Alt-Seafood Splash #8 - Cultivated Seafood Deep Dive With Umami Meats

Cultivate your mind with the inspiring story of Umami Meats' quest to pioneer cultivated seafood in APAC.

July 26, 2022

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Happy Tuesday Market Shakers. Today we dip our toes back into the alt-oceans and talk to Umami Meats Co-founder and CEO, Mihir Pershad.

In today’s post:

  • Introducing Umami Meats

  • Catching up with cultured seafood

  • What inspired Mihir to co-found a cultured seafood company?

  • How is Umami Meat’s technology paving the way for a cultivated-fish future?

  • What is Umami Meat’s business model?

  • What are the barriers to scaling cultivated seafood?

  • What are Umami’s plans for expansion?

  • How can we market cultivated seafood?

Introducing Umami Meats

Umami Meats is a Singapore-based startup working to develop cultivated seafood. Through their proprietary process, they aim to resolve unsustainable seafood industry practices. Umami has created a bank of production-ready cell lines for bigeye tuna, red snapper and Japanese eel. They are also developing a sophisticated maturation process to grow their cell lines.

Mihir Pershad, co-founder and CEO of Umami Meats, joined us to tell us more. Get ready to dive into a fascinating discussion about the potential of cultivated fish and building a business in this emerging space. 

Catching up with cultured seafood

But hold your seahorses! Before diving into this interview, let’s take a beat and catch up on what’s been happening with cultivated seafood.

Cultivated meat is genuine animal meat (including seafood) that is made by cultivating animal cells directly. Unlike previous products we’ve written about, such as OMNITuna, made from plants, cultivated seafood is made by taking cells from a live fish and reproducing them in a bioreactor. Cultivated fish is made from the same cell types arranged in a similar structure to animal tissue. The taste, texture and nutrition of cultivated seafood replicate the real thing, reducing or eliminating the need to catch and farm fish for food. 

Cultivated seafood has attracted a lot of attention lately, especially from investors. In 2021, cultivated seafood captured two-thirds of all investments made into alt-seafood. The trend has continued in 2022 with big investments being made in companies such as South Korea’s CellMEAT and Wildtype, who raised $100 million earlier this year.

In Japan, some of the biggest seafood players are showing interest in cultivated fish. The government has recently announced that it will begin working on regulations for the category, which means we may see cultivated fish on the Japanese market earlier than expected.

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Even with so much potential, we’re still some ways off cultivated seafood entering the market. The sector faces technological challenges. A big one is finding the ideal cell culture medium (a mixture of nutrients which feeds cell growth) and bringing the cost down. Regulations, while on the table in some countries, are mostly in early stages outside of the US and Singapore. Finally, producers still have their work cut out for them to convince consumers who are wary to try cultivated, “lab-grown” alternatives.

The challenges are worth taking on however as cell cultivation is a promising technology with the alluring potential to eventually produce large volumes of seafood without ever harming a single fish. 

Without further ado, let’s hear from one of the pioneers in the field.

What inspired you to co-found a cultivated seafood company?

Mihir Pershad trained as a biochemist. Not content with being stuck in the lab 24/7, Mihir joined a venture studio in Baltimore. There, he helped to build and commercialize drug delivery, disease diagnostics, and feed management businesses whose customers were fish and shrimp farms.

Mihir then travelled to Singapore to establish business development and sales activities for these companies.

On my first business development trip from Singapore into ASEAN, I got my first experience on a shrimp farm. I was surprised by the difference to the Canadian and Norwegian aquaculture systems that I had experienced.  Most aquaculture in the U.S. and Canada focuses on salmon, where the farming practices are more sustainable compared to these fish and shrimp farms. I remember standing on a shrimp farm, looking up the road, and seeing mangroves being cleared to make room for another farm. Seeing this firsthand made me realize the gap between how much seafood we need to produce and the capacity of (current) systems to produce it sustainably.

Mihir's realized there was a need for more sustainable solutions to produce seafood. So he decided to do something about it. As a biochemist, tyring to grow cells without animals was the perfect starting point.

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How is Umami Meat’s technology paving the way for a cultivated fish future?

More cultivated seafood consumption means less pressure on our oceans. Umami Meats is aiming to develop the process to make this happen at vast scale.

First, they are establishing a bank of cell lines (target cells to be reproduced to make fish meat) for different species. They focus on unagi (Japanese eel), red snapper and bigeye tuna. All these species are listed by the IUCN as endangered or under threat of becoming so.

We selected species that are difficult to farm, either because we don’t know how or because the economics don’t work for aquaculture. There are a lot of species caught in the wild that are being driven to extinction, which is a problem for the industry and for our oceans.

The next part of their process is maturing the cells. They use bioreactors filled with growth media to grow the initial fish cells into tons of fish cells. These stem cells are then turned into muscle and fat through an incubation stage. These mature muscle and fat cells can then be formed into end products.

Umami intends to partner with big seafood companies that want to enter the cultured seafood market. Eventually, these big players can license the technology or establish joint ventures to make cultivated fish products for their own brands using Umami’s process.

What is Umami Meats' business model?

