Umami Meats is now UMAMI Bioworks

In 2020, we began with a simple vision: to deliver on the promise of cultivated seafood by developing a B2B business that solved critical bottlenecks in the supply chain and path to scale. We started with development of cell lines from endangered species of fish optimized to grow in serum-free media and in large-scale conditions.

Why Rebrand?

Over the past 3.5 years, we’ve made tremendous progress on this initial vision, establishing cell lines for half a dozen endangered species and fine-tuning culture media that is serum-free and increasingly food-grade. But in that time, we also recognized that these inputs alone would not be enough to deliver on the promise of cultivated seafood.

Our experience has taught us that making the cultivated category successful and relevant requires three things: scale, profitable economics, and great applications.

1. Scale: Achieving a meaningful impact on global seafood demand means producing tens of millions of tons of cultivated seafood annually. With total demand expected to reach 230 million tons by 2030, we need to demonstrate a long-term path to hundreds of millions of tons of cultivated production.
2. Profitable Economics: Unprofitable and unaffordable products don’t survive long. We need to chart a clear path to profitable production of cultivated seafood that also creates affordable food for consumers around the world.
3. Great Applications: Above all else, people buy food because of how it makes them feel. Delicious and familiar food applications will drive consumer adoption and behavior change more than any planetary or animal welfare impact. And the foods we love are heavily influenced by where in the world we live; global appeal demands a global range of applications.

A cultivated grouper fillet demonstrated by UMAMI and crafted in partnership with 3D bioprinting pioneer, Steakholder Foods.

Why UMAMI Bioworks?

While our early work on cell lines and growth media addressed both economics and scale, we felt that a unified engineering approach would be needed to bring cultivated from promise to reality. This idea is at the core of our rebrand.

An example of the many great steelworks that built the modern world.

In the Industrial Revolution, the ironworks and later the steelworks brought an integrated manufacturing and engineering approach to crafting the building blocks of modern industry. Now, we intend to bring that same engineering and manufacturing-led thinking to scale the cultivation of animal cells through our bioworks.

At UMAMI Bioworks, our ultimate aim remains unchanged: to produce the world’s best seafood without compromises. We are working to create exceptional food experiences that preserve deeply rooted food traditions while empowering a more sustainable, healthy food system that is accessible to everyone. ‘Umami’ is a Japanese term that translates to ‘the essence of deliciousness,’ and at its core, it evokes the mouth-watering flavours and delicious aromas of the world-class seafood we will deliver.

With our renewed commitment to delivering scalability and impact, UMAMI Bioworks will serve as the discovery and development platform for cultivated seafood — and beyond. We will accelerate the discovery and industrialization of novel cell cultivation inputs and processes with ALKEMYST, our machine learning-based optimization platform. And we will empower the world’s food producers to produce and deliver world-class cultivated seafood to consumers worldwide with our automated, modular production solution.

With UMAMI Bioworks powering production, we will enable locally-produced:

• seafood without heavy metals
• seafood without antibiotics
• seafood without microplastics
• seafood without extinction
• seafood without compromises