The plant-based supermarket aisle has an impressive selection of meat-free alternatives like burgers, sausages, and bacon rashers but options for alternative seafood are still far and few in between. According to the Good Food Institute (GFI), the US market recorded both dollar and unit sales growth (up by 53%) for plant-based seafood last year, and stakeholders predict this trend will continue.
However, plant-based seafood’s quality needs improvement before it can truly hit the mainstream, says Kianti Figler, founder and CEO of Dutch start-up Upstream Foods. At the Rabobank-hosted F&A Next event last week in the Netherlands, she discussed how focusing on taste is the key to driving innovation.
Consumers cite flavor as the main reason for choosing plant-based seafood, while other benefits such as reducing overfishing, containing omega 3, and reducing plastic waste also garner interest. Once consumers have a positive taste impression, messaging focused on these benefits will likely make plant-based seafood more appealing to them.
Upstream Foods’ solution for improving taste is to enhance fat content, as taste and fat are interlinked. To achieve this, the start-up is developing cultivated fish fat for the plant-based seafood market through cellular agriculture. The company takes cells from salmon, turns them into a proprietary cell line, cultivates them in a bioreactor, and then, in partnership with an industry player, combines the fat with a plant-based matrix.
Upstream Foods sees cost reduction as the most significant challenge to increasing scale. Figler noted that “Everything has been designed for the pharma industry, and traditionally there have not been a lot of incentives to drive the cost [of ingredients] down. Making this entire process cost-efficient is, I think, the biggest challenge we’re all facing.”
After fundraising, Upstream Foods plans to scale its process to regulatory approval in the US, before filing for European approval, although the latter may be delayed due to the lengthy Novel Foods submission process to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).
To hit the market four years from now, Upstream Foods is first optimising its salmon cell line and establishing its process at lab-scale. The company has already developed a proof of concept with global plant-based seafood players.
Keen to enhance your knowledge on alternative meat and dairy innovations? Tune into Protein Vision, our free-to-attend broadcast event across four sessions on June 21-22, 2023, profiling the technology, ingredients, and culinary science behind the next generation of meat and dairy-free innovation.
