Umami CEO Mihir Pershad
Last week, Singapore-based cultivated seafood startup Umami Bioworks announced a merger with cell-based crustacean meat company Shiok Meats in a rather unexpected move. The deal raised many eyebrows as the alt-protein market is far from mature, and consolidation is many years away.
However, Umami CEO Mihir Pershad sees the merger as good and timely, allowing the two firms to establish a one-stop-shop for seafood incumbents wanting to adopt cultivated production.
Umami CEO Mihir Pershad spoke with e27 and shared the rationale behind the deal and how it will impact the alt-sea food industry in Southeast Asia.
Edited excerpts:
Can you tell us more about the motivation behind the merger between Umami Bioworks and Shiok Meats and how it positions the combined entity in the cultivated seafood industry?
As Umami began submitting its first regulatory dossiers and signing initial customers for production facilities in Q4 2023, we felt it was a good time to take a more strategic look at how the industry may evolve in the next few years and how we could position the company to be the partner of choice for incumbents looking to adopt a more sustainable production technology.
The merger with Shiok Meats stood out as an opportunity to bring together the IP, resources, and commercial progress of two pioneers in the sector to establish a leading platform for cultivated seafood.
This merger allows two companies with complementary strategic priorities in cultivated seafood to combine their resources, commercial relationships, and species pipelines to establish a leading platform that can be the one-stop-shop for seafood incumbents wanting to adopt cultivated production.
With Umami Bioworks leading the merged entity, what are the key strategies or initiatives you plan to implement to leverage the strengths of both companies and drive growth?
Umami has focused on International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)-listed fish species that are unsuited to commercial farming and are facing growing demand, including eel, tuna, snapper, grouper, and halibut, whereas Shiok Meats has prioritised work on crustaceans, including shrimp, crab, and lobster.
Together, these species represent a robust pipeline of several of the most at-risk and commercially desired seafood products.
Also Read: Alt-food revolution: A look at SEA’s growing demand for sustainable food
Further, Umami can now extend its platform technologies for screening, continuous production, and machine learning-based automation to the Shiok crustacean portfolio to accelerate the development of cell lines, production processes, and commercially ready products.
How do you envision the continuation of Shiok Meats’s work on crustaceans under Umami, and what potential impact do you foresee in addressing market demand and sustainability challenges?
We have seen a strong pull from the market, including our existing strategic partners, for cultivated crustacean options. We are committed to continuing the development of crustacean cell lines that enable scalable production.
Further, Umami’s priority has always been ETP (endangered, threatened, and protected) species that are unsuited to large-scale commercial farming and are facing growing demand. Crustaceans like lobster and crab are aligned with our strategic mandate.
With growing instability in crustacean supply and an increasing number of crustaceans being added to the IUCN Red List, we believe that creating a sustainable alternative to the current wild catch of crustaceans will be critical to preserving these species in the wild while meeting rapidly growing demand.
As per a news report, you plan to bring cultivated unagi and white fish to the market via hybrid product applications. Could you elaborate on the significance of these choices and the expected market reception?
We are initially planning to bring cultivated unagi (eel) and white fish (grouper) to the market, as these are the most advanced species in our pipeline and those for which we already have commitments from existing strategic partners. We selected unagi initially because it is an iconic and culturally important species in many Asian countries, and we believe that preserving this food heritage will be a strong element that can motivate consumer adoption.
Grouper, while also culturally important in many Asian countries, we selected for its versatility. Whitefish is the second largest category in seafood but includes a wide variety of culinary preparations and product formats, from fillets to smaller cuts. Grouper’s versatility will allow us to develop a range of products with multiple global food companies, establishing a more rapid path to scalability and offering a diverse range to consumers.
The cultivated seafood market is still in its early stages. How do you see this merger impacting the broader industry landscape in the APAC region?
Cultivated seafood as a sector is now on the cusp of commercialisation and initial scale-up. As the cultivated industry is starting to mature, we believe that M&As like this one are good for the industry, as they allow for the consolidation of IP and resources to accelerate commercialisation and scale-up.
