Cultured Fish Could Be the Answer to Overfishing, if Seafood Lovers Can Get Hooked on It

Salmon doesn’t come cheap these days. One UK report in 2023 found that, over the past decade or so, the fish had experienced the largest price rise of any supermarket food item, going from costing £9.55 per kilo in 2008 to £18.97 per kilo in 2023 – a 98.6% increase in 15 years! And prices are only expected to climb higher.

It wasn’t always this way, though, recalls Justin Kolbeck.

“You see prices coming down considerably over a long period of time since the 1960s, when fish farming was introduced,” he says. “And then around the year 2010, prices level out. And since then, salmon prices have been rising five times as fast as inflation.”

So, what’s behind this surge in seafood value? Appetite, says Kolbeck: a global, veracious appetite.

“I think demand is rising and supply is now becoming increasingly constrained, and it makes sense,” he says. “Where does our seafood come from? We have wild-caught, and we have farmed. Wild-caught is a fixed supply, more or less. There’s some seasonal fluctuation in wild catches, but, for the most part, we’ve reached the biological limit of wild catch for the types of fish that we eat regularly.”

“Then, on the fish farming side, there are also supply constraints. In the case of salmon, there are only so many fjords – areas where you can fish farm.”

“The combination of these things has led to an environment in which we have rapidly growing interest in people eating healthier seafoods – driven largely by a lot of consumption in Asia – combined with relatively fixed supplies.”

To fill this insatiable demand, the world may need a new avenue of fish food production, a third way that can take the pressure off wild-caught and farmed methods.

Enter: cell-cultured fish flesh.

Cell-fish

“If are you familiar with the Impossible Burger, what we’re doing is not exceptionally different,” says Kolbeck, who founded the company Wildtype with his business partner Aryé Elfenbein in 2016.

“Instead of creating a genetically modified yeast organism to create a leghemoglobin – which is this iron-tasting substance that they add to plant-based ingredients – what we’re actually growing the animal cells themselves,” he explains.

Based in San Francisco, the company has helped pioneer bioreactor-grown salmon muscle. How exactly does this fishless fishing work? you might ask. Well, it’s a lot like beer brewing. So much so, that Kolbeck and his partner bought themselves a brewery to get started.

“In our case, we repurposed an old brewery here in San Francisco that had gone bankrupt during COVID, and so we grow our cells in a brew tank. Essentially, it's a large 3,000-liter stainless steel tank. It’s not all that different from a beer vat, other than you control the temperature, the pH and the oxygen level inside the tank with a higher degree of specificity than you would find in beer brewing.”

As for the cells inside the vats, the Wildtype team began with a single stem cell taken from a (less than willing) salmon.

“This original fish gave its life for science in 2018, at the very end of the year,” Kolbeck recalls.

Already pre-programmed to morph into salmon muscle, this cell then just needed the right materials, like a nutrient feed for growth.

“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. 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,” Kolbeck emphasizes. “There’s no starting point. You just have to do the work and test different combinations.”

Uncharted waters

This lack of scientific mapping has, at some point, disorientated just about every start-up company that has attempted to cultivate seafood.

One particular problem has proven to be the challenge of keeping cells from sticking to the sides of the vats, where they naturally gravitate.

“You want to have suspension cultures,” says Dr. Christian Dammann, chief technology officer of BLUU Seafood, a cell-cultured seafood company based in Hamburg.

“The challenge is that most animal cells don’t like that; they like to be attached to something. So that’s a challenge that very few companies have solved. We did.”

BLUU Seafood’s fish balls. Credit: BLUU Seafood.

To achieve this feat, Dammann and his colleagues developed their own micro-materials to keep their fish cells stuck together.

“We created spheroids,” he tells Technology Networks. “So instead of adhering to a surface, they adhere to each other. And that seems to keep them happy. Then we grow them in a bioreactor.”

But one hard-won solution can sometimes lead to another challenge.

“Now, the problem that you encounter there is that these spheroids would grow and grow, they just get bigger and bigger, which is not good, because the nutrients cannot get into this ball,” Dammann says. “Then everything dies.”

“So, we developed a method that can keep the spheroids in a certain size, below 200 microns. That’s the diffusion limit, basically. So that is what we do; we take the cell lines from the cultured dishes, put [them] in a solution, then they go into bioreactor, we harvest the cells and then use methods that are known from the food industry – extrusion machines, mixers.”

These machines fortify the fishy matter with certain plant ingredients like starch proteins, which give the fish cells a scaffold for structure. Depending on the type of scaffold used and the programming of the mixers, Dammann and his team can grow their fish cells in a number of ways, forming diverse products, from fish balls to sashimi to caviar.

