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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

seafood

Later, California Rolls. New Vegan Sushi Options are Trying to Mimic Raw Fish

For most vegetarians, sushi options are limited to all-too-often lackluster California rolls. Maybe a tamago egg, if they’re lucky.

But as of late, vegetarians and vegans — or consumers who are just concerned about ocean overfishing — have several new options to swipe through their soy sauce. Ones composed entirely of plants, but which are made to fool you into thinking you’re eating raw fish.

Photo: Ima.

First up is a new product from Ima, a plant-based food company. Just last week Ima released a sushi roll with a salmon substitute made of konjac, an Asian root vegetable with a gelatinous texture. Ima has twelve other products, including a vegan sushi burrito (sushi-rito?), but this is their first offering that’s really trying to imitate fish. We can’t speak to the taste, but the look is spot-on. Ima’s plant-based sushi is sold in U.K. retailers Planet Organic and Sourced Market.

For those who are more into tuna, Ocean Hugger Foods has “ahimi”: an alternative to raw ahi tuna made out of tomatoes, which they process to mimic the taste and texture of raw fish. Ahimi is available in roughly 90 sushi/poke restaurants and grocery retailers (including Whole Foods) across the U.S.

Photo: Ocean Hugger Foods.

I got to sample sushi with ahimi a few months ago at the Alternative Protein Show in San Francisco. While it hit the same basic flavor notes as sushi — savory, clean, and just a tiny bit sweet — I wouldn’t say it would fool me into thinking it’s actually made of tuna. But compared to a bland California roll, ahimi sushi is light years more exciting.

Plant-based seafood innovation isn’t just happening on the raw side. Good Catch recently launched their plant-based tuna at Whole Foods, Sophie’s Kitchen has a canned “toona” made of konjac (the same ingredient in Ima), and New Wave Foods has a vegan shrimp product.

Of course, all these plant-based fish might become irrelevant once cultured seafood comes to market. Finless Foods has claimed it will start selling its cell-based bluefin tuna by the end of this year, and Wild Type is developing cultured salmon. On the crustacean front, Singapore-based startup Shiok Meats is about to have the first taste test of its cell-based shrimp.

But it’ll be a while before cultured fish hits the market and even longer before it’ll show up in our supermarket sushi. Until then, Ocean Hugger and Ima are smart to capitalize off of the booming plant-based food trend, especially in a space like sushi which currently has relatively few animal-free options. There are plenty of vegan burgers, sausages, and even canned fish (see above), but there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in making alternatives to raw fish.

Fair, it’s a lot harder to imitate the taste and texture of a slice of fatty raw tuna than a tin of cooked tuna fish. But early movers like Ocean Hugger and Ima have the chance to really get in on the ground floor stake a claim in what will likely be a booming market: plant-based fish.

If you get the chance to try ahimi or Ima’s new “salmon” sushi, give us a shout and let us know how you liked it!

Good Catch’s Plant-Based Tuna Swims into Retail

Good Catch just got one step closer to changing your tune about tuna. Yesterday the company rolled out its plant-based “tuna” products in Whole Foods, as well as through grocery subscription service Thrive Market and online grocer FreshDirect.

Good Catch’s tuna is made of a “6-plant protein blend” which contains lentils, pea protein, soy, and chickpea flour, as well as sea algae oil for flavor. It comes in three flavors, “Naked in Water,” “Mediterranean,” and “Oil and Herbs,” all of which are packaged in pouches (not cans) and cost $4.99.  Each 3.3 ounce serving of tuna has 14 grams of protein.

When it comes to plant-based foods, there are plenty of “fish” in the sea. In addition to Good Catch’s tuna, Sophie’s Kitchen has a “toona” made out of Japanese yam, and Ocean Hugger’s ahimi is a plant-based alternative to raw tuna — both of which are also sold at select Whole Foods. Atlantic Natural Foods also recently launched a new fishless tuna product, called “Tuno.”

There’s no question that more and more people are turning to plant-based protein. But is there enough demand to support multiple brands of vegan tuna?

Maybe not now, but soon consumers might not have a choice. The price of fresh tuna is rising as stocks dwindle due to overfishing. Just last month in Japan a giant tuna sold for a whopping $3.1 million. Canned tuna might not cost anywhere near as much as fresh, but if we continue to deplete the supply eventually it might. Plus there’s the worrying levels of mercury to think about. As consumers turn away from canned tuna for health or price reasons, Good Catch & co. will be there for all their tuna melt needs.

