11. From lab-grown stem cells to sushi rolls. Is this the future of sustainable seafood? Feat. Mihir Pershad, founder of Umami Meats.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Mihir Pershad: If we look at global seafood production today is on the order of 200 million tons. And I think the most ambitious estimates for single factories or single manufacturing sites right now for cultivated are in the order of 10,000 tons of production per factory.
And so we're not in the ballpark of building enough of these things and having an optimized process to completely negate the need for what's going to provide still a fundamental part of the food chain for, for a decade or more to come. But I think if we can prove that we can do this in the premium segment, we can do this in restaurants, and we can start to scale it so that it reaches retail, we can really make this something that does become the way the industry grows for the next 50 years.
[00:00:42] Mizter Rad: Hello, beautiful humans. Today I am delighted to be joined by a biochemist and entrepreneur, making sure we do not run out of fish. His name is Mihir Pershad and his company Umami makes fish out of stem cells. They are cultivated. Grown in a lab.
Mihir, how are you doing?
[00:01:22] Mihir Pershad: Doing pretty well. How about you?
[00:01:24] Mizter Rad: Good. I really appreciate your time. I'm very curious about what you guys are doing and how you see the future of food in the next decades to come.
I wanna jump straightaway into the topic, Mihir. The other day, I want to tell you this little story before we start actually. The other day, I went to my doctor here in Berlin and he said something that really caught my attention. He said, look, no matter how organic, local, fresh foods you eat. You still need to make or to take some supplements on top of that to support your body. So no matter if you, you know, have the freshest bananas, papayas, meats, whatever, even if it's the best qualities, the quality is not the same as before.
So a lot of the products that we eat and consume nowadays, unfortunately, don't have the same nutrients as maybe some decades ago. What do you think about that?
[00:02:24] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, I think it's one of the unintentional hazards of the sort of green revolution was that our goal was to increase productivity, and we measured productivity by how much we were producing.
But when you increase yield per acre, let's say there's a limited amount of nutrient load that the soils can hold. And so the more produce, you try to feed that into, uh, you run into barriers to basically making things less nutritious, uh, simply because you're having soils that are depleted and are not able to fully rejuvenate between growing cycles.
I can't say that I know as much about the trends in, in meat, but it's easy to see that potentially switching from diverse diets to kind of commodity grain could, could yield the same sort of challenges for, for meat as with produce.
[00:03:16] Mizter Rad: in this specific case with umami meats, you're working with fish that is grown in the lab. Maybe we can talk a bit more about that in a second, but I wanna first understand why or what kind of problems are you actually trying to solve here with growing fish in the lab?
So I wanna go through the whole process of how you do that. But first I wanna, set the stage by understanding maybe for those listeners that would say, oh, I would never ever try this out. I wanna, I want you to look like, lay the base to to tell them the problem is this, and this is why this is a good solution.
[00:03:55] Mihir Pershad: Absolutely. So I think the fundamental problem we set out to solve is that most fish that we eat by number of species, count species is not farmable and is not farmed. So it's, it's the only real area of animal protein where this is the case. So unlike cows and, and chickens and pigs, which we've domesticated 10,000 years ago. And been farming in some form ever since, most fish species are still caught out of the ocean or out of rivers.
And this leads to a production challenge because it's not necessarily the case that, we have an emissions problem with our way of getting fish. We just don't have enough fish to meet the demand. And that's going to continue to become more and more, uh, evident, uh, in the, in the coming years.
[00:04:48] Mizter Rad: And so what, what are the other alternatives that that are there in the market at the moment? So is there any plant-based fish, maybe plant-based flavored patties, or what kind of competition do you have as a business at the moment?
[00:05:02] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, so there has definitely been growth in the plant-based fish and in the precision fermentation based fish category. Alongside what we've seen in meat.
Let's say. There's many fewer companies working in seafood space right now. But I think the biggest challenges are texture and taste and seafood are pretty different from what you'd expect in meat. And so, so far I think the products have not met the taste, texture, price, expectations of consumers. And so we haven't seen a beyond meat or an impossible type of breakout in plant-based seafood space.
[00:05:37] Mizter Rad: I would like to understand if there is something beyond the taste that, in your opinion is stopping people from trying or continually, continuously consuming this kind of product. Is there a, maybe a fear of, you know, this kind of meats are being grown in the lab and therefore I'm not getting enough nutrition?
or the normal nutrients that I would get from caught fish. Is that also a concern or what kind of other concerns do you see besides the taste and texture that you just mentioned about?
[00:06:10] Mihir Pershad: So I think, I think price point is definitely a big one. So right now a lot of these alternatives are not price competitive and they're not in the categories that feel premium.
So they're often in frozen aisle and packaged goods sort of segments, which is typically not where you see the sort of, we call aspirational seafood, right? It's typically things like fish sticks or, or battered fish filets that don't inspire people to want to try them. I think that's kind of a challenge in general for these products.
And then you definitely have sort of a, an aversion to changing the food system, right? So adding new technology, new production method and uncertainty around what that actually means. I don't think we've heard about potential long-term effects and how this might change people's bodies with time.
I think that's always a question with any new technology. Is what are long-term effects, and I think just a sense that it's not natural. I think that's, that's kind of a, maybe a common sentiment that we've heard in, in more in Asia than in other places, but definitely similar globally.
