 | |
| Company type | Privately held company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Food technology |
| Founded | March 2017 [1] |
| Founders | Michael Selden and Brian Wyrwas [2] [3] |
| Headquarters | , |
| Website | finlessfoods |
Finless Foods, or Finless for short, is an American biotechnology company aimed at cultured fish, particularly bluefin tuna. [2] [3]
Finless Foods was founded in June 2016 [1] and is headquartered in Emeryville, California. [4] At the time, co-founders Mike Selden (CEO) and Brian Wyrwas (CIO) were both molecular biologists (biochemists) in their mid-20s who met each other at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. [2] [5] They decided to focus on cultivating bluefin tuna because this species is under threat, and as an expensive food product it is easier to achieve price parity with this fish species. [2] Wyrwas stated in an interview: 'For me, this stems from making something out of nothing and creating an abundance. This is going to be no mercury, no microplastics, more sustainable seafood. In a sense this will be the most pure sample of protein of muscle that you could ever get.' [6] Selden explained in 2020: 'I'm not a serial entrepreneur. I never went to business school. I've always been a political activist. And for me [co-founding Finless Foods] was a part of my food activism.' [7] Indie Bio is a biology oriented accelerator program that has invested in Memphis Meats, Geltor, New Age Meats and Finless Foods. [8] [9]
In March 2017 the company commenced laboratory operations. [1] [5] CEO Mike Selden said in July 2017 to expect cultured fish products on the market by the end of 2019. [1] He found the term "lab-grown meat" to be inaccurate for the end product Finless was aiming for, comparing cultivating fish with brewing beer. [5] Product development of beer also starts from laboratories, but nobody calls the end product "lab-grown" anymore either: 'So if we're lab-grown meat, then beer is lab-grown beer. We're not going to have armies of scientists sitting over petri dishes forever.' [5]
Finless Foods presented its proof of concept, fish croquettes, in September 2017. [10] [11] Guardian journalist Amy Fleming, who attended the tasting, wrote: "I find it both delicious and disappointing. It’s only 25% fish and the subtle carp flavour is eclipsed by the potato. I just about detect a pleasant aftertaste of the sea, though not fish as such. But then, far from a polished product from a development kitchen, this is a first prototype – a benchmark of scientific progress."
By September 2017, production costs were about $19,000 per pound of fish, [10] [5] not including labour. [3] By February 2018, the company claimed to have been able to reduce production costs to $7,000 per pound. [10] The same year, Selden reported having received $3.5 million in venture capital. [12] [11]
In August 2019, five startups – Eat Just, Memphis Meats, Finless Foods, BlueNalu, and Fork & Goode [13] – announced the formation of the Alliance for Meat, Poultry & Seafood Innovation (AMPS Innovation), a coalition seeking to work with regulators to create a pathway to market for cultured meat and seafood. [14]
In October 2021, Selden stated that he thought Finless might obtain regulatory approval from the FDA to sell its products within months, perhaps before the end of 2021. [4] FDA officials were said to be very helpful in explaining regulations and giving advice on how to build and operate safe and efficient production facilities, which Finless promptly implemented during the construction of its pilot plant. [4]
In May 2022, Finless Foods launched pokè-style plant-based tuna products at National Restaurant Association's Show, with national availability. [15]
A tuna is a saltwater fish that belongs to the tribe Thunnini, a subgrouping of the Scombridae (mackerel) family. The Thunnini comprise 17 species across five genera, the sizes of which vary greatly, ranging from the bullet tuna up to the Atlantic bluefin tuna, which averages 2 m (6.6 ft) and is believed to live up to 50 years.
Sashimi is a Japanese delicacy consisting of fresh raw fish or meat sliced into thin pieces and often eaten with soy sauce.
Cultured meat, also known as cultivated meat among other names, is a form of cellular agriculture where meat is produced by culturing animal cells in vitro. Cultured meat is produced using tissue engineering techniques pioneered in regenerative medicine. Jason Matheny popularized the concept in the early 2000s after he co-authored a paper on cultured meat production and created New Harvest, the world's first non-profit organization dedicated to in-vitro meat research. Cultured meat has the potential to mitigate the environmental impact of meat production and address issues regarding animal welfare, food security and human health.
The Atlantic bluefin tuna is a species of tuna in the family Scombridae. It is variously known as the northern bluefin tuna, giant bluefin tuna, and formerly as the tunny.
The yellowfin tuna is a species of tuna found in pelagic waters of tropical and subtropical oceans worldwide.
