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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Wild Type

SKS 2020: What Does It Take to Build a Cell-Based Protein Business?

If you keep an eye and ear to food tech, you’ll know there’s been a significant uptick in interest (and investment) for cell-based meat products. But what can companies in the space do to help cell-based protein scale to address issues like global food security and environmental sustainability? 

That’s a topic FTW Ventures’ Brian Frank discussed at this week’s SKS 2020 show, where he was joined by Benjamina Bollag, the founder and CEO of HigherSteaks, and Justin Kolbeck, CEO and cofounder of Wild Type. 

Since both Bollag and Kolbeck have founded cell-based meat companies (HigherSteaks is working on bacon and pork belly, Wild Type on salmon), they had a ton to say — more than can realistically be packed into a few hundred words.

Kolbeck summarized his advice by pointing to three things companies can think about: taste, affordability, and building the kind of story around the product that will attract your average consumer. For example, when we reach that far-off day where cell-based seafood is available at your local Publix, its branding might explain to shoppers that it contains zero mercury or antibiotics, or that it’s a more sustainable solution to wild-caught seafood from our oceans (which are overfished).

“The role of brands will be important to differentiate and distinguish between companies,” he said.

I say “far-off day” because no one is going to stroll into Publix tomorrow, or even next year, expecting to find cell-based meat and seafoods. All panelists agreed the timeframe for that reality is years away.

Part of the reason for that is the cost required to produce cell-based proteins. Bollag mentioned media — the liquid that gets fed to cells to make them grow — as one challenge. Growing those cell in bioreactors at scale is another massive hurdle, as is developing the scaffolding to give products the correct meat-like texture.

One thing that could address all of those tasks and challenges isn’t even a technology. It’s simply the concept of not doing everything in-house. A company that develops its own media, builds its own bioreactors, and simultaneously tries to navigate the regulatory challenges for cell-based meat is going to be slow in reaching commercialization. “Developing the IP yourself is not the most efficient way to do that,” said Kolbeck. Frank was even more to the point: “Cell-based [meat] companies cannot develop all the IP themselves.”

That presents a real opportunity for many kinds of businesses to get involved in the growth of cell-based meat, from those building bioreactors to companies developing cheaper serums to lawyers with expertise in the regulatory realm. All of those individuals and companies working together can help accelerate the timeline between now and when cell-based protein products reach our grocery store shelves. Only then can the planet and the population start to reap the widespread benefits of cell-based meat as an option.

Singapore’s Shiok Meats Raises $12.6M in Series A Funding

Cell-based seafood maker Shiok Meats announced today it has raised $12.6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Aqua-Spark, an investment fund focused on sustainable aquaculture. SEEDS Capital, Real Tech Fund, Irongrey, and several others also participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. This brings Shiok Meats’ total funding so far to $20.2 million.

Shiok Meats said it will put the new funds towards building its commercial pilot plant, from which the company plans to launch its minced shrimp product in 2022. 

Shrimp is one of the most widely consumed seafood types in the world. For now, at least, Shiok Meats says it is the only company in the world creating a cell-based version that’s grown outside the animal. The company’s process involves isolating stem cells from the shrimp then growing them inside nutrient-rich bioreactors. 

It joins a growing list of cell-based protein producers that have raised funds over the last year, including Blue Nalu, Good Catch, and Wild Type.

For all of these companies, price remains a major hurdle to getting products to market: cell-based protein is simply an expensive process right now that makes it impossible to get products to price parity with traditional seafood offerings. On its own website, Shiok meats notes that a limited production scale is in part responsible for the high costs of its cell-based shrimp. Scaling up production will help the company bring down costs.

Shiok recently partnered with IntegriCulture to use the latter’s CultNet System to create shrimp cell cultures. Doing so brings down the overall cost of cell-based shrimp production, since it doesn’t require expensive animal serums normally used for the process. 

Shiok did a first public taste testing of cell-based shrimp dumplings last year, to positive reviews. The rest of us will have to wait a little longer. The company’s initial products will be frozen cell-based shrimp meat for dumplings and other shrimp-based dishes. In the coming years, the company also plans to launch shrimp flavoring pastes and powders, fully formed 3D shrimp, and cell-based lobster and crab products.

Food Tech News: Wild Type Is Looking for Chefs, White Castle Is Offering Rewards

Some final bits of food tech news from ’round the web this week:

Wild Type Has a Pre-Order List for Chefs

While still a good five years out from commercial production, Wild Type said this week it has opened a pre-order list for chefs wanting to include the company’s cell-based seafood into their dishes. Right now, the company is developing a cultured salmon prototype that would work in sushi dishes. Wild Type cofounder Justin Kolbeck clarified that the company is not launching its product, just “releasing news” that they “have the next iteration of the product.