[00:07:18] Mizter Rad: So there, there is some sort of fear or aversion against the potential outcomes that this technology might have in the years to come when people start consuming this. But at the same time, I feel, maybe you correct me if I'm wrong there is a lot of bad stuff already in, in the fish that we catch in the oceans and in the rivers.
Is that correct? Like I understand that for example, two years ago, a couple of years ago, I had the chance to travel above the Arctic Circle in Norway to a town called Bodo. Have you been to Norway?
[00:07:50] Mihir Pershad: I have not yet.
[00:07:52] Mizter Rad: Okay. Big fish country, as you know. They eat actually also a whale. A type of whale that is called Minke whale.
And I tried it. Quite strong taste. I tried it raw, like carpaccio. But they also eat it in other kinds of forms like. It looks almost like a beef steak, but it's a whale steak. Supposed to be tasty, but I didn't, I didn't try it. In general, the taste is very intense. And by the way, these are like free range. Not endangered whales, and it's part of the culture and the economy of Norway. It's legal to catch them and to commercialize them.
However, I understand that there's some studies about the Norwegian whale industry and the meat of the whale in general that talk about the toxicity of some of these animals. Some of these meats because it may have hormone disruptive chemicals and metals such as mercury. And I know mercury is also a problem in other kinds of fish, like salmon.
So talking about, aversion to lab grown fish. People maybe are not so aware of also this other problems with the caught fish at the moment. What's your opinion, what's your view on this?
[00:09:06] Mihir Pershad: I, I agree. I think that's one of the challenges is often that natural as a term is used as an indicator of healthiness or of goodness.
And there are many natural things that are not particularly good for us. Right. You point out heavy metals that are commonly found in seafood. I could talk about radon in people's basements and, and on and on. There's plenty of natural things that are not particularly healthy for us. And I think more and more as a result of human activity, we're seeing increases in pollutants being found in the seafood supply chain that starts with the heavy metal.
So it includes not just mercury, but things like lead and cadmium. Especially in fish that are caught near kind of large cities and industrial production areas because oftentimes you get lead and cadmium coming out of manufacturing that can accumulate in nearby fish. But microplastics I think is going to be the next major area of concern because we're finding them in sort of fish all throughout the supply chain. We're refining microplastics in rainwater, in breast milk. And I think that's something that's increasingly getting the attention on scientists, but I'm not sure that it's made it to the average person's list of things they're concerned about yet.
[00:10:22] Mizter Rad: Sounds like a pretty... On the one hand, I think, like it sounds like a pretty damned and dystopian future for the foods in general. If you say that all the fish are pretty much contaminated, or not all, but a big bunch of it. How much... do you... do you know, in general, statistics about how much fish is, may be contaminated already with chemicals or microplastics?
[00:10:50] Mihir Pershad: I don't think there's been a good global assessment to be able to say what percentage. I think similar to the heavy metals we have specific species of high concern and fisheries of high concern where we know these fish are being caught downriver of very large scale manufacturing or...
[00:11:08] Mizter Rad: What are the, sorry to interrupt.
What are the species that are more concerning and, and where are the fisheries with that are more concerned as well as well?
[00:11:16] Mihir Pershad: So I think in general, microplastics now is a global problem. I would say heavy metals. You do see a lot of runoff and challenges in many Asian countries because the regulation is not as strongly enforced perhaps as it is in the US and Europe in some of these countries.
And so you can see more of these things leach into the environment and then into the fisheries. But particularly with heavy metals, these things accumulate in fats. So in, in fattier fish. Fish that are higher up the food chain, things like tuna, eel, salmon as well. And then your bottom feeding fish can also be problematic because if the things settle toward the bottom and then the, the fisher living among very high concentration, you run into issues.
[00:11:57] Mizter Rad: And so, you know, when you go to buy fish, I guess, the more concerned or aware consumers would look at the labels of, for example, a tuna can. Yesterday for example, I went to buy a can of tuna here in Berlin. In a supermarket just around the corner. And there were at least three brands with three different certificates or seals on the labels and the seal one said: fish by hand. The seal number two said Fair trade. The seal number three said: dolphin safe. And there actually was a fourth seal that said Sustainable. Sustainable wild catch.
Now I'm a consumer that likes to looks at the packaging and the ingredients and sometimes the seals. But I'm also aware that I'm a bit skeptic about these certificates sometimes. There have been some documentaries about some how the industry works. And, and so I guess my question is how trustworthy do you think are these certificates and does that trust or mistrust in the industry affects you as a, an alternative player in some way or the other?
[00:13:09] Mihir Pershad: So I fully empathize with that. I think before I came into the fisheries and seafood business about five, six years ago I had no hope of reading those labels at all. And, and I think still now the number and type of these labels has exploded to the point that there's only a handful that I think are fairly reliable.
Like I think the MSC certification is fairly reliable and pretty transparent. So have some trust in it. But there are certainly others that are new that have no sense of what they mean and what they're actually measuring. The problem is there's money to be made whether or not the certification is thorough as long as it looks compelling to a consumer on the label which is unfortunate.
But I think the reality is. These labels aside, anybody working on new tech that is helping to produce food, has to put transparency and consumer trust at the forefront of their planning because you're always going to have inherent skepticism with anything new, especially in the food system. And so it's incredibly important to start building with the understanding that people need to be able to understand everything that you do, so that they can feel that it's comfortable and somebody can help them to do background research to check that it's actually safe.