One final note: it’s interesting that Good Catch named its product straight-up “tuna,” instead of using a similar word or a different spelling, like its competitors. As meat and dairy companies battle to keep plant-based options from using words like “meat” and “milk,” this is a pretty bold move from Good Catch. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company gets some backlash from Big Fish.

Good Catch raised $8.7 million last August. We haven’t tried its products yet, but with the number of new plant-based players trying to disrupt canned tuna, it just might be time for a taste test.

Shiok Meats is The First Cell-Based Meat Company in Southeast Asia

If you’ve been on the internet in the past, oh, year or so, you’ve probably heard some media buzz about cell-based meat: animal tissue produced outside of an animal. But the pool of companies working in this space is actually pretty small in terms of product and geography.

Cellular aquacultured startup Shiok Meats is pushing the industry envelope on both accounts. Firstly, they’re developing ways to make cell-based crustaceans. Companies are working on ground beef, steak, pork sausages, salmon, and tuna — but as far as I’ve heard (and granted, some companies are in stealth mode), Shiok is the first to tackle crab, lobster, and shrimp.

When I spoke with Shiok Meats CEO and co-founder Dr. Sandhya Sriram, my first question was about texture. Replicating meat’s texture is one of the biggest challenges for cellular agriculture/aquaculture companies, and crustaceans in particular have a toothsome bite that seems like it would be much harder to copy than, say, ground beef or processed pork sausage. But Sriram is undaunted. “Yes, the technology and science are different [than other clean meat companies,] but we all have similar challenges,” she told me. They also won’t be trying to make the shell, which keeps things simpler. And with new innovations continuously being developed to facilitate cell growth, such as edible scaffolds, perhaps Shiok’s relatively late entrance will serve them well.

The fact that I could eventually taste a cell-based lobster roll is certainly exciting, but what’s more notable about Shiok Meats is its location. The startup is based in Singapore, which makes it, according to Sriram, the first cell-based meat company in Southeast Asia.

This is huge. Asia is the largest meat producer in the world, making 40-50 percent of the world’s meat. From a consumption perspective, there’s expected to be a 78 percent increase in demand for meat and seafood by year 2050. Yet the vast majority of cultured meat companies are based in the U.S. or, across the Atlantic, in the U.K. and Israel. (The notable exception is Shojinmeat, a Japanese company open sourcing clean meat production.) It makes sense that a company is bringing cell-based meat, which some herald as the solution to the evils of industrial meat consumption, to one of the regions where it could make the biggest impact.

But the choice to operate out of Singapore brings plenty of challenges. At the Alternative Protein Show this week in San Francisco, Sriram spoke about the differences between operating a cell-based meat company in the U.S. vs. Asia. Cultured meat companies in the U.S. have more access to funding and infrastructure than they would in Asia, and American and European consumers are more amenable to the concept of meat grown outside the animal.

Sriram told me that they expect to bring their first product to market in 3-5 years, with a taste test happening in the next year in high-end restaurants. Their target market is Asia-Pacific, so they’ll start rolling out products in Singapore, Hong Kong, and India, then eventually move onto Australia. Eventually, Shiok will sell their cell-based crustaceans to food companies who will incorporate their products into frozen meals.

For now, Shiok Meats is still in the R&D phase. They’ve developed a media (food which helps the animal cells grow) made of synthetic and plant-based substances, so they don’t have to use the very contentious Fetal Bovine Serum. They just closed their pre-seed round for an undisclosed amount and are working on raising a seed round over the next few months.

Currently, Shiok Meats just staffed by Sriram and her co-founder Ka Yi Ling. Compared to “veteran” cell-based meat companies like Memphis Meats, which was founded in 2015, the startup is small, young, and untested. But because of its location, Shiok Meats has the potential to make a global impact that could far outweigh cultured meat companies in the U.S. and Europe.

Sophie’s Kitchen’s “Toona” Poised to Feed Untapped Plant-Based Seafood Market

If you’re on the hunt for a plant-based burger or chicken strip, there’s no lack of options. Looking for some fish-free salmon, or a vegan shrimp? That’s a lot harder to catch (sorry, I had to).

That may not be so tough in the future. Sebastopol, California-based Sophie’s Kitchen is bringing plant-based seafood to the grocery aisle. Founder and CEO Eugene Wang first got the idea for the company when his daughter Sophie had a severe allergic reaction to seafood.

Wang also knew firsthand about the problem of overfishing: he grew up in Taiwan and noticed how fishermen there were struggling more and more to find a daily catch. “I could see that the seafood stock is really dwindling,” he said. He’s not wrong: according to the U.N., around 90 percent of the world’s stocks are currently depleted or overfished, though demand for fish continues to rise steadily.