White Castle Launches a Rewards Program

White Castle has launched its first-ever rewards platform, called “the Craver Nation loyalty program.” Like other digital rewards programs out there, Craver Nation will offer discounts and deals to loyal customers that sign up for the White Castle mobile app. The program was trialed earlier this summer in Louisville, Ky. and is another digital tool in the chain’s quickly-growing arsenal of them.

Asia-based abillionveg Raises Fresh Funding

Singapore-based app abillionveg announced this week that it has closed a $3 million pre-Series A round, with participation from Nan Fung Group, CloudKitchens, and York Capital. The app features community-led reviews for vegan and vegetarian products, including both retail and restaurant offerings. Simultaneous to the funding news, the company announced it has struck partnerships with plant-based heavyweight Impossible Foods and restaurant-booking platform Chope.

Cornucopia Farms Is Building a Large-Scale Hydroponic Farm in Georgia

Leafy green lovers, take note. Marietta, Ga.-based Cornucopia Farms said this week it is completing construction on a 56,000-square-foot hydroponic farm two hours east of Atlanta. The farm will grow all manner of greens, including herbs, Romaine, and Bibb lettuce, among other types, and will produce an estimated 12 million heads of leafy greens and 2 million pounds of herbs per year when it is completed. That won’t be for a minute, though: completion of the project is expected at some point in the latter half of 2021.

As Cell-Based Protein Becomes a Reality, What to Call it Gets Increasingly Important

Last week we briefly covered news about a Rutgers study that found “cell-based” the best descriptor for lab-grown seafood products. Further thought and reading on the matter leads me to believe the study’s findings have implications for labeling across all of the cell-based protein space, not just seafood.

Here’s a quick recap: A new study by Rutgers in the Journal of Food Science recommends “Companies seeking to commercialize seafood products made from the cells of fish or shellfish should use the term ‘cell-based’ on product labels.”

The study, commissioned by cell-based seafood company BlueNalu, claims to be the first of its kind evaluating how to label alternative seafood products in a way that both appeals to consumers and meets regulatory requirements around product naming. The study was done by William Hallman, a professor who chairs the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers-New Brunswick’s School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. He noted this week that participants in the study were able to tell the label “cell-based” apart from ones like “wild caught” or “farm raised,” and that those participants still believed the cell-based products were as nutritious as the others. 

Other names tested in the study were “cell-cultured seafood” and “cultivated seafood,” as well as phrases like “cultivated from the cells of ____” and “grown directly from the cells of ____.”

It’s not hard to understand why “cell-based seafood” resonates the most with consumers. The above phrases lack the kind of concise description needed for food products, and terms like “cultivated seafood” are rather muddy in terms of describing what goes into making the product. 

This question of labeling is only going to get bigger as cell-based proteins move further from concept and into a culinary reality for average consumers. We’ve already seen this play out to some degree with plant-based proteins. About a year ago, large meat corporations were pushing hard to ban their plant-based counterparts from using words like “burgers” and “sausages” on packaging. As we wrote previously, “Big Meat trying to quash alterna-meats’ popularity by telling companies how they can or can’t label themselves feels protectionist and ineffective, not to mention desperate, at this point.” 

And that was before the pandemic. Since COVID-19 hit and shed an uncomfortably bright light on issues in traditional meat production, demand for alternative proteins has been through the roof. Just this week, investment network FAIRR released a report stating investment in alt-protein for the first half of 2020 is nearly double the amount for all of 2019. That includes cell-based protein.

Whether Big Seafood pushes back on labeling now that more cell-based seafood is coming to market remains to be seen. It will certainly have a lot of opponents if it does. BlueNalu just announced a new facility designed for commercial production of its alt-seafood products. Wild Type raised a $12.5 million Series A round last year for its cultured salmon, and Shiok Meats just partnered with Integriculture to scale up production of lab-grown shrimp. And those are only the seafood-focused players in the cell-cultured protein space.

Big Seafood aside, effective labeling of all these products — and all cell-based protein products, really — will be key to appealing to new consumers who may not have previously known about cell-based meat and dairy, and that it’s just as nutritious as the real deal. When it comes to finding a name for these alt-protein items, that could be the most difficult and most rewarding challenge companies face.  

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.

Wild Type’s Cell-Based Salmon Costs $200, But Not For Long

A few weeks ago Wild Type, the San Francisco-based startup growing salmon in a lab, did a tasting of its cultured salmon.

Sadly I was not there to taste the goods (hint hint, guys). But I did get to connect with Wild Type co-founders Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck over the phone this week to learn more about how their dinner went and what’s next for the cellular aquaculture startup.

According to the co-founders, the taste test was a critical step in their R&D process. While there are things they still want to improve on their product — tasters apparently thought the flavor was quite faint and the color wasn’t as vibrant as wild salmon — they were impressed with how the salmon adapted to a variety of dishes.

