The Future of Seafood
We Explore How Cultivated Agriculture Can Change How We Eat Seafood
If you are working on the future of food we would love to hear from you! Email a deck to Brad Pruente (brad at primemoverslab dot com).
Next week, Suzanne Fletcher and I will be hosting a webinar on The Future of Seafood where we’ll cover the emerging cultivated agriculture industry and then focus on its application to seafood, an area we are particularly interested in. Register here and join us Wednesday, January 12 at 3pm ET and let me know if you have any questions you’d like our panel to address.
Justin Kolbeck, Co-founder & CEO at Wildtype
John Pattison, Co-founder & CEO at Cultured Decadence
Chris Somogyi, Co-founder at Blue Nalu, CEO of EverCase, Business Development Lead at Xerox-PARC
Pae Wu, CTO, IndieBio / Partner, SOSV
Cultivated agriculture is the process of growing meat cells like muscle or fat without the entire animal. Scientists can grow the cells in a lab using processes similar to what you may have done in high school biology. Except that in this case, instead of a colony of bacteria, the outcome is a hamburger. Nature gave us a more convenient supply of Whoppers with the cow, but cows are not without their downsides.
The global population is growing and on average people are eating more meat. In 2019, agriculture accounted for 10% of all US greenhouse gas emissions. [1] Industrial agriculture also contributes to several other bad outcomes:
- Water use and pollution
- Soil erosion
- Rainforest loss
These problems don’t exist independently of each other. If a farmer clears some land to plant soybeans, he might end up contributing to all four when runoff from the farm pollutes a local river and rain and wind erode the tilled soil. Technology and different farming practices can help to alleviate these problems but this example helps illustrate how demanding agriculture, and especially meat production, is on our environment.
The idea of meat without the animal is not new. In 1931, Winston Churchill wrote, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” The industry has made incredible progress but needs more experimentation to continue its road to our dinner plates. Cost and taste are the two most pressing challenges for startups in the alternative protein industry — and two of the main criteria we at Prime Movers Lab use to evaluate companies in the sector. In order to put chickens and cows out of a job, any great product is going to have to taste amazing and be affordable for “everybody”.
There are plenty of ways to categorize the startups working on solving these problems. Here is one of our favorites, adapted from the Good Food Institute.
We used this framework to come up with several areas we are particularly interested in and have been speaking to many of the most promising startups out there. If your company is solving problems in this area we would love to talk with you!
Three areas of experimentation with exceptional promise:
Cultivated Agriculture — Seafood
Seafood is typically more expensive on a per pound basis than other protein products, so achieving cost parity is somewhat easier to envision (although lots of skepticism still exists).
Better Growth Mediums
“Culture Medium” is essentially the food that the cells eat as they grow. Fetal Bovine Serum is a common choice because it works broadly but it has several drawbacks. It remains expensive, which is obviously not helpful to a startup trying to reduce costs. It is produced from the blood of fetal cows — not something you would want to associate with dinner. There are several companies that are working on developing alternatives today, and we are interested in finding a better way to grow cells.
Plant-Based
Plant-based meat alternatives aren’t new but they have begun to move into the mainstream as evidenced by the Impossible Whopper debuting at Burger King. The challenges in this area of the industry revolve around more specific innovations like texture (e.g. creating whole cuts — the difference between a steak and ground beef) or mimicking seafood.
One key area I’ve left out here is cultivated chicken or beef products. From an early-stage investment perspective, many of these technologies (and importantly their valuations) have already gained so much traction that their valuations are far beyond our purview. Startups competing here need to demonstrate how they are different from or better than later-stage competitors.
A few months ago, another investor explained his north star for considering massive problems. He considers what society will look back on in 50 or 100 years and think was barbaric. Raising animals for the express purpose of slaughtering and eating them is a good candidate in my opinion and yet I still eat animal protein. There are plenty of great reasons to eat less meat. Making that choice is becoming easier and easier as companies produce better and better alternatives. Once it becomes cheaper to grow a steak instead of a cow, society will begin to look at animals as a luxury or special occasion, rather than dinner every night. Whether you want to help slow climate change, oppose animal cruelty, or simply want to learn more about an exciting technology, tune in next Wednesday to check out the experts talk seafood.
Register here and join us Wednesday, January 12, 3 pm ET.
Notes
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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