In 2010 Wang decided to make an alterna-seafood product to serve people with allergies and also help relieve the overfished oceans in the process. After spending almost two years developing the product, Sophie’s Kitchen launched their first product — plant-based shrimp — in retail in early 2012. They soon rolled out fish filets, crab cakes, and smoked salmon, and currently offer eight products, with four more coming out soon.

To copy the complex texture of fish, shrimp, and more, the company uses an ingredient called konjac, a Japanese yam root. When combined with pea protein and put through Wang’s patent-pending manufacturing process, the root can imitate the “rubbery” texture of shellfish.

Sophie’s Kitchen’s smoked “salmon.”

Sophie’s Kitchen’s plant-based seafood is sold exclusively in grocery stores, including Safeway, HEB and Whole Foods. As of now, the company’s most popular product is vegan tinned tuna (“toona”), which supermarkets hope will help them capitalize off of plant-based food trends and attract more millennials to the canned food aisles.

While it may appeal to eco-conscious consumers, the “toona” falls behind traditional canned tuna in a few ways. First of all, it’s a lot pricier — roughly two to three times more expensive as the bargain brands (as are all of Sophie’s Kitchen’s products). It also has less protein than regular tuna and doesn’t contain any of those heart-healthy Omega-3 fatty acids, though Wang said he’s exploring ways to synthesize them from plants.

Like the entire plant-based seafood space, Sophie’s Kitchen has a lot of growing and development to do. It has already come a long way: according to Wang, when they started in 2010, the concept of plant-based edibles was “not a thing” — for seafood or meat. But now they’re far from alone. New Wave Foods makes shrimp alternatives out of algae. Good Catch Foods has developed seafood-free crab cakes, shredded tuna (not canned), and fish patties.

I can’t speak to the taste of their products, but when it comes to reach, Sophie’s Kitchen is pretty far ahead of the curve. New Wave Foods is only in three stores, and Good Catch won’t be on shelves until February 2019. Sophie’s Kitchen is available in over 2,000 stores nationwide and also sells in China, Israel, and France.

Sophie’s Kitchen is self-funded and has three employees. The company won a prize of 200,000 SGD (~$146,000) at the Slingshot Startup Pitching Competition in Singapore in 2017. It will also join the inaugural class of PepsiCo’s North American Nutritional Greenhouse Program.

It’s a good time to be in the plant-based seafood industry. Plant-based foods are growing in popularity and are projected to heat up significantly 2019 — and seafood is no exception. With cultured seafood likely years away from reaching retail shelves, products from Sophie’s Kitchen and others are poised to experience some serious demand. Hopefully they’ll be able to ramp up production and keep their hooks in the emerging market.

“Cellular Aquaculture” Company BlueNalu Raises $4.5 Million

By now, you’ve probably heard of cultured (or lab-grown) meat. But what about cultured seafood? That’s what BlueNalu, a San Diego-based startup, is working on.

The company is developing cellular aquaculture, in which living cells are taken from fish and grown, using culture media, to create seafood. Basically it’s cellular agriculture, but for seafood instead of beef or pork.

Today BlueNalu got some new wind in their sales: the company announced that they raised a $4.5 million seed round. New Crop Capital led the round, with participation by 25 VC firms and individuals from the U.S., U.K., Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Israel (a country which is turning out to be a hotbed of clean meat innovation).

This news is pretty impressive, considering the company was just established two months ago. It also indicates a strong interest in clean seafood. BlueNalu isn’t the only company working in the space; Wild Type is currently developing cultured salmon and Finless Foods is working on lab-grown bluefin tuna. So far this year, both companies have each raised $3.5 million.

There’s no word yet on whether BlueNalu will try to develop their own clean seafood product or license out their cellular aquaculture tech to other companies. But the amount of money they raised mean that people (this reporter included) are pretty excited to see just what exactly cellular aquaculture can do.

Good Catch Foods Reels In $8.7 Million for Plant-Based Seafood

Good Catch Foods, the Pennsylvania-based startup which makes seafood out of plants, closed an $8.7 million Series A funding round yesterday. This ups their Series A from the $5.5 million the company announced in April. The round was led by New Crop Capital with participation from Stray Dog Capital, the PHW Group, Blue Horizon, and others.

Founded in 2016, Good Catch Foods is developing plant-based alternatives to shredded tuna, crab cakes, and fish patties. They’re aiming to bring their fish-free tuna, which comes in three flavors and has roughly half the protein of “real” tuna, to market by 2019.