The southern bluefin tuna is a tuna of the family Scombridae found in open southern Hemisphere waters of all the world's oceans mainly between 30°S and 50°S, to nearly 60°S. At up to 2.5 metres and weighing up to 260 kilograms (570 lb), it is among the larger bony fishes.
John West Foods is a United Kingdom-based seafood marketing company established in 1857, and currently owned by Thai Union Group of Thailand. The company produces canned salmon and tuna, as well as mackerel, sardine, herring, brisling, anchovies and shellfish.
Aquaculture in Australia is the country's fastest-growing primary industry, accounting for 34% of the total gross value of production of seafood. 10 species of fish are farmed in Australia, and production is dominated by southern bluefin tuna, Atlantic salmon and barramundi. Mud crabs have also been cultivated in Australia for many years, sometimes leading to over-exploitation. Traditionally, this aquaculture was limited to table oysters and pearls, but since the early 1970s, there has been significant research and commercial development of other forms of aquaculture, including finfish, crustaceans, and molluscs.
New Harvest is a donor-funded research institute dedicated to the field of cellular agriculture, focusing on advances in scientific research efforts surrounding cultured animal products. Its research aims to resolve growing environmental and ethical concerns associated with industrial livestock production.
Eat Just, Inc. is a private company headquartered in San Francisco, California, US. It develops and markets plant-based alternatives to conventionally produced egg products, as well as cultivated meat products. Eat Just was founded in 2011 by Josh Tetrick and Josh Balk. It raised about $120 million in early venture capital and became a unicorn in 2016 by surpassing a $1 billion valuation. It has been involved in several highly publicized disputes with traditional egg industry interests. In December 2020, its cultivated chicken meat became the first cultured meat to receive regulatory approval in Singapore. Shortly thereafter, Eat Just's cultured meat was sold to diners at the Singapore restaurant 1880, making it the "world's first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat".
Shark meat is a seafood consisting of the flesh of sharks. Several sharks are fished for human consumption, such as porbeagles, shortfin mako shark, requiem shark, and thresher shark, among others. Shark meat is popular in Asia, where it is often consumed dried, smoked, or salted. Shark meat is consumed regularly in Iceland, Japan, Australia, parts of India, parts of Canada, Sri Lanka, areas of Africa, Mexico and Yemen.
Upside Foods is a food technology company headquartered in Berkeley, California, aiming to grow sustainable cultured meat. The company was founded in 2015 by Uma Valeti (CEO), Nicholas Genovese (CSO), and Will Clem. Valeti was a cardiologist and a professor at the University of Minnesota.
SuperMeat is an Israeli startup company working to develop a "meal-ready" chicken cultured meat product created through the use of cell culture.
Cellular agriculture focuses on the production of agricultural products from cell cultures using a combination of biotechnology, tissue engineering, molecular biology, and synthetic biology to create and design new methods of producing proteins, fats, and tissues that would otherwise come from traditional agriculture. Most of the industry is focused on animal products such as meat, milk, and eggs, produced in cell culture rather than raising and slaughtering farmed livestock which is associated with substantial global problems of detrimental environmental impacts, animal welfare, food security and human health. Cellular agriculture is a field of the biobased economy. The most well known cellular agriculture concept is cultured meat.
Mosa Meat is a Dutch food technology company, headquartered in Maastricht, Netherlands, creating production methods for cultured meat. It was founded in May 2016.
Aleph Farms is a cellular agriculture company active in the food technology space. It was co-founded in 2017 by the Israeli food-tech incubator "The Kitchen Hub" of Strauss Group Ltd., and Prof. Shulamit Levenberg of the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and is headquartered in Rehovot, Israel.
BioTech Foods is a Spanish biotechnology company dedicated to the development of cultured meat from the cultivation of muscle cells previously extracted from animals. It is a subsidiary of Brazilian company JBS S.A.
Vow is an Australian company that grows cultured meat for commercial distribution, and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
Believer Meats, from 2018 to 2022 known as Future Meat Technologies, or Future Meat for short, is a biotechnology firm which produces cultured meat from chicken cells and is working on cultured lamb kebabs and beef burgers. Based in Israel, its main office is located in Jerusalem, while its primary production facility is operating in Rehovot. Future Meat Technologies mainly seeks to supply hardware and cell lines to manufacturers of cultured meat rather than directly selling food products to consumers. In November 2022, Future Meat Technologies rebranded to Believer Meats.
Wildtype is an American seafood company that produces cultivated seafood from fish cells. Its headquarters is located in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, California and includes a former microbrewery that has been converted into Wildtype's first Fishery where their cultivated seafood is produced. Wildtype's first product is cultivated Pacific salmon that will offer several benefits when compared to conventionally-harvested fish.