I think regulators play a part. But I think researchers and academics play a part too, and we have to try to be as open with these different groups as possible so that they can help to inform consumers.
[00:14:37] Mizter Rad: How do you build that trust? Actually? You talk about trust. We talked about the, the mistrust that people already have on those seals of tuna cans, for example, or other products. How do you people in this alternative new technologies, food industry, um, build trust? Starting from zero, I believe, because, people already off the bat, they don't, in my opinion, what I've talked around with friends, they don't see lab meat in general as a as a viable product for their own consumption. Not everyone, of course, but I would say the majority of people I talk to around, around my circle at least.
So how do you build that trust? How do you start from zero and build that trust? You talked about transparency, but how exactly do you do that?
[00:15:26] Mihir Pershad: So, I think the key is to go seek out opinions.
Don't say cultivated is great and I wanna be the first to try it. And some of that is trying to go to trade shows or trying to solicit conversations in public places where you'll run into people who have skepticism, um, and try to really understand where that skepticism and that concern comes from first before figuring out what information might actually help to convince that consumer.
Because I don't think it will be the same thing for everyone. And right now most companies are too early to really open the doors and invite consumers and customers in to actually see how things get made. Show them the safety processes that are in place. And have that full level of transparency. It's, it's much harder to do that in an R&D site than a production site.
But I think that's a key part of the process. And then US FDA has already made this their policy, but I think it's going to be important for other regulators, is what we submit to them should be public so that anybody who has concern or skepticism can see what we've submitted to the regulators and they can check the data for themselves.
And I think that kind of transparency, trust.
[00:16:41] Mizter Rad: Let's talk a bit about the business. I like the topic of transparency. I think, of course, every new company, especially every new industry, if they wanna appeal to new consumers, they, they'll try to be as transparent as possible. Challenges will come on the way.
And if you rely on other institutions like the FDA, as soon as the FDA loses some sort of credibility because of whatever issue they have, then you might have a problem as well. But I understand that this is the way that it might, you know, it is, it's kind of the, you would say, would you say it's kind of the only way or the safest way right now?
Or would you also look at alternative? Let's say more independent organizations, maybe even edu education institutions, universities that would also certify you or give you some sort of approval or independent studies that help people trust you more?
[00:17:36] Mihir Pershad: I think both are good avenues. I do agree with you that you don't want your trust to be proxy, trust of a regulator only. Because that is risky.
But I think the challenge is actually this, the challenge you were talking about. If you are seeking out independence third party groups to approve and validate your process you can functionally go shopping for the person who's going to say what you want to say, right? I mean, that's kind of a cynical...
[00:18:03] Mizter Rad: yeah.
[00:18:03] Mihir Pershad: Side of that. So I actually, as a consumer, have. More concerned about parties because I have no way of vetting those third parties and what they're doing and their approaches. And I think academic studies and academic safety tests at at university labs or something similar are certainly part of the equation.
But I also think that food regulators look at risk for a living and they will be looking for things that a scientist would not normally look for. And so I think there is value in having both of those be completely public. I, I would say, you know, like there's a lot of food products that come to market and because they're not novel foods, they're not new in, in a regulatory sense, they don't really have a high barrier, high hurdle to proving safety.
But I think in the case of cultivating this is sort of a blessing and a challenge in that we actually do have to prepare hundred page dossiers with dozens of, of safety studies backing them up. And all of that ends up going to the regulator. And FDA has asked us, basically, as part of this process, to make as much of it public as possible.
So I think that actually does build a lot of trust because the studies you talk about are part of that package. People can see the data, they don't have to trust the certification. Right.
[00:19:17] Mizter Rad: That's an interesting point cuz when you think about this new, this novelty technologies in food, uh, as a consumer, you never think about the hurdles and the, the bureaucracy, the papers, the studies, the, trials and errors that you guys go through.
And that have to present to, for example, the FDA the other companies that have, like you say, not new products don't have to do. And so that, that alone should be something that the consumer maybe should be more informed of. Because that, in, at least in my case, would bring me, okay, these guys have done their homework and they have and gone through a lot of say obstacles.
And that's why they sell their product. And the other guys that have a more traditional product, they didn't have to go through that cuz it's just a traditional product and maybe they're not doing the homework as they should, but that's how it works. The system, right?
[00:20:12] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, actually. So, so the more new your product is, the more novel it is actually the more direct safety data you have to develop yourself, which I think actually leads to the ability to provide transparency.
Whereas if I'm making a new plant-based product using a traditional method of, or and maybe using soy that's been on the market for years and years, that actually doesn't really have the same burden of evidence required to show safety because it's assumed we've been eating soy for a long time. So it's assumed safe.
[00:20:40] Mizter Rad: Right, right. Going back to the toxicity problem of the traditional fish in the rivers and the oceans and the lakes do you guys or lab grown fish has the same problems in terms of toxicity? Do, do you have to, what kind of issues you encounter when manufacturing these products?
