Umami Bioworks partners with Indian entities to drive cultivated fish and seafood commercialization

15 Jul 2024 --- Singapore-based cultivated seafood innovator Umami Bioworks plans to scale and commercialize its products by joining forces with two Indian organizations — science incubator IKP Knowledge Park, Bangalore and Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology in Chennai. The move will help Umami speed up its R&D efforts amid India’s growing smart protein ecosystem.

In an exclusive interview with Food Ingredients First, Umami’s founder and CEO, Mihir Pershad, discusses cultivated seafood challenges, reducing formulation costs and how the alt-seafood innovator plans to accelerate the “commercial viability” of its products.

“With the new establishment of a National Facility for Coastal and Marine Research at Sathyabama focused on blue economy and sustainable development solutions, we felt that the university was a great fit as a collaborator.” 

Species cell lines
The collaboration will help Umami expand its pipeline of marine species cell lines in partnership with the institute’s marine facility through collaborative research to “establish cell lines from new fish, crustaceans and other species.” This will include seeking a deeper understanding of the fundamental biology of these species to enable “first-ever cell lines” to be established for some species, he adds.

Meanwhile, the alliance with IKP will allow Umami to leverage the facilities and network to establish a team in India to “support development, testing and scale-up of our plug-and-play production solution.” 

“As we are just getting started in India, the network, facilities and ecosystem they are building will be an excellent hub for us to establish ourselves and build our team,” explains Pershad.

We anticipate securing joint R&D grants with our collaborators to support some of the fundamental research, says Pershad.IKP’s recently launched Centre for Smart Protein and Sustainable Material Innovation will promote core R&D, innovation, collaboration and knowledge exchange for alternative protein advancements. The center can house nearly 20 fermentation, plant-based and cultivated meat/seafood start-ups. 

Seafood culture
Both Singapore and South India have a strong culture of seafood cuisine and high rates of seafood consumption, observes Pershad.

“In Singapore, surveys have shown a very high interest and willingness to try cultivated seafood. The Indian market, on the other hand, is quite unique, as it has a large proportion of vegetarians and a rich variety of plant-based traditional foods already. Given the existing market landscape, there may not be such a strong desire for new cultivated alternatives.”

He notes that there are currently no products approved anywhere in the world regarding cultivated seafood regulation.

“Umami has submitted a dossier in Singapore and initiated discussions in multiple countries. Singapore has been quite forward-looking on regulation for cultivated foods, perhaps in part due to a lack of land resources to produce via traditional methods.”

Meanwhile, India has announced that the regulator is starting to “assess cultivated products, but the timeline is not clear yet.”

Optimizing through machine learning
Isolating the correct cell type and confirming cell identity in seafood can be challenging due to the limited set of tools available, flags Pershad.

“Umami has developed proprietary genetic biomarkers to allow us to rapidly screen and select the right cells.”

Getting cells into long-term suspension culture is another challenge, which Umami tackles through its “high-throughput screening and selection methods” to rapidly get to optimized clones without genetic modification, allowing for scalable cell culture in existing bioreactors.

“Establishing effective culture media that is serum-free and low-cost has also historically been a challenge. Umami has developed ALKEMYST, a machine learning toolkit that guides our team in performing highly efficient screening of media formulations.” 

For seafood, isolating the right cell type and confirming cell identity present challenges to formulators.The tool allows the transfer of learnings from one species to the other, improving the efficiency at which new products can be developed.

Using this approach, the start-up has developed proprietary algae-derived supplements that enable low-cost and serum-free culture.

Sustainable seafood
Consumers are increasingly conscious about the ingredients, health implications and sustainability of the food they are buying, he underlines. 

“When it comes to seafood, more consumers are aware of concerns around antibiotic use, mercury contamination and microplastics. We anticipate that this growing awareness will drive interest in cultivated seafood, as production in a controlled environment allows for seafood that is free from mercury, antibiotics and microplastics.”

Climate change, overfishing and ocean acidification are also driving increasing volatility in supply and thus prices and availability for many seafood species, flags Pershad.

For instance, the yellowfin tuna in the Indian Ocean is overfished and is one of the reasons why the EU Council revised its fishery control regulations last year. The new rules introduce stricter tolerance margins in catch estimates, with general margin at 10% per species.

“For consumers and those in the supply chain, cultivated seafood offers local production with stable supply that is not impacted by seasonality or overfishing.”

Expansion and advancements
Umami Bioworks has been making strides in seafood substitutes for a while. It is among the few global cellular agriculture companies that have received investment from traditional protein companies like Japan’s Maruha Nichiro and recently acquired fellow cultivated seafood company Shiok Meats to expedite the journey toward scalable production of seafood alternatives like eel and grouper.

The company now plans to explore different avenues in the alt-seafood space. 

“We are working on both premium seafood applications as well as pet treats and food apps with commercial partners. We expect to demo and hold tastings of these products this year and to launch the first products commercially early next year.”

Umami also plans to expand its range of product applications across species and seafood product segments as its partners move to commercialize and regulatory approvals are granted for its production solution in multiple markets.

By Insha Naureen