According to the U.N., around 90% of the world’s stocks are currently fully or overfished — and our demand for fresh seafood continues to grow. Some companies are tackling this by ensuring they only source sustainable fish and shellfish or raising farmed fish with low environmental impact. Despite these efforts, the fact remains that seafood is a finite resource. Which makes the work of companies like Good Catch Foods, who hope to sate our seafood craving using plants, all the more important.

The alterna-seafood market, which is developing more slowly than its meaty counterparts, has recently experienced some serious growth. Wild Type raised $3.5 million a few months ago for their lab-grown salmon, followed a few months later by an identical fundraise from Finless Foods, a startup developing cultured bluefin tuna. And just a few weeks ago, Terramino Foods raised $4.25 million for its “salmon” burger made out of fungi.

Terramino Foods’ “salmon” burger.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first investment in meat alternatives for the PHW Group, which is one of Europe’s largest poultry producers. They recently invested in cultured meat company Mosa Meats, and also partnered with SuperMeat, an Israeli company developing lab-grown chicken.

This is in line with the idea that Tom Mastrobuoni, the CFO of Tyson Ventures, put forth at the Smart Kitchen Summit Europe: for Big Food companies, the smart move is to invest in their own disruptors. Which explains why Tyson Foods, which produces one in five pounds of protein consumed in the U.S., has invested in both plant-based and cultured meat companies. (P.S. If you want to hear more about food tech investment trends, see Tom speak at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October.)

TimberFish Launches IndieGoGo to Raise Trout on Brewery Waste and Wood Chips

It’s no secret that wild-caught seafood is fraught, what with its declining supply and associations with inhumane labor practices. Many tout farmed fish as a more ethical and sustainable (not to mention cheaper) way to satisfy our seafood cravings, which is why aquaculture is the fastest growing food-producing sector. In fact, as of 2016, aquaculture produced half of all fish for human consumption.

While aquaculture doesn’t lead to overfishing of limited ocean resources, it can have other unsavory consequences. Farmed fish produce a lot of waste (AKA fish poop), and can sometimes cause chemicals to leak into our drinking water.

And then there’s the fish food. Often, farmed fish are fed pellets of corn, soy, unwanted chicken parts, or even fish meal. Sometimes people even catch smaller, less popular fish from the ocean and grind them up to feed their farmed bretheren. Obviously, it takes a lot of energy and environmental resources to create all this fish food, and even more to filter out waste from fish enclosures.

TimberFish Technologies‘ eponymous technology promises to offer a more palatable alternative to aquaculture. The company launched in 2008 and have so far raised or won $260K, which they used to build a test facility at Five & 20 Spirits & Brewing facility in Westfield New York.

There, they feed their fish not with animal parts or corn, but with a combination of nutrient-rich wastewater from food processors (such as breweries, distilleries, and wineries) and woodchips. Microbes grow on the woodchips, small invertebrates (like worms and snails) eat the microbes, and the fish eat the invertebrates. The fish poop is grub for the microbes, and the whole cycle starts again.

In addition to seafood, the TimberFish system’s only outputs are clean water and spent wood chips, which can be used as a biofuel or soil supplement. Another benefit is that TimberFish can build their aquaculture farms close to cities, shortening the supply chain and guaranteeing fresher fish.

This is obviously not as idyllic as plucking salmon from the Alaskan seas or catching trout in a mountain stream, but, as aquaculture operations go, it’s not bad. And it’s certainly cost-efficient; diverting a waste product to make it profitable.

This week TimberFish Technologies launched an IndieGoGo campaign to raise funds for their no-waste, sustainable aquaculture system. If they reach their $10,000 goal, they’ll use the funds to design plans for a larger commercial facility, which they estimate could produce 2 to 3 million pounds of fish per year.

Investment has been slow so far, but personally I hope TimberFish gets the funds it needs to keep swimming along towards its goal of creating a more sustainable agriculture.

If you’re in New England and want to learn more about blue tech and sustainable seafood, join us for our next food tech meetup in Providence, RI on July 17th!

The Spoon Meetup in Providence: Blue Tech + Sustainable Seafood

This month we’re taking our food tech meetups on the road — to Providence, RI! We’re teaming up with SeaAhead and the City of Providence for this event, all about blue tech and sustainable seafood.

Through panels and a town hall meeting, we’ll explore how innovation and technology can improve sustainability while still meeting the rising global demand for seafood. The event will feature local entrepreneurs, chefs, producers, regulators, and disruptors within the fishing and aquaculture industries.

As always, the events are free and open to all. Join us at the Providence Pilotworks as we discuss actionable steps to improve sustainable seafood systems!

Spaces are limited so register here to ensure you have a spot.