[00:21:01] Mihir Pershad: Right. So we, because we run a contained process inside sterilized steel tanks, basically in, in a production facility, we have a much greater degree of control over what goes into our process, and because all of our ingredients have to be certified as safe for food manufacturing, those inputs already get tested for heavy metals and get tested for things like pathogens and, and e coli type, you know, agents of concern for, for humans.
And so we have more control over that in a way that a farm doesn't, uh, cause you, unless you can completely isolate your, your production system or the ocean, can't realistically do, uh, things can get in. And in our case, the key air focus is process quality. And so looking for potential points in our manufacturing process in which we might have exposure to, to air where something could get in, and trying to engineer a manufacturing kind of line that minimizes those risk points.
and introduces tests anywhere there's a real risk. So we can make sure that anything that comes out of the line is completely safe to eat. And I think we don't have the problems with plastics because we're running steel tanks. We don't really have plastics in our production system, and we can basically filter out the heavy metals and everything using highly pure water to start our process.
So many of the known kind of common risks for seafood are mitigated. There are obviously different risks with food manufacturing compared to catching things out of the ocean. That we, I'm happy to talk about what we think those might be, but that, those are definitely still things we're developing right now and trying to develop a process safety around.
[00:22:50] Mizter Rad: I like that you touched a, a little bit the process of how this works in general. So I understand that one of the first steps is... you isolate cells from fish.
[00:23:02] Mihir Pershad: Yes.
[00:23:02] Mizter Rad: Can you go through the process in a very simple way? Like how does it work? Like you have a fish and then you take some sample of that fish and grow out of that, some other muscle tissue that taste and looks or maybe just looks or maybe just taste like fish?
How, just, just let me know how the process goes here.
[00:23:23] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, definitely. So we start by sourcing the fish and we try as much as possible to work with heritage producers to try to source from the famous fisheries. So many fish are famous for coming from certain locations, so we try to source from those locations, we isolate stem cells from those.
And in our case, our process works with an uh, stem cell called an MSC or a Mesenchymal stem cells. And this is a stem cell that allows us to produce both muscle and fat from one cell type. So we then take these stem cells and develop a data set to demonstrate that they're safe to use in production for food.
And then we put them in a liquid nitrogen freezer until we're ready to manufacture. Once we're ready to manufacture, we take that vial out of what we call the cryobank, the liquid nitrogen freezer, and we start growing the cells. And over a period of about two to two and a half weeks, we grow from one small vial of maybe 1 million cells, up to several trillion cells. And then we separate into the right ratio of muscle and fat for the product we're making.
So I can give you an example, like with eel. We would separate out something like 70, 30 or 75, 25 ratio of muscle to fat. And then we would turn those stem cells into muscle and fat. We would harvest them down and then use the proprietary forming technology to produce a FLA that has the texture of fish.
And most of the flavor in the nutrition is coming directly from the cells. So it's basically growing cells and then structuring them into the right products at the end of the, the process. And that can take about two and a half weeks on average to run in a batch.
[00:25:10] Mizter Rad: out of the, so, okay the, the fish that you sourced, you say is from the best fisheries in the world, the most, let's say trustworthy. And then you isolate and then you take a part of that fish and you isolate the stem cell that is called the MC stem cell. With that, you produce muscle and fat, then you develop a dataset, you said?
[00:25:31] Mihir Pershad: Yes.
[00:25:31] Mizter Rad: What do you mean with the set?
[00:25:34] Mihir Pershad: So for us, our core products that we're offering is actually a manufacturing system that's reliable for cultivated protein for, for, for seafood. And we wanna partner with producers around the world to locally manufacture and then to launch under a local brand for, let's say, eel Unagi in Japan, or snapper in the US.
But the important part of doing that is making sure that the system is reliable and robust and safe. So we develop data sets around how the process should run. What the safety and quality parameters are. And
[00:26:17] Mizter Rad: basically it's like a, it is like a manual, like a set of instructions,
[00:26:20] Mihir Pershad: basically an op, a process, operating process.
Right. And try to standardize that as much as possible to minimize potential variation in the production system.
[00:26:31] Mizter Rad: But, so right now you're just doing this in Singapore, am I right?
[00:26:34] Mihir Pershad: So we are in Singapore and we are now also building an operation in the Netherlands, uh, through a collaboration with, uh, Ving and University as well as a few corporate partners based in Europe.
[00:26:46] Mizter Rad: Okay, so now you have the mu, the muscle and fat, and you... is this Correct? You put it in a, a liquid nitrogen freezer?
[00:26:55] Mihir Pershad: Yeah. And so that's basically, uh, what's known as cell banking. But once you develop a cell line, The step after that is to basically create like a production bank. So if we create the cell line in Singapore and then somebody wants to manufacture in Japan and somebody else wants to manufacture in Korea, we basically create a working bank of maybe a hundred or 200 vials, which is making up a number that they could use for production runs.
And so those have all been deemed safe for manufacturing from our R&D site.
[00:27:26] Mizter Rad: So is this something that you would ship to, say Korea or Latin America and have them produce the final product there? So instead of fish, instead of shipping a whole fish, like if you were a traditional fishery, you would just ship a data like a sale bank?
[00:27:43] Mihir Pershad: Yes. And the sale bank is, is quite small, right? So these are vials that weigh maybe 10 or 15 grams. And so we would ship. A small set of them over to a manufacturing site and everything else can happen locally.
[00:27:57] Mizter Rad: And out of 10 gram how many fish products can you get?
