Wildtype’s Cultivated Salmon Becomes First of Its Kind To Receive FDA Approval

Wildtype’s cultivated salmon has become the first cultivated seafood product to be approved for sale in the US.

It joins two other cultivated meat products, from UPSIDE Foods and Eat Just’s GOOD Meat, respectively, to mark the third cultivated protein to enter the US market.

Cultivated salmon, regulated

Based in San Francisco, Wildtype is one of several recently founded companies producing “cultivated” fish meat.

“Instead of creating a genetically modified yeast organism to create leghemoglobin – which is this iron-tasting substance that they add to plant-based ingredients –we’re actually growing the animal cells themselves,” the company’s co-founder, Justin Kolbeck, told Technology Networks last year.

Kolbeck and his lab partners acquired their first fishy stem cells – from a less-than-willing salmon – back in 2018. Since then, the company has been trying to perfect its combination of environmental factors to encourage the cells to develop into salmon muscle.

“Once you have a cell line like that, then there was work involved to figure out how to feed those cells in a way that keeps them in that healthy growing state,” Kolbeck said. “So, we needed to come up with a mix of vitamins and minerals, carbohydrates, proteins and fats in a cell feed that was tuned to these fish cells, which was no trivial matter, because there’s very little primary research done on fish cell culture.”

“Nobody’s ever written a scientific paper about this,” he emphasized. “There’s no starting point. You just have to do the work and test different combinations.”

Fortunately for Kolbeck and his team, it seems the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is satisfied with their progress – or, at least, satisfied that the process is safe for consumers.

In a memo dated May 28, the agency declared it had no current health and safety concerns about Wildtype’s production process.

“Based on the data and information presented […] we have no questions at this time about Wildtype’s conclusion that foods comprising or containing cultured coho salmon cell material resulting from the production process […] are as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods,” the memo read.

“We did not identify a basis for concluding that the production process as described would be expected to result in food that bears or contains any substance or microorganism that would adulterate the food,” the memo concluded.

With this pre-market safety approval in hand, the company has since announced an agreement to provide its cultivated salmon to the Haitian restaurant Kann in Portland, Oregon.

The promise of cultivated fish

In the wake of dwindling global fish stocks and greater consumer demand for sustainable products, cultivated fish has risen as a potential new strand of the seafood market.

“Cultivated meat has the potential of being really sustainable,” Dr. Christian Dammann, chief technology officer of BLUU Seafood, a cell-cultured seafood company based in Hamburg, told Technology Networks last year. “It’s just the efficiency. So, [the products] have no bones, no skin, no scales or brain; you don’t have to throw anything away; whatever we put in, it’s being transformed into biomass, and you eat 100% of it.”

“It’s also much faster,” he added. “I mean, these cells grow exponentially. If you look at a fish or a cow, how long does it take to go from 10 kilos to 100 kilos? In cell culture, you can do that [in] a few days.”

This more humane, fish-friendly future may take a while to arrive in full, though. Even if start-ups like BLUU Seafood and Wildtype can surmount the regulatory issues, their technology still needs time to upscale to the extent required for a new sector.

“Difficult technologies like this take time,” said Kolbeck. “If the expectation is this is going to change everything in five years, that’s just not the case. It's more 5–10, 15–20 years journey.”