish plans to boost its yellowtail kingfish capacity—and, eventually, to begin producing its next fish species. An internal group nicknamed Kingfish X is currently deciding which species that will be. Maiman couldn’t go into detail about which fish are being considered, but he did hint that the team is looking for another import-dependent, high-value species.

The company’s overarching goal is to be at the forefront of a technology-driven paradigm shift in aquaculture. “Within the last year or two, this technology has crossed the rubicon from an experimental to a commercially viable technology,” Maiman said.

“At some point, any new technology becomes less of a mystery—and then it’s the first few companies that have been able to build scale and establish a market position that lead the sector.”

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.”

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.

E-Fish Delivers Fresh Fish to Your Door 48 Hours After It’s Been Caught

When the pandemic hit, I shifted just about all of my grocery shopping online, including my proteins like chicken and fish. I still buy my fish online, getting frozen fillets delivered to my door each month.

But E-Fish, a startup that launched around the time the pandemic hit last year, says it can do one better. The company delivers fresh — not frozen — fish to your door 48 hours after it is out of water.

E-Fish started out as a fish marketplace for restaurants such as Jean-Georges, Esca, The Fulton, and Bellemore. But when the pandemic hit, many restaurants across the country shut down, cutting off E-Fish’s target market. Not only that, restaurant closures were also devastating the fish industry, who lost all those restaurant customers. So E-Fish pivoted, and like so many other restaurant food suppliers, launched its own direct-to-consumer sales channel.

Jeffrey Tedmori, Co-Founder and CEO of E-Fish, told me by phone this week that this D2C marketplace pivot was also helpful for fish harvesters because they can focus on catching fish while E-Fish takes care of all the digital marketing and sales.

E-Fish never touches the product. Instead, it has relationships with different fish harvesters on both coasts of the U.S. When you visit E-Fish and place your order, that order along with a shipping label is forwarded directly to the harvester.

That doesn’t mean your order ships right away, however. As Tedmori explained, when an order is placed, “A lot of the time the product isn’t even caught.” So the harvester goes out, catches the fish, preps it and ships it out to the customer. The result, said Temori, is an “Unparalleled level of quality.”

You’ll pay for that freshness. Two pounds of Black Cod will set you back $70 plus shipping and taxes (E-Fish ships across the U.S., except for Hawaii and Alaska). While that is probably more than your corner store, it is not that far out of line with other online fish markets like CrowdCow.

E-Fish has received Angel funding and is now part of the Techstars Anywhere accelerator cohort. The company currently has relationships with fishers in Massachusetts, Maine, Florida and California, and is looking to scale up from there.

Wild Type Raises $12.5M Series A to Accelerate Production of its Cultured Salmon

Wild Type, a startup developing cultured salmon (that is, fish grown from cells outside the animal), announced today that it had raised a $12.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by CRV with participation from Maven Ventures, Spark Capital and Root Ventures, the last two of which had previously invested in Wild Type. This would bring the total amount of funding raised by the company to $16 million.

Founded in 2016, Wild Type currently has a team of 16. We spoke with co-founders Justin Kolbeck and Aryé Elfenbein last week to learn more about how the San Francisco-based startup will leverage their funding. According to Kolbeck, who serves as CEO, their first priority is to continue improving the taste of their product and get it into “as many talented hands and palates as possible.”

Wild Type has been doing quite a few private tastings lately, culminating in a tasting in Portland, Oregon this June. The startup can currently only make minced salmon and small lox-like pieces of the fish, but hopes to work its way up to full-size filets.

Kolbeck also wants to use the new funds to scale up their cell-based fish production. He told me their goal was to be able to supply a handful of restaurants on a regular basis. This would also drive down production costs. When I spoke to him after the tasting event in Portland, Kolbeck disclosed that one of their salmon sushi rolls would cost $200. Their goal is to get it down to $5 to make it accessible to as many people as possible.