[00:28:02] Mihir Pershad: So you can basically expand one of these vials into a working bank of a hundred or more.
And each of those vials can run a whole production batch of several tons. So conceptually the idea would be a bank could support production for several years from an initial shipment.
[00:28:21] Mizter Rad: I'm an entrepreneur as well, and this just popped into my mind.
This is more like a business question, even though we were talking more about the process. But before I forget, I wanna ask you this. As a business, you want to have recurring customers. Of course. Yeah. If you sell them, if you sell like a manufacturing brand or company in Korea, a cell bank that you know, produces maybe that weighs maybe 10 grams, but produces thousands if not hundreds of thousands of products, when is that client coming back to you and asking for another batch of product if they can use it for so many final products?
You know what I mean?
[00:29:02] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, absolutely. So, so we look at this as more of a technology business, like similar to a Goretex or an Intel. So there is a physical component, but actually the logic and the process know-how to manufacture from that cell bank is most of what we're providing that the customer mm-hmm.
So we look at this as, as a licensing style operation. Mm. Because the cells are mm-hmm. a seed. Right. It's, it's not actually the, the main thing that you work with every day. It's, it's the input.
[00:29:31] Mizter Rad: Are this kind of cells somehow patentable? Can you, can you put a patent on this like some companies did on seeds actually some years ago.
[00:29:42] Mihir Pershad: Yeah. It's something that we're, we're considering very carefully because I think the patents on seed have also had negative effects. Right. Both on...
[00:29:49] Mizter Rad: definitely
[00:29:50] Mihir Pershad: consumer perception, but I think also on just the realities of trying to farm when wind exists and seeds can get blown around. And, um, so our view is the production process itself is proprietary and it works with a certain type of cells that we're developing. To produce, using our process, there are several patents you'll need to license as part of a package. Mm-hmm. we will likely have, and we do already have some IP around how we, how we make the cells. But the specific cell lines themselves in the way that seeds are, are GM seeds are manufactured and, and patented. I don't think we're gonna pursue that strategy because I don't think it's necessary.
[00:30:30] Mizter Rad: Yeah. Okay. I mean, the way you explain it, I, my head is just going around with so many, and, and of course I'm not an expert in the industry. I'm not within the industry, so I'm not sure what's happening in terms of business opportunities, but what you're telling me makes my head spin cuz I can see so many businesses deriving from this new process or this new way of making fish.
Okay. So now you have the 75, 25 muscle to fat eel. What do you do with that?
[00:31:05] Mihir Pershad: So we have a couple of different ways of making end products. I think one of the challenges that alternative protein faces is that the end products tend not to be as versatile as the fish you catch out of the ocean.
And this is true for meat as well. So the ingredients and the process of making, let's say a filet, uh, tends to be ideal for certain cooking applications, certain product styles, but not everything. So we take a couple of different approaches because seafood has a tremendous variety of ways that it's prepared.
So for example, if we're working on a raw sushi sashimi type product our approach right now is actually looking more at 3D printing through a collaboration with Steakholder Foods which is an Israel based, uh, company. And if we're looking at something that's going to be coded, meaning battered or uh, put in a sauce or put in some kind of coded application, we would look at, um, more hybrid technologies, leveraging some plant ingredients to make sure the structure gets maintained when it's steamed or cooked in a more high moisture environment.
[00:32:15] Mizter Rad: Okay, so the must so basically your final product is muscle to fat ratio eel in this case is the final way it looks, depends on how it's gonna be consumed,
but...
[00:32:30] Mihir Pershad: yeah, that's right.
[00:32:31] Mizter Rad: I'm not think, I'm not understanding. Okay, so let me go back on something. Your current customer is who?
[00:32:38] Mihir Pershad: So the customer is actually the food manufacturer and or the, the company that brands the product. So we do...
[00:32:45] Mizter Rad: all right.
[00:32:46] Mihir Pershad: Joint product development with those partners to help them. They, they come to us and they, they tell us with their market knowledge and their customer knowledge what segment and what product format they think we should be pursuing with them, and then we work with them to actually make that format a reality.
Um, what we've, what we find is, so let's say we're making eel is maybe not the best example because it's typically cooked in a pretty narrow range of, of formats. But let's take like a whitefish filet. Yeah. Right. So let's say it's a Soul or a Seabass. And you could grill it, you could steam it, you could do a hot pot, you could put it in noodles and, and cook it in the stir fry.
And because of the wide variety of cooking applications we find that different product formation technologies yields products that are better suited to the taste and texture properties that consumers will expect from using it in a certain way. . So that's why we take multiple approaches.
[00:33:40] Mizter Rad: Okay, I see.
I see. Okay, to me it's clear that you're not growing a whole fish. You're customizing a product, basically.
[00:33:48] Mihir Pershad: Yeah.
[00:33:48] Mizter Rad: And when, when products are customized, um, the logistics change as well. So how would you define, or maybe you wanna talk to me a bit about the logistics of the traditional fish industry, ver versus the logistics of the, how would you call it?
Lab fish sector?
[00:34:11] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, sure. So, uh, depending, I'll talk about just wild cod cause farm can be also very complicated and, and very different. But let's assume fish that are caught in the deep sea and let's say tuna, just as a good example. So you typically have fisheries companies that run a fleet of boats and they'll send the boats out with all sorts of advanced technology, different kinds of nets, sonar sometimes to track down fish, catch them, and increasingly freeze them at sea.