Our goal with this merger was to establish a leading cultivated seafood platform globally and to become the partner of choice for seafood incumbents looking to adopt cultivated products. Umami will now have one of the deepest pipelines in the cultivated sector along with a licensing commercial model that will allow us rapid industry adoption that will be needed to increase seafood supply to meet expected demand growth over the coming two decades.
As the cultivated seafood sector progresses towards commercialisation, what are the main challenges or obstacles that Umami Bioworks anticipates, and how do you plan to address them?
Regulation and market access: Currently, the US is the only major market where cultivated products can be sold. Singapore and Israel are much smaller markets. Most food incumbents – and investors – want to see more markets available before they invest in establishing large-scale production and investing in category creation for cultivated.
Further, regulations to allow market testing of products with consumers are also unclear or unwritten in many markets, making it challenging to test products for acceptance and market fit.
Umami is working closely with a number of government and industry bodies to accelerate the development of frameworks for market testing and commercialisation.
Consumer acceptance and education: Once cultivated seafood products are available for sale, we believe it will be essential to establish a clear identity for the category to help consumers understand what cultivated seafood can offer and why they should care. This is a critical and often overlooked aspect of building a new category and will require localised messaging based on market research into the desires and concerns of consumers in various regions.
Scale-up and industrialisation: Producing a few kilograms of cultivated fish is one thing. Producing it at scale, reliably, with rigorous quality and production standards is another. We call this industrialisation, and at Umami, we believe it is one of the most critical aspects to the success of cultivated seafood. This is partially an engineering challenge to ensure production systems are reliable and rigorously evaluated in a factory environment and partially a biology challenge, ensuring sufficient process controls to manage a bioproduction process in different seasons and climates and regional variations in supply chains.
Umami engages closely with strategic suppliers to bring production experts into the process design and validation phase in early scale-up. Then we specify those to ensure reproducibility between production sites.
With regard to regulatory approvals, what are the key considerations and milestones for Umami Bioworks as it prepares to launch its products in various markets, including Singapore, the US, and beyond?
In our view, the first major milestone is establishing a clear and comprehensive theory of safety that allows for transparent communication of risks, benefits, and mitigation or validation approaches, which is critical.
Also Read: Umami Meats secures US$2.4M seed funding to scale its cultivated seafood business in Singapore
With only three exceptions, most regulators worldwide do not have frameworks that have been used to approve products yet – and none have yet approved seafood – so establishing a roadmap with regulators is critical. Beyond that, conducting experiments and generating the data from the dossier is an ongoing set of milestones as our process continues to mature. We also work with regulators to clearly delineate what will be included in our initial dossier and to separate new technologies and approaches that may only be incorporated in the future.
How does Umami Bioworks plan to navigate the competitive landscape in the cultivated seafood industry, especially considering the emergence of other players and evolving consumer preferences?
The cultivated seafood sector is still nascent, with no products yet available in the market or approved by regulators. Given the immature state of the industry, we believe that the startups in this space have a shared challenge to successfully bring the first products to market and educate consumers about the category. The emergence of additional startups is not much of a concern today, as the seafood market is nearly US$200 billion globally, and we are all collectively capable of serving a small fraction of that in the next few years.
The broader challenge of establishing a category identity for cultivated seafood, determining the key factors to achieve product-market fit with consumers, and navigating the myriad regulatory regimes globally is far more critical.
Looking ahead, what are the key markets that Umami Bioworks aims to target, and what strategies will be employed to establish a strong presence and capture market share?
Due to clear regulatory frameworks and established regulatory review processes, Umami will initially focus on Singapore and the US. However, we see multiple key markets in Asia, including Japan, South Korea, and China, which have a tremendous appetite for priority species and growing seafood demand.
We are currently actively engaged with multiple regulators worldwide and are planning several regulatory dossier submissions this year.
Also Read: Shiok Meats CEO Sandhya Sriram to step down after merger with Umami Bioworks
Once we have completed the integration, we will also establish a clear roadmap for crustacean approvals that are in line with our customers’ market priorities.
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This article was first published on March 18, 2024
The post Consumer acceptance, industrialisation are critical to the success of cultivated seafood: Umami CEO appeared first on e27.