Cell-based meat and seafood companies have been attracting waves of funding lately, but Wild Type’s Series A is a whopper — especially in the cellular aquaculture space. “In terms of later stage funding for cell-based companies, it’s been more focused on poultry and meat,” said Kolbeck. “This is a Series A in the seafood space, which is interesting.” Indeed, cultured seafood companies like BlueNalu and Finless Foods have raised $4.5 million and raised $3.5 million seed rounds, respectively. Earlier this year Shiok Meats, which grows shrimp in a lab, closed a $4.6 million seed round. But Wild Type is the first cell-based seafood company to reel in such hefty funding.

Kolbeck still was hesitant to give a specific date for when they would bring their product to market. But with this new funding in hand, we’re all one step closer to having cell-based salmon sushi on our plates.

Ocean Hugger Foods to Unveil Plant-Based “Eel” Sushi at National Restaurant Association Show

There will be aisles and aisles of new technology to see and taste at this weekend’s National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago. But I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar that there will only be one plant-based eel sushi.

Ocean Hugger Foods is debuting its new vegan eel, called unami at the show this weekend. It’s made from eggplant, which the company processes to imitate the texture of eel, as well as soy sauce, mirin, and algae oil for flavor.

This will be the second product from the New York-based startup, which already makes ahimi, a plant-based alternative to raw tuna made from tomatoes. (Next up they’re launching a vegan “salmon” made from carrots to be called sakimi.)

The company hasn’t announced when or where its unami will be sold. I’m guessing it’ll join sushi lineups alongside their ahimi, which is available in around 90 restaurants and grocery stores, including Whole Foods.

A few months ago I predicted that vegan sushi — that is, sushi that uses realistic plant-based raw fish, not just California rolls — would become a growing market. Ocean Hugger Foods isn’t the only one in the space: across the pond in the U.K., plant-based food company Ima is selling sushi made with a vegan salmon substitute.

Eel isn’t quite as popular a sushi selection as tuna or salmon, but it’s rapidly disappearing due to climate change and overfishing. In fact, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch List lists eel as “one of the worst seafood choices from an environmental perspective.”

It may not be America’s #1 sushi choice, but the New York-based company is smart to diversify its product range before other companies jump in and stake their claim with plant-based sashimi. Plus, since eel is chiefly consumed in Japan and China, maybe this product will help Ocean Hugger Food expand into the plant-based protein-hungry Asian market.

If you’re in Chicago this weekend and have a chance to sample Ocean Hugger Foods’ unami, leave us a comment and tell us what you thought.

Could Blockchain Solve the Fishy Problems Surrounding Seafood Accountability?

When you buy fish, do you have confidence that what you’ve purchased is as advertised at the point of purchase? According to the state attorney general’s office in New York, there is a good likelihood that what you’ve purchased is not even the same species as the one specified on the label. There could be a very promising solution to what the attorney general’s office calls “rampant” seafood mislabeling, though: blockchain technology.

The attorney general’s office purchased fish from 155 stores across 29 supermarket brands throughout the state, and then sent them to a lab for testing. A remarkable number of the specimens—more than one in every four, or 27%—were not what the supermarkets said they were. The complete results of the experiment are found here, with this conclusion:

“While mislabeling affected virtually every tested seafood category, there was rampant mislabeling of certain species. The results suggest that consumers who buy lemon sole, red snapper, and grouper are more likely to receive an entirely different fish. Similarly, consumers who bought what was advertised as ‘wild’ salmon often actually received farm-raised salmon instead. Such consumers had often paid more money—on average 34% more—to avoid farm raised fish.”

The report also notes that in many cases, consumers are getting fish that is less sustainably raised than claimed, and in some cases, they are unknowingly buying types of fish that can cause gastrointestinal problems. In addition, according to an article by Forbes, a report conducted between 2010 and 2012 by a marine surveying organization, Oceana, identified that as many as one in three seafood products in the United States were incorrectly labeled. Needless to say, a solution is needed, and pronto.

Enter blockchain. The disruptive new technology promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers, and it also promises to guarantee more accountability and trust in the food supply chain. Headlines abound heralding how blockchain technology will revolutionize financial services markets, which remain burdened by unwieldy paper trails and costly proprietary software applications. Not everyone realizes, though, the move toward developing blockchain has direct roots in the erosion of trust that grew as the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 exploded around the globe.