So they deep, they deep freeze the fish on a special vessel that travels with the fleet to maintain product quality. Um, those fish will then come back after a fishing trip that can take a couple of weeks. And often these vessels are traveling five to 10,000 kilometers to catch fish. Um, especially these deep sea fish that come back to port and now you have a whole fish, right?
And so the next step is what's called primary processing, which is basically removing all the organs, um, gutting the fish. And then you get to secondary processing, which is rough portioning. So, uh, are you familiar with like a, a saku? If I as a concept of fish?
[00:35:24] Mizter Rad: Saku? No.
[00:35:25] Mihir Pershad: So it's basically...
[00:35:25] Mizter Rad: it's a type of fish?
[00:35:26] Mihir Pershad: No it's, it's basically a cut. So it's like a large block of fish that would be used for sashimi. So it's kind of a, but it's a standard kind of size. So a sushi chef would purchase salmon as a saku, typically as opposed to the whole fish. And so you have certain cuts of fish that get prepared by the secondary processing for different applications.
So actually the industry's already set up to prepare portions of fish or different intermediate products to most channels. O only typically in the very high end or very local segments do you see whole fish fresh, coming directly into retail or restaurants. And so our view is that we can avoid the fishing boats. We can avoid the primary processing because we aren't growing a whole fish, but we can produce cultivated products that fit exactly what comes out of a secondary processing plant. So we produced the portioned, but not necessarily finished goods that could go into B2B channels. So people could then take those and make a wide range of things from them.
But we could also work directly with the packaged food company to make battered fish that goes directly into the freezer aisle. So the, the flexibility here, I think is a, is really an advantage for cultivated, because the idea is you can plug it in as the front end. For existing infrastructure, either to produce portions or to produce finished products.
[00:36:55] Mizter Rad: Yeah, I understand. But the, then the current infrastructure. The boats with the sonars and the big boats going 5, 10, 15, 20 kilometers in the deep sea to catch this fish they will be obsolete in a way cuz you don't need all of this infrastructure. Not that heavy. Not that big. To catch some fish to then produce them or multiply them in the lab.
Is that correct?
[00:37:20] Mihir Pershad: That's right.
[00:37:20] Mizter Rad: So do you get, do you get any kind of pushback from these fisheries or the traditional fish companies on what you're doing?
[00:37:29] Mihir Pershad: So I think, I think more the opposite than you might expect because actually running these fleets is very expensive. You might imagine, I mean, these vessels can be 40 to 50 million plus for a single boat.
And if you ever owned a boat or know somebody who has maintaining kind of ocean-going vessels is also tremendously expensive. And so annual maintenance, fuel needed to run them, crews needed to run them. And there's a lot of issues with the way the traditional industry operates that these companies are not married to.
They just wanna deliver good products because many of them have generational history of providing fresh, nutritious seafood to millions of people. And they care deeply about what they do, but not necessarily how they do it. I mean, if you can imagine a, a company's a hundred years old, the way they catch fish today looks very, very different from the way that that same company may have been catching fish 30 years ago.
And so I don't think there's a fundamental aversion to new ways of producing fish. And this is getting compounded because fuel prices have been increasing generally year over year. Making it more and more inefficient to run these vessels. And as the wild fisheries deplete, it gets harder to bring back a full vessel without longer trips, which means more cost.
So I think many of these companies actually can see the economics reaching a break point fairly soon, and they're trying to look ahead to see how they can continue to do what they do in the, in the face of that new re emerging reality.
[00:39:01] Mizter Rad: Do you think, and I wanna, I wanna touch the topic of price points and prices in a second, but do you think that in the future we will not need this traditional fisheries or the boats that go out there in the ocean to fish anymore because we'll have enough, let's say, material to build our own food in the labs?
[00:39:24] Mihir Pershad: I think it's a real possibility. But the reality is that won't happen in the next five to 10 years. If we look at global seafood production today is on the order of 200 million tons. And I think the most ambitious estimates for single factories or single manufacturing sites right now for cultivated are in the order of 10,000 tons of production per factory.
And so we're not in the ballpark of building enough of these things and having an optimized process to completely negate the need for what's going to provide still a fundamental part of the food chain for, for a decade or more to come. But I think if we can prove that we can do this in the premium segment, we can do this in restaurants, and we can start to scale it so that it reaches retail, we can really make this something that does become the way the industry grows for the next 50 years.
[00:40:17] Mizter Rad: Absolutely. From what you're saying, I think it totally makes sense to you know, some people argue or would argue that they would never eat fish grown in the lab because it's just weird for some people. But when you look at the details of the industries of both sides of the traditional industry and these new technologies, you, you realize how much more efficient this could all be and how much potentially healthier could also be, and healthier is a big question mark still I believe, I don't know if you agree with this. But but at least efficient in a way that, we stop shipping tons of fish from here to there and wasting energy just to feed some people with a very inefficient system.
[00:41:05] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, I mean, I think I, I, I would say it's fair to say that nutrition is a question until it's proven right?
So that, that's pretty reasonable take on, on that front. I would say the potential to be more nutritious is there, and I think when you talk about new industries, comparing the state of a century's old mature technology to emerging technology is often not the right kind of way to con compare. Right? I think the way to think about it is what could this look like in 10 years and what does it, what does it have the ability to do that we can't do today?
Like we can put fish production in the middle of Europe where it doesn't really exist and where people don't get the access to fresh fish like they do. Uh, if they live on a, in a, in a country with a long coastline. Um, we can, we can bring fish to, uh, consumers who normally get very, very seasonal access to prized fish. And we can make that something that's available more often. So I think there's a lot of potential to actually improve the food system beyond what we think we are doing today. Um, but potential needs to be realized. Right?
[00:42:11] Mizter Rad: Yeah. When, when you talk about accessibility, how accessible are these products nowadays in terms of pricing?
How do you guys price them or how, what, what is the cost of a final product to the consumer?
[00:42:23] Mihir Pershad: So, cultivated products are not on the market anywhere for seafood yet. Uh, although I, I, I suspect we'll see the first one to two of them get approved this year, uh, from a few companies in the US. But I think our view on this is we focus on premium species that are endangered and being driven, extinct by overfishing and, and human consumption.
So these are naturally more expensive fish like eel, tuna, red snapper, et cetera, cod, halibut, all fitness category. And our goal is to produce at the same price as what consumers are used to paying from our first commercial plant.
[00:42:58] Mizter Rad: Okay. Yeah.
So here, for example, in, uh, in Berlin, you get salmon for about $17, uh, kilo. Mm-hmm. Tuna has the same price. So your goal would be to match that price more or less.
[00:43:12] Mihir Pershad: Yeah. And I think, but we're, we're not necessarily, I, I don't know what tuna, uh, I guess I'll find out when I, when I come to Berlin, uh, and, and I, I take a look at the fish, uh, that's available.
But I think if you look at cuts of tuna that go into higher end restaurants, tuna has grading, kind of like Wagyu does, and, and like Angus Steak does. And so if you, if you aim for certain grades, you'll often see fish in the 50 to $60 per kilo price point.
[00:43:36] Mizter Rad: Right.
[00:43:37] Mihir Pershad: And, and that's really where I think we're gonna start and be able to hit price parody and then we'll work our way down.
I think, I think $20 a kilo is definitely feasible. Uh, particularly as we start to reach kind of economies of scale with larger facilities and more facilities. But it won't happen day one, product number one.
[00:43:53] Mizter Rad: Um, when, when you talk about, uh, nutrients, we talked, we touched this topic before and I would like to know, traditional tuna, for example, traditional fish, salmon, uh, it has vitamin b12, phosphorus, selenium, omega-3 fatty acids, are all these nutrients and others also available in lab grown fish?
[00:44:18] Mihir Pershad: So, yes. Uh, whether the exact ratios are the same is something that. We don't, it will look different for every company's process, uh, to be fully transparent. But it's tunable. Yeah. Because based on what you feed the cells, they will take some of these nutrients up. Using the example of selenium, um, selenium is one of those sort of trace metals, um, that is useful in small quantities and you get really great doses of it from fish traditionally. But it's not good in high amounts. So, mm-hmm, we think it's important not just to fortify above and beyond, but try to at least match the profile of what consumers are used to getting nutritionally from these products. Mm-hmm. But then over time, you can imagine creating a snapper or a grouper that's high in omega-3 where grouper and snapper typically aren't. Um, so we could start to create health foods for species that people like the flavor of.
Maybe they don't like strong flavors, uh, from, from other fish, but they want to eat snapper and they want it to be high omega-3.
[00:45:27] Mizter Rad: So we are gonna end up personalizing every single product that we eat, basically based on, uh, maybe even the kind of DNA profile that we have. Do you think that's a possibility?
[00:45:42] Mihir Pershad: I think that sort of thing ends up being difficult just based on, as you pointed out, right? Customization at that level of individuality becomes challenging. It might happen, I think the ability to just create a broader range of products, so that consumers who have diabetes can get local glycemic, index starches and, and, and grains.
And consumers who need more omega-3 in their diet can seek out a high, an omega-3 fortified, cultivated fish. Right? I think, I think having more categories of product available and more specialization within categories is fe definitely feasible. Getting to, I wanna print my own fish filet with the exact nutrition that I require for today, I think is a ways off.
Um, and I don't know that, that it may be fully desirable to have that level of specificity.
[00:46:35] Mizter Rad: maybe at some point, uh, we'll see that. I was interviewing, um, Sajung Yung. He's a, he is a professor, in a very prestigious university in the US but also an entrepreneur. And he's building a company that, um, basically allows you to have a digital twin of your DNA on your phone.
And by having that, you're able to crosscheck pretty much everything that you put into your body before you're putting it, um, to see if it will have some sort of reaction or not. So, you know, it's, it's interesting because, you know, it's not only for medicines that you take into your body, but it could potentially be for the kinds of foods that you put into your body.
So maybe, maybe in some 50 years or 60, 70 years, we'll see in the market some sort of service where you can order your fish from the lab in with very specific quantities of whatever vitamin B 12. If you're, you have a deficiency on that vitamin. I don't know, just thinking out loud.
[00:47:41] Mihir Pershad: It's definitely possible.