Umami Meats’ strategy then is not to conquer the alt-seas, but to grow them.

Our business model is licencing our cultivated seafood technology, including several speciality ingredients. We provide companies with the process blueprint and cell lines and connect them with partners who can help to provide bulk inputs like media, for example.

Umami will provide plug-and-play cultivated seafood technology. With it, big players will have the tech and know-how they need to enter the cultivated seafood space.

When it comes to structuring the end product, our formula needs to be flexible. We’re trying to integrate with traditional food-forming technology and new processes like 3D printing. Whatever companies want to make, be it battered fillet, grilled eel, or sushi, we aim to ensure they have flexibility.

The potential for cultivated seafood to replicate wide varieties of fish is one of its most exciting benefits for the F&B industry. As the technology is so new, it will take some getting used to though.

In the early days, we will need to support our partners in building cultivated seafood facilities. So we’re looking at joint ventures to show that we know how to scale this process from lab to commercial production and ultimately build a new, productive facility.

What are the barriers to scaling cultivated seafood?

At the moment, the cultivated meat and seafood industry’s biggest challenge is working out how to scale affordably.

Currently, the cost of making cultivated meat and fish is very high. Sometimes as much as 25 times the price of caught seafood. That said, advances in cost reduction are being made every day.

Better cell line identification and bioreactor technology are high priorities to reduce costs further. Another aspect is finding the ideal growth medium for cells to develop. In Mihir’s opinion, this is the biggest challenge facing cultivated seafood.

The biggest challenge is solving the cost problem, particularly around media inputs. If you look at cost structure, your consumables cost at volume are mainly media and whatever you choose to clean your reactors with. The cells themselves don’t cost anything once you’ve done the R&D to identify or create your cell line.

The current media supply chain for culturing cells is set up for pharmaceuticals. But this is not suitable for food-grade production.

There’s a level of overhead for media produced for pharma that isn’t necessary for food grade. Of course, both pharma and food grade has documentation, including Good Manufacturing Processes. But, they are on totally different levels.

The annual volume of media we need for food grade is maybe 100 times that of what is produced for pharma. Finding suppliers willing to switch and make food-grade formulations when they’re currently making pharma-grade formulations is key for being able to scale cultivated meat and fish.

The solution to this challenge will not come from Umami Meats’ efforts alone. As the Good Food Institute (GFI) suggests, we need industry-wide cooperation to bring the cost of media down. Opportunities lie in partnerships with animal feed producers to source food-grade media components. Further down the line, the valorisation of media also represents a promising opportunity.

What are Umami’s plans for expansion?

Ultimately, Umami Meats aim for their process to produce cultivated seafood at a competitive price, within 10% of caught seafood. Right now they’re still working out pricing for their service. At the same time, they're striving toward bringing costs down for their process. That is not to say they plan to wait around for this to happen until

commercializing, however.

Our initial focus is on the premium seafood market. We’ve specifically selected species of fish, like unagi, that sell at a premium price point. So our process isn’t far off from being able to produce unagi at a price point of $70 per kilo, which is competitive with current prices.

Given the cell lines that Umami Meats specializes in and their premium seafood strategy, Japan is a market in their sights.

Japan is the global market leader for premium seafood. Along with South Korea, Japan has one of the largest markets for premium seafood. Now sure, the stakes are high. But, if we can validate our products with discerning Japanese and Korean consumers, we can validate that what we’re doing is working. It’s a sign to the rest of the world that our product is high quality and ready for any market.

There is no doubt that convincing Japanese consumers to go for alternatives over caught fish is a challenge. Yet, Umami’s approach also highlights an opportunity for alternative seafood in Japan. Success in Japan is a mark of the highest quality. It can help validate a product when expanding to other countries.

Despite this, regulations are the biggest factor in market entry. Japan is taking proactive steps to regulate cultivated proteins, but it’s still early days.

North America looks like it will be the next market to open up to cultivated seafood. There’s significant potential there given the size of the seafood market and also the openness to alternative proteins.

How can we market cultivated seafood?

Even after regulation, will consumers be willing to eat “lab-grown” products? Mihir believes marketing must focus on nutrition and health.

One of the biggest drivers of fish consumption is health. But there are also reasons to be wary of how much caught fish we eat because of heavy metal and plastic contamination. On the farmed fish side there have been ongoing concerns about antibiotic use. The advantage of cultivated seafood is that it contains the same nutrients as actual fish, without any contamination or disease.

At the same time, Mihir is aware that promoting the health benefits shouldn’t smear traditional production.

There are large parts of Asia where fish is the main source of protein. We don’t want to malign traditional producers of seafood because they have played a pivotal role in providing affordable and healthy proteins to billions of people. We want to promote cultivated seafood as a new method of production that allows us to live in harmony with nature. It’s fresh, healthy and free from contaminants so that even a pregnant mother or young child can eat it.

That's all folks

We'd like to say a huge thank you to Mihir Pershad and Umami Meats for supporting this interview. We're looking forward to the day we can find cultivated unagi sushi on our sushi trains here in Japan.

See you next Tuesday for the final article in our series exploring alternative seafood's potential in Japan.

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