Blockchain allows people to record transactions securely via a decentralized platform without a lot of intermediaries. Because of the advantages it can bring to the process of tracing food sources, it may also be a big part of the answer in fighting fish fraud.

According to Forbes: “Some companies are already using blockchain technology to track their supply chain – for example, an initiative called Tuna on the Blockchain provides a provenance system so that you will know where you tuna comes from. Back in late 2016 it was reported that a British-based start-up called Provenance went out to Indonesia and tested tracking tuna on the blockchain.”

There are a number of corporate and legislative proposals in motion, which could require detailed seafood product labeling. Legit Fish is a Boston-based company that is dedicated to improving the traceability and verification of seafood products. The company has developed a seafood traceability database that compares confidential data from supply chain participants to landings data collected by the government in order to provide seafood dealers, processors, retailers, and their customers a solid verification of each individual lot of product that has been transacted.  As this story notes, Legit Fish is working with companies such as BASE that are integrating seafood traceability solutions with blockchain.

At a meetup that The Spoon held in July, blockchain was very much on the minds of fishermen in attendance. They see blockchain as a way to not only prove provenance, but also to help them from getting unfair blame for fraudulent acts that take place down the fish delivery chain. Recently, we wrote about how blockchain technology could have helped quickly mitigate the crisis involving E.coli and Romaine lettuce in California. In a similar way, by providing better sourcing information and, importantly, more open food sourcing information, blockchain could make fish fraud much tougher to pull off than it is now.

At a 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit panel, executives from ripe.io and Walmart discussed the promise of blockchain in the food industry, food safety, and which groups of people need to get connected for blockchain solutions to work. Watch the video to hear the whole conversation.

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.

Aquabyte Casts its Machine Learning to Improve Fish Farming

It was estimated at one point that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson ate upwards of 821 pounds of cod per year. He’s certainly an outlier, but as global demands for seafood increase, fish farms are rising to meet that challenge, with the aquaculture market projected to reach $219.42 billion by 2022. Already, half the seafood eaten in the U.S. is farmed, and a startup called Aquabyte is using machine learning and computer vision to make those farms more efficient and productive.

Using cameras mounted in fish farm pens, Aquabyte’s software monitors data such as the fishes’ biomass, feed consumption and sea lice counts. Armed with this data, fish farmers can better understand their inventory, optimize the feed process and maintain regulatory compliance to reduce harmful impact on the surrounding environment.

Aquabyte takes the data from the pen cameras and applies it to models developed by fish nutritionists to determine the optimal amount of feed to distribute, which is a percentage of the fishes’ size. Aquabyte’s software can better detect the biomass of the fish in pens, and can also “watch” the pellets fall through the water to determine how much of them the fish are eating.

Using its software, Aquabyte claims that farmers can save money by not overfeeding, and also promises to eliminate over and underselling by giving them a better sense of how many fish they will actually produce for sale.

Aquabyte’s computer vision and machine learning can also yield a positive impact on the local environments of fish farms. One of the ways it does this is through quantifying sea lice, which can be a destructive force in the close quarters of a fish farm. Not only can they destroy a farmer’s inventory, but sea lice can get out and attach themselves onto passing wild fish, eventually killing the native fish populations. This problem has gotten so bad that Norway has enacted regulations forcing farms to control the number of sea lice in their pens or face heavy penalties.

Traditionally, sea lice quantification is done manually by netting fish out of the water and counting the lice by hand. Aquabyte’s software, however, can automate this process to keep fish farms within regulatory compliance, without requiring anyone to hand-count sea lice.

Aquabyte was founded just under a year ago and has offices in San Francisco and Bergen, Norway, where its software is currently running on a few fish farms. (Between this and Hatch, Bergen is becoming a hotbed of aquaculture tech.)

Aquabyte is targeting salmon farming in Norway to start, and the company just raised a $3.5 million seed funding round last week. They will use the money to hire out a team of software engineers in San Francisco as it works to bring the commercial version of its software platform to market.

Future versions of the software will work in other parts of the world and with other fish such as trout, sea bass, and hopefully–assuming The Rock’s appetites don’t diminish–cod.

You can hear about Aquabyte in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill.