Cellular Seafood
While working on deep tech commercialisation for aquaculture, Mihir Pershad witnessed firsthand the issues facing our current seafood sector. Fast forward to now, and Mihir is the CEO of Umami Meats, a Singapore-based startup focused on cultivating seafood products. We chat to Mihir about his journey to entrepreneurship, as well as the evolution of Umami Meats as an early-stage company. We also discuss their scientific approach for deciding which species to cultivate, the benefits of focusing on B2B, biggest challenges, and most enjoyable experiences in the startup journey so far.
Mihir has a personal background in biochemistry and research, where he spent spent several years working on how to commercialise deep tech. It was during that time that he began to research technology such as orally delivered vaccines and rapid diagnostics for farms that could help aquaculture.
Mihir: “So I got to see firsthand how many of these problems were impacting how to produce fish sustainably … ocean harvests were stagnating over decades, and [I] started to get a feeling that we needed more than the technology we had for aquaculture if we really wanted to meet rapidly growing demand.”
But the story of Umami Meats as a company, like many others, hasn't been linear; the startup has evolved in their journey from initially developing serum-free media to cultivating fish.
Mihir: “I’m a big fan of putting the most important and the most difficult problem upfront … because if you can’t solve that problem, all other problems eventually lead you back to that one.”
As a result, Mihir and the rest of the team at Umami thought it was important to develop a solution of low-cost media and its role as an enabling technology, and see whether they would build their business around it or try to leverage it as an internal tool.
The process began by first using up-cycled ingredients, as well as some other low-cost strategies to achieve an outcome that wouldn’t be possible if they were working on recombinant protein production (the standard way of replacing serum).
Mihir: “We had some early success so we continued that approach, trying to experiment with different feedstocks and different processing technologies, and ended up with a plant-derived growth media that works quite well and is able to fully replace bovine serum for a number of fish cultures.”
Soon enough however, they decided that it was important to put this together with cell-lines that were well-adapted to the media they had produced.
Mihir: “In a lot of ways they’re two key parts of a single system, and you can’t really separate them and achieve optimal results.”
Mihir: “Seafood stood out as an area that was underinvested in and under prioritised, relative to the scope of the problem.”
According to Mihir, the transformation of the seafood sector is important for two main reasons:
Environmental: Rising levels of ocean-species extinction
Economic: Seafood is typically more expensive than average ground beef and poultry products, which increases the ability to bring a product to market at a price point which customers will be comfortable paying for early on
The way Umami Meats has decided which species to cultivate has been largely determined through a scientifically-driven approach; the team generated a list of IUCN species, and matched these against certain market criteria.
As a result the startup has ended up prioritising Japanese eel, red snapper, yellowfin tuna and grouper, for 3 key reasons:
Many populations are considered to be overfished, or otherwise threatened / endangered
Consumption continues to grow for these species
They can’t really be farmed
Even practices like ranching, which are used for Japanese eel and tuna don’t fundamentally solve the problem of reducing catch from the oceans.
Mihir: “In some ways it exacerbates the problem because you’re pulling many juveniles out early in the life cycle, effectively shrinking the populations without allowing them to reproduce.”
Mihir: “That makes things really high priority, because functionally the way that we grow, raise or catch these fish today is putting their species at risk, and some of these species are going to be incredibly important to the food webs they’re a part of, more so than others.”
With species decided, the next stage is to cultivate products and launch; we spoke extensively with Mihir about his perspective on a heavily B2B approach.
Mihir: “We think there’s opportunity to apply some branding to really help consumers recognise that it’s a cultivated product, but also to promote some of the sustainable aspects of the seafood.”
In particular, Mihir mentioned two main benefits of B2B.
Launching in a restaurant enables chefs who have sustainability concerns to promote and educate the consumer
B2B provides a clear avenue for scale, as you get the chance to work with companies who have distribution across Asia, to multiple different consumers and segments, allows Umami to scale much faster
Mihir: “We have had some great conversations with chefs who are cognisant of the issues that the seafood sector faces, and trying to design their menus around more sustainable or local species. That’s easier for some things than for others.”
However, even though some chefs may be on board, there’s a growing body of the general population that believe fish is already a ‘clean’ and healthy protein, which can present a challenge when promoting sustainability concerns. Mihir went on to mention that in terms of this, he believes we can expect to see the development of empirical tests and standards which enable consumers to directly compare pollutant levels between products.
Mihir: “These are things that we’re already seeing happen with red meat, so I think consumers are primed to look for these if they’re looking for healthier choices.”
And as more cultivated meat companies arise on the market, we can expect that consumer attitudes and exposure to health and sustainability concerns of the industry will become apparent. In Singapore for example, Umami meats is not the only startup focusing on cultivating seafood; we asked Mihir how he viewed potential competition in the sector.
Mihir: “My view is that seafood, food in general, is a massive market; we’re talking hundreds of millions of fish sold annually.”
Mihir: “In that regard I think our biggest competition is internal, our ability to scale the company, our ability to reach consumers and meet demand for these kind of products, and it will be some number of years before we are directly competing with Shiok meats for customers, for example.”
Mihir: “I think it’s in our best interest to collaborate, to see how we can build each other up and get to market, and grow the awareness of our segment, more so than worrying about direct competition from other cultivated companies.”
This comes at a time where articles have made headlines questioning the scaleability of cultivated meat. We asked Mihir if he had any thoughts on the topic.
Mihir: “There are definitely concerns, but … it’s very easy to make assumptions based on what’s being done today without building in any improvements or assumptions around how things might progress from the current state, and then say things can’t be feasible.”
Mihir: “But that’s the way all new technology looks when it comes to market; the initial computers that were made took up very large rooms, and now we have smartphones that are more powerful than any of those.”
Mihir: “I think the question is more about timing, and about making sure we can build a robust business at each stage we can scale, as opposed to needing to reach the largest possible scale for the economics to be at all viable.”
But building a robust business at each stage can come with many challenges.
For the team at Umami meats, working on fish cells was a new experience; there are a number of things which are dissimilar to mammalian cells, the field most scientists in the industry are used to.
Mihir: “There’s a lot of educated guesses in the dark.”
The second biggest challenge was to source high quality fish for cell samples.
Mihir: “Singapore does farm some species, but it’s a very limited set of species. Securing supply of some fish to work with was actually a relatively substantial challenge early on.”
Mihir: “Luckily we’ve found some great contacts to help us with.”
And thirdly, like with many other early-stage cultivated meat companies, scaling and understanding what assumptions are being made are large questions that weigh heavily.
But whilst there are great challenges in the journey of being an entrepreneur, there are also great joys. Mihir shared some of his with us towards the end of the episode.
Mihir: “Just the ability to wake up with the sense of purpose and identity around what I’m doing and why I think it’s important every day”
Mihir: “Even when things are not going well on a given day, knowing that what we’re doing is important and it’s working on something that’s really critical to feeding people and making sure we have a sustainable society going forward.”
Also the experience of being an entrepreneur in this space presents many new opportunities.
Mihir: “The number of different things you get to do, and the number of different opportunities you get exposed to in terms of presenting ideas to people who are at the top of their fields and trying to help educate them and bring them up to speed on new technology and opportunities for them is also really great because it’s a way of moving the conversation in a longer-term direction.”
The broader vision for Umami?
Mihir: “Our goal is to produce cultivated fish that can make consumers want to take it off the shelf, even if other fish is available for them to buy.”
Mihir: “If we can do that, the sustainability comes with it.”
To learn more you can reach out to Mihir Pershad on LinkedIn, or follow Umami Meats here.