In London’s East End a food revolution is bubbling – a high-tech movement promising to change our way of life. Though in its infancy, with significant early stage obstacles to overcome, could become the biggest agricultural disruptor since farming began. I’m talking about cellular agriculture – meat, fish, milk, proteins, and fats – grown in bioreactors, rather than in farmyards.
Recently, I was invited to try it for myself, and I was keen to give it a go.
The invitation read, “We would like to invite you to an intimate tasting experience hosted by Umami Bioworks (Umami).” It continued, “At this tasting, you will have the opportunity to sample two of our signature product categories: Cultivated White Fish — prepared in a classic fish & chips style. Cultivated Caviar — traditionally presented to highlight its sensory experience.”
Umami is a Singapore-based cultivated seafood company with offices in Japan, the USA, and Europe. It’s applying for approval to sell cultivated fish in several jurisdictions, including the UK, South Korea, the USA, and Singapore. Umami is partnering with Nestle Purina in line with its ambition to launch a tuna-flavoured pet food in the UK.
On 28th May this year, Wildtype’s salmon became the first cultivated seafood to be made available to consumers anywhere in the world , having received approval from the FDA, and the third cultivated protein to enter the US market. But because Umami doesn’t yet have regulatory approval, tastings of its cultivated seafood are by invitation only.
Twelve of us were seated at the table in the trendy East London basement kitchen, which gleamed with polished utensils, pans, and white tiles, and unsurprisingly smelled of cooking fish. The director of food science, Dr Lou Kutzler, was in the kitchen overseeing the cooking process, which, he assured us, was just like cooking any normal piece of fish fillet.
Having verbally agreed that we had no allergies, we signed a consent form. The same document outlined the purpose of the tasting, which was “to assess the sensory properties and overall product acceptability of cell-cultivated seafood products prior to their market launch.”
We grilled the CEO, Mihir Pershad, and Dr Lou Kutzler as we awaited our first dish – about cell lines, flavours, and ingredients. Mihir answered with cautious frankness. Although he was unable to tell us what the scaffold was, what the hybrid sections of the dish consisted of, nor what percentage of the fillet was cultivated, he did try to answer our questions, and seemed genuinely interested to know what we thought of the food.
The fish was cooked in beer batter and arranged delicately on the plate, alongside a block of sculpted chips, some red cabbage, and a dollop of tartar sauce. As I bit into the fish, a shiver washed over my back and face – perhaps it was the momentousness of the event itself, or maybe it was a sense of trepidation. After all, I was about to eat something which very few people in the world had ever tried – and which hadn’t been approved for consumption anywhere. And what’s more, because we knew little about its contents we were eating it blind, on trust.
So how did it taste?
The product tasted just like fish. It looked and smelled like fish, too. The texture and mouth-feel, however, was slightly off the mark – a little harder and more jelly-like – not as flaky as white fish should normally be. Lou assured us that the texture and mouth-feel could be resolved at the production stage. I’ve heard this critique before from people who have tasted the chicken equivalent, in the USA and Singapore – the mouth-feel dilemma.
The market for seafood, in the UK alone, was worth £10 billion in 2023, according to the Marine Management Organisation, and worldwide the numbers are enormous. Cultivated fish has been listed by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as a potential solution to currently damaging fishing practices, and to the massive depletion in stock, especially tuna. WWF reported that bluefin tuna have “been overfished to near extinction globally, and if not managed effectively, the world’s tuna fisheries face an ecological disaster.” Umami recently announced a cultivated tuna co-development partnership with Japanese company Maruha Nichiro , the world’s biggest seafood company and a leading supplier of tuna.
Back in central London, where one cultivated fish product would have been plenty for our adventurous palettes, we were being served up a second helping, of cell-grown caviar. We had been briefed that the dish was a top-end, Beluga-like caviar product – a more subtle tasting, creamier and less fishy caviar than others. We were told Beluga caviar melts in your mouth, rather than bursts like the cheaper variety. It was served with sour cream on blinis, arranged delicately on a fancy spoon. Since none of us had tasted Beluga, we all agreed the cultivated caviar didn’t live up (or down) to our experiences – it had less flavour and the consistency was more soluble. Unfortunately, the sour cream and blini somewhat overpowered it. Perhaps we weren’t the right people to appreciate the product given our inexperienced tastes.