There’s just one snag: these botanical scaffolds have been known to give the fish products a leafy aftertaste, as Kolbeck and his team at Wildtype discovered.

“There are certain plant components that got in the way of the salmon flavor, to put it mildly,” says Kolbeck. “It was a big journey.”

After a few further technical experiments, Kolbeck and the Wildtype development team eventually got the right, fishy-flavor recipe and came to the end of that journey. Would it have taken less time with a bit of open scientific collaboration with other fish-culturing start-ups? Perhaps. But that kind of cooperation isn’t common within the industry just yet, says Kolbeck.

“I would not say that there’s a generous collaboration on the IP [intellectual property] generation front,” he says. “We do collaborate on other things, like whether it’s helping the government set up a reasonable regulatory environment or addressing political issues that come up from time to time, which are, of course, going to go hand-in-glove with any type of new food product. Food is a very political topic in any country.”

Indeed, in some areas of the world, the burgeoning cultivated fish sector needs all the help it can get.

When banned in Rome

Last November, Italy became the first country in the world to ban the production, sale and importation of cultivated meat. The vote was seen as a victory for the country’s agricultural sector and Italian cultural traditions.

“Italy is the world's first country safe from the social and economic risks of synthetic food,” Francesco Lollobrigida, Italy’s agriculture minister, said at the time.

In practice, the law has had no effect, given that lab-grown meat and fish have not been approved for human consumption in Italy or the European Union.

Such approval has been issued in the US, however, which has sparked backlash in certain states.

Earlier this year, Florida and Alabama became the first two states to ban the sale of cultivated meat and seafood. On what grounds? To fight back against the “global elite”, according to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs,” Mr. DeSantis said in a statement at the time.

Seemingly driven by similar sentiments, certain lawmakers in Tennessee and Arizona have attempted similar bans, while the state of Iowa passed legislation in May requiring lab-grown meat products to be labelled with such words as “fake”, “meatless” or “imitation”.

When championing their products to regulators, companies like Wildtype and BLUU Seafood may, understandably, struggle to combat rhetoric around global elites and dietary conspiracies. When it comes to the sympathetic concerns of the agricultural sector, however, many of the companies are quietly confident that the fears of farmers can be successfully assuaged, because the two industries can work together.

“I always try to emphasize that this is not a fight one against the other; this is one alternative, and it will just be one more production method,” BLUU Seafood’s Dammann says. “We need farmers. This opposition that comes now from a lot of the agriculture area is really very interesting, because we will bring them customers. We have to buy plant products to feed our industry, so they will benefit from us.”

Salmon cells under the microscope. Credit: BLUU Seafood.

Fortunately for Dammann and other cultivated fish entrepreneurs, there seems to be little-to-no political or cultural opposition to the foods in the one other country that has legislated their consumption: Singapore.

“Singapore has really led the world on this kind of technology,” says Kolbeck. “It’s a relatively small city state that imports almost all of its food. They have, let’s say, a significant vulnerability if there’s significant political instability in the region.”

“They’ve set a goal of having 30% of their food supply created domestically by the year 2030, and that has driven significant investment in and support of alternative protein companies, both in Singapore and elsewhere.”

BLUU Seafood expects its products to be available in Singapore next year [Updated, September 16, 2024].

As for the US, the companies are currently in talks with the country’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Beyond that, there’s hope more markets could soon spring up in the European Union, the UK and fish-loving Asian countries like Japan.

In the meantime, to boost consumer interest and the prospect of regulatory approvals, both companies are keen on getting the word out that cell-cultured fish is the sustainable alternative the supermarket needs.

Refining Nemo

“Cultivated meat has the potential of being really sustainable,” says Dammann. “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 adds. “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 a few days.”

But, for Dammann, these sustainability benefits are secondary to the animal welfare revolution cultivated fish could help usher in.

“Nobody cares about fish,” he says bluntly. “Everybody looks at these trawlers. They dump the fish on the deck. But those animals feel pain and they suffocate over several hours. Nobody would do that with cows. But, for seafood, it’s OK? It’s really not for me.”

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 political opposition to their products, their technology still needs time to upscale to the extent required for a new sector.

“Difficult technologies like this take time,” says 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.”

Staring ahead at decades of product development and regulatory hurdles would intimidate anyone, but Kolbeck has a mantra to keep him focused for the coming years.

“The journey ahead of us is quite simple: make delicious food and make it affordable,” he says. “Those are the two things that I’m thinking about every morning when I wake up. How do we advance those two things and create a product that people want to buy? In the end, it boils down to that.”

Correction

This article was updated on September 16, 2024. The original article stated that both Wildtype and BLUU Seafood expect their products to be on sale in Singapore in 2025. While BLUU Seafood has this goal, Wildtype is not currently focused on regulatory approval in Singapore. This error has been amended.