I, I think, I think the question's just gonna be one of cost and whether people are willing to pay. I mean, that degree of kind of personalization will come at a premium. Right, right. I, I don't know exactly how much of a premium, so.
[00:47:51] Mizter Rad: Right.
[00:47:51] Mihir Pershad: That will, that will be the question. I think. Not, not that, uh, it can't be done, but just will, will people want to, to do that.
[00:47:58] Mizter Rad: So how do you see the future of foods in general? Talking about, you know, we went through the traditional foods industry, specifically the fishing industry touch and went into the lab, created meat and specifically fish. But in general, do you think in the next 10, 20, 50 years we'll see a, a growth in one of those two industries?
I'm talking about traditional versus lab, or do you think they both will live together for a while or how, what's your perception on what's gonna happen next given that we have still growing population, stagnating the number, but still the population is growing. You have economies like China, a lot of Asian countries getting out of a sort of poverty trap.
And the middle class is growing. People want to eat more and healthier. And specifically fish, I believe, is a product that is seeked for, uh, by people that have a better income, naturally. And so how do you see this happening and evolving the next 10, 20, 50 years?
[00:49:10] Mihir Pershad: I think that's right. I think we will see growth in both.
And not just one because we'll, we'll need it, uh, I don't think cultivated is at the point where we can say, let's just scale this and bet on just cultivated as our only, uh, our only scale up source for new fish production for the next 30 years. Uh, and so I think we'll see growth in aquaculture. We're seeing increasing growth in what's known as RAs systems or recirculating aquaculture.
So they're on land in tanks, so they could be done kind of anywhere, uh, that you have good water supply. And I think cultivated has a role to play, I think particularly for us in the species where they can't be really fished out of the ocean as we're used to. And so for these species, we have to have an alternative because we can't farm them, we can't fish them, so we have to get them from somewhere new.
Um, that's kind of how I, I view the industry growing. And then we'll see with time as cultivated becomes more abundant and more affordable if it can replace more and more new production requirements.
[00:50:14] Mizter Rad: Last question. Why Singapore? Why are you based in Singapore? I believe you were based in the US before.
Why did you end up in Singapore?
[00:50:22] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, so I, I moved to Singapore actually to start this company because I think it's important to be close to the customer and to the market that we're trying to build from because the kinds of people you recruit and the people who end up working at the business are, have empathy in a way that you don't.
And as somebody who grew up in America, I think I can, I can reasonably say most Americans don't really have a good sense of how seafood gets produced. Um, and, and also have a very narrow seafood pallet because we just don't eat more than maybe a dozen species of fish. Whereas you go to Japan and people eat 300, uh, different, you know, fish outta the ocean.
So I think it's. Wanting to be close to the customer. And then Singapore was also kind of strongly signaling that it wanted to be a leader in the category of kind of new food. And that combination of things seemed really rational to me as a good location to, to build from.
[00:51:14] Mizter Rad: Are there any governments or any countries that see these initiatives or lab-grown fish as something that they don't wanna pursue?
Are they against It? Is, do you get any kind of pushback? Is Singapore specifically friendly towards what you're doing and other countries are not? Or what's your opinion on this?
[00:51:33] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, I mean, I don't wanna speak on behalf of governments right. But I can say from public statements, I know like the French government has had some public statements from, parliamentary officials that they don't want to see this because they think it's not... it's unnatural.
Right. Okay. Fair enough. I think. I'm sure there are other governments that are more cautious, uh mm-hmm. , and I would say like the US government has been a pretty strong supporter, particularly of, of late, uh, because this fits into sort of new reinvestment in, in Biomanufacturing for the new century, uh, the US. So it fits into kind of strategic priorities for the administration right now.
And that seems to be reflected in a fairly quickly moving regulatory process. But some countries have traditional product production they want to protect, right? And they wanna make sure that right, millions of jobs aren't put at risk, um, from Silicon Valley. And so I think that's, that's not unreasonable, right?
Because it's hard to tell people who've been generationally in food production that we're gonna replace you and then what...
[00:52:38] Mizter Rad: um, right. It needs some, needs, some time to change their mentality. Also, the processes in general.
[00:52:43] Mihir Pershad: I think, I think the more that we can show, we can build trust, we can show that this is safe in the pioneer countries, we'll see more and more adoption in a similar way that you saw adoption for GM starting to kind of really set in globally.
And I think for even, even greenhouses and vertical farming, I mean, the technologies are not traditional in a sense of we're growing in soil. Now people want to grow in water. And I, I've heard kind of people who are traditional agricultural say, yeah, but you're losing something when you're not, when you're not growing soil.
Um, I can't speak to that. I don't know. But I think, uh, yeah.
[00:53:19] Mizter Rad: It has been a wonderful conversation. I really am really appreciative and very thankful that we managed to do this. I hope I can see you here in Berlin when you're here.
[00:53:30] Mihir Pershad: Yeah, let me know, uh, what your schedule looks like and see if we can, if we can meet up.
[00:53:33] Mizter Rad: Cool. Mihir, uh, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time and I wish you all the best with Umami and all your ventures. Uh, really thumbs up for what you're doing and uh, yeah, talk to you next time.
[00:53:47] Mihir Pershad: Yeah. Thank you.
[00:53:49] Mizter Rad: Bye-bye. Chao.
[00:53:51] Mihir Pershad: Bye.