AgShift Expands its Deep Learning Food Inspection to Nuts and Seafood

AgShift, a startup that uses computer vision and deep learning to determine food quality in the supply chain, is broadening its capabilities beyond produce into edible nuts and seafood.

We named AgShift as one of our Food Tech 25 companies last month because of the way it allows produce buyers and sellers to come to an objective price. AgShift’s software lets inspectors take a picture of fruit with their mobile phone and upload it to the cloud where AgShift’s deep learning algorithms would assess its quality (color, bruising, etc.) and base that against USDA, or other customized ratings, to provide a food grade.

AgShift is expanding this type of objective algorithmic grading to inspect edible nuts, starting with cashews, and is in the process of exploring seafood inspections.

To do this, AgShift has developed its own hardware to do bulk analysis. This analyzer is an enclosed box with cameras optimized for deep learning that is installed on-site at a food processing facility. Food, in this case cashews, is loaded into the analyzer which takes pictures of the product and sends the images through AgShift’s platform for analysis and grading.

Miku Jha, AgShift Founder and CEO, told me that using the analyzer on-site allows for better, and more efficient, large-scale assessments. She said that traditionally cashews are examined by hand, with inspectors looking at one or two pounds of nuts at a time. That takes time, and after being touched, those particular nuts need to be discarded. Both time and waste can add up when you’re processing literally tons of cashews. Using AgShift’s analyzer, sampling can be done faster and samples do not need to be thrown out because of the workflow at the processing facility.

Jha said that AgShift has finalized production units of its analyzer, and that the company has already been working with a global nut processor doing inspections and assessing the quality of their cashews.

AgShifts’s expansion into seafood is not as far along. Jha said that AgShift’s deep learning models can help the seafood supply chain with objective species identification and freshness assessment, as well as determine any change in quality of fish as they move through the supply chain. The company is still looking for its first customers in that field.

AgShift isn’t alone in its computer vision and deep learning approach to food inspection. Intello Labs uses the same type of technology to help farmers get a fair price from buyers in India, and it too is eyeing a move into seafood. Here at home, Walmart is using its Eden technology to assess general food freshness.

Earlier this year, AgShift raised its first $2 million seed round and announced it is working with RJO Produce marketing.

Plant-Based Seafood Company Good Catch Foods Nets $5.5M

Tuna melts are great and all, but they can lose some of their appeal when you hear about mercury in the fish, or how dolphins sometimes get killed by being caught in tuna fishing nets.

Pennsylvania-based company Good Catch Foods is developing vegetarian shredded tuna, crab cakes, and fish patties made of lentils, chickpeas, fava beans, and other legumes. Founded in 2017, the startup is trying to change the way we look at tuna by, according to their website, “disrupting the seafood category, not the ocean’s resources.” Last week they got a little closer to their goal when they raised $5.5 million in Series A funding from Stray Dog Capital.

Good Catch is one of many companies capitalizing on the recent consumer trend towards plant-based and flexitarian eating. Vegan burgers have been creating a lot of buzz as of late — think Beyond Meat and the Impossible burger — but there are surprisingly few players working to create seafood alternatives, especially considering the popularity of seafood and the fishing industry’s massive environmental and ethical costs.

According to Good Catch’s website, fish are the largest class of farmed animals and account for roughly 4 out of every 10 pounds of animal product consumed. 90% of global fish stocks are overfished and fully depleted, and those that are wild-caught can have high levels of mercury or other contaminants.

These sobering stats have led to the creation of startups like Aquabyte, which uses machine learning to optimize fish farming, and Hatch, an accelerator geared specifically at aquaculture companies.

But they’ve also prompted some companies to start looking at ways to replace seafood altogether. Wild Type, a cellular agriculture startup, recently raised $3.5 million to continue its development of lab-grown salmon. Finless Foods is working on culturing bluefin tuna, which they hope to have to market by 2019. And New Wave Foods recently created the world’s first plant-based shrimp alternative, while Ocean Hugger Food is making the first vegan alternative to raw tuna.

Good Catch’s is developing plant-based tuna in three flavors: original, Mediterranean, and olive oil & herbs. They’re made with their signature 6-Bean Non-GMO Plant Protein Blend, and has 13 grams of protein per serving. That’s roughly half the protein of canned tuna, which has 25g of protein per similar-sized serving.

Good Catch claims their fish-free tuna will be in the market by the end of 2018. It will be interesting to see if their product makes the same splash (sorry) as other recently-launched meat alternatives, like the Impossible burger. I guess I’ll have to wait and put it to the test myself — preferably in a tuna melt.