Cultivated caviar seems, at least price-wise, like a sensible product to launch, as cultivated foods will (at least in the early days) be sold at a premium, until scale-up brings the price down. But I couldn’t help wondering whether the appeal of this luxury caviar, to those wealthy individuals able to afford it, is at least in part the way it’s sourced. Would cultivating it reduce the requisite exotic appeal? However, we were assured by Mihir that a growing popularity amongst Gen Z is a potentially encouraging market.
Singapore was the first to approve the sale of cultivated meat back in 2020, followed in the USA in 2022 for Upside Food and Good Meat, and last year for Mission Barn’s cultivated fats. Also last year, Aleph Farms received approval from Israeli regulator to sell cultivated beef, and in the same year, the UK became the first in the world to approve the sale of cultivated meat for pets, for company Meatly. Other UK cultivated meat companies are awaiting approval from the FSA, including Ivy Farm and Hoxton Farms – developing beef fats.
Cultivated meat and dairy companies face significant headwinds regarding capital funding, a largely negative media, and regulatory hurdles, but there are signs of encouragement from governments who see it as a net zero contributor. The UK is fast becoming a frontrunner in Europe with initiatives like the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub and the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein. Last year also saw the opening of the £38 million National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC) which works to advance research and innovation in areas like cultured meat, plant-based proteins, insect-based proteins, and fermented proteins, derived from sources other than animals. In addition, the FSA sandbox programme was also launched last year, and invited 8 companies, including BluNalu, Most Meat, Vow, Gourmey, and Hoxton Farms, to help inform and develop a robust system of regulation for cultivated novel foods.
Following the event on City Road, I said goodbye to my fellow tasters and headed to the HYLO Building, in EC1. It was just 10 minutes on foot and is home to Hoxton Farms. There, I met with, CEO, co-founder (and former Future of Foods Interviews guest) Max Jamilly, who had agreed to give me a tour.
Jamilly is a scientist and a businessman, with a PhD in Synthetic Biology from the University of Oxford and two master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge in biotechnology and business. He has a background in venture capital, which almost certainly assisted Hoxton Farms in raising an impressive $35 million in funding. Though significant, this is a fraction compared to the heady days of 2020 when the likes of Mosa Meat and Good Meat were raising hundreds of millions. 2024 saw record-low levels of venture capital investment in this space, so to secure this sum is impressive for Hoxton. Jamilly assured me that he isn’t fazed by the current lack of investment in the industry and expects a turnaround.
The scale of the project is very impressive, and much of what happens inside is commercially and technically sensitive, hidden from external view by a privacy glass façade. I was allowed one photograph outside the lab, then I was decked out in laboratory gear – hat and gown, shoe coverings and gloves, and led from the wide open-plan offices into the technical guts of the building. It was made clear that any contamination would be catastrophic, destroying entire batches, so although the air filtration system worked almost unnoticed in the background, it was described to me as one of the most impressive parts of the whole set up. I was taken into the laboratory and given a brief explanation of the process, shown the old bioreactors and the new ones, and introduced to the engineers who were building them on site. I was shown the kitchen area where the cultivated fats were being turned into products by an in house chef, Josh Hatfield.
Hoxton Farm’s next move, according to Jamilly, is a new facility in Singapore where their regulatory application is ongoing. According to Jamilly, having a facility in Singapore makes things easier for the Singapore regulators to do their inspections and examinations, but also allows Hoxton Farms to produce it’s cultivated beef fats locally for sale, not just for Singapore but eventually into the wider Asia market.
Research carried out internally by cultivated meat company, Aleph Farms, indicates that acceptance of cultivated meat is significantly more positive in Asia than in the west. Perhaps recent events in the USA have also added to this fresh eastern-promise. And Singapore appears to be ahead of the game, not just because it has a well established, globally respected Novel Food Regulatory Framework, and is selling cultivated meat into retail, but also because it’s been perceived by global companies as a gateway into Asia. It’s generally accepted that getting approval in Singapore could be persuasive with other countries in the region, when it comes to regulation. But it appears to be a two way street, because as western companies like Hoxton Farms look to Singapore and Asia for a market – so too are those Asian companies such as Umami Bioworks, being drawn to the UK, which could also become a significant player.
Alex Crisp is a writer, podcaster and facilitator – host of Future of Foods Interviews.