Wild Type’s salmon falls apart if it’s heated above 212°F, so for now the company is focusing on raw applications. Their first product will be a smoked salmon similar to lox. Apparently Wild Type’s scientists can already produce a thin sheet of salmon that’s 10.5 inches x 11 inches, which can then be sliced, cold smoked, and presumably put on a bagel alongside schmear and capers.

While they eventually want to sell their cell-based lox directly to consumers, the Wild Type founders first need to get their price down. Way down.

Right now, Kolbeck and Elfenbein estimated that it cost roughly $200 dollars to produce one serving of their cultured salmon. (They specifically referenced the cost of to make the eight-piece spicy salmon sushi roll they served at their recent dinner.) Though high-quality wild salmon is pricey, up to $30 a pound, Wild Type still has a ways to go before their fish is cost-competitive with the real thing. Kolbeck explained that they’re currently working on making their animal-free cell media — one of the biggest costs in cellular agriculture/aquaculture — more efficient, which would make the growth process significantly cheaper.

Kolbeck and Elfenbein wouldn’t give a timeline for their product release, but seeing as they won’t launch until they’re at least close to price parity with traditional salmon — roughly one-tenth their current cost — it’ll likely be several years at least.

However, Wild Type does have one significant advantage over companies like JUST and Mosa Meats, which claim to be closer to bringing their cultured meat to market. Fish are cold-blooded, so the startup’s salmon cells can be grown at room temperature. Mammalian and avian cells, on the other hand, have to be grown in little ovens to stay warm. That means that cultured fish requires fewer energy inputs than cultured beef, pork, or chicken, and can also be produced more cheaply.

For now, Wild Type is focused on perfecting their product, reducing growth costs, and planning more tastings of their salmon. Maybe this writer will be able to snag an invite for the next one.

Wild Type Debuts New Cultured Salmon in Largest Tasting of Lab-Grown Meat

Last week Wild Type, the West Coast startup growing salmon in a lab, had the first large-scale taste test of its new product.

In a Medium post, the company detailed a test dinner at Portland, Oregon’s Olympia Oyster bar, which included an assortment of cell-based salmon dishes based on “a variety of culinary traditions.” Menu items included Ceviche Verde, salmon tartare, Hawaiian poke, and spicy salmon sushi rolls, all made with the cultured fish. The dinner, which the company claims was the first to feature cell-based food so extensively, wasn’t open to the public, so there’s no indication how good the cultured fish actually tasted.

Founded in 2016, Wild Type raised a $3.5 million seed round to expand its cell-based salmon R&D in 2018. The company plans to initially release minced salmon and lox and work its way up to full-size filets.

It still has quite a few hurdles to overcome. As with most cellular agriculture (or aquaculture) companies, it can only produce relatively small pieces of lab-grown meat due to scaffolding challenges and other growth constraints.

Wild Type’s salmon can also only be served raw. If it’s heated above 212°F, it will become too flaky fall apart. According to Bloomberg the company plans to debut a new version of the salmon that can be cooked in the next few months.

Pricing is also an issue. The company hopes to sell their salmon at a competitive price to real farmed Atlantic salmon: $7 to $8 per pound. As of now, they estimate that the spicy salmon roll served at the dinner cost a whopping $200 to produce. However cellular agriculture/aquaculture companies are rapidly reducing the cost it takes to make cultured meat, mostly due to improvements in growth media, so it’s likely pricing will go down soon.

Wild Type isn’t the only company trying to get in on the seafood alternative market. Finless Foods is hoping to bring its cell-based bluefin tuna to market by the end of 2019, though likely in a very limited release. In Singapore, Shiok Meats is developing cell-based shrimp (and racking up serious funding along the way), and Avant Meats is making lab-grown fish maw in Hong Kong.

It’ll still be a while until we taste any sort of cultured meat or seafood due to high costs, low production capacity, and regulatory hurdles. Wild Type has yet to release a go-to-market date for their cell-based salmon, but some speculate it’ll be as much as 10 years from now.

However, several plant-based seafood companies are already vying for our plates. Good Catch’s plant-based tuna is now available at Whole Foods, and Ocean Hugger Foods makes alternatives to raw tuna and eel out of vegetables. These options may all be better for the environment than fishing or even growing fish cells in a lab, but at least from my experience, it’s much harder to make plants taste like fish than it is to make them taste like a juicy burger.

Regardless, we have to do something about our dwindling seafood supply. Our oceans are rapidly being depleted through overfishing and aquaculture has its own set of issues. If companies like Wild Type can produce tasty fish to relieve some of the pressure from our oceans, I’m all for it. Even if I have to wait a while to try lab-grown spicy tuna sushi for myself.