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As I fumbled with my chopsticks, I could feel the eyes of the four executives circled around me watching closely. Seated at the head of the table in a room tucked between a commercial kitchen and a laboratory, I had just been treated to a tour of the Finless Foods facility in San Francisco – and this was the finale.
Positioned on a plate before me were four beautifully presented pieces of high-grade nigiri with all the expected extras. Two were made from wild-caught bluefin tuna; two were unreleased prototypes grown from cell cultures in their lab. I was among only a few people outside the company given the chance to try the results of years of research and experimentation – and millions of dollars of investment – into what Finless hopes will become the future for sustainable seafood.
Now in the final stages before submitting its prototype to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Finless is in position to achieve regulatory approval in 2024. Created from a 51-49% mix of cells grown in its lab and a proprietary blend of plant-based materials that help achieve a similar look, feel, smell, taste and nutrient profile between its fish and those caught from the sea, the company is also on track to be the first to offer cell-cultured bluefin to US consumers.
Despite years of conservationist messaging, demand continues to grow for the melt-in-your mouth delicacy – called “essential to sushi” by chef Mark Okuda in an LA Times feature on the pitfalls of bluefin consumption. By 2016, the Pacific bluefin tuna population was roughly 2.6% of its original size. In recent years, bluefin stock around the globe have bounced back from the brink but the species remains in peril from overfishing.
“We are reaching carrying capacity,” Shannon Cosentino-Roush, the chief strategy officer at Finless, told me of the plight faced by this fish and the ecosystems around it, adding: “There’s no end in sight in demand decreasing.”
“Getting the cells to do what you want and the nutrient mixes super inexpensive — it is a challenge,” said chief innovation officer and co-founder Brian Wyrwas, over the hum machinery inside the lab. Feeding the cells a nutrient mix, the team has been able to not only get them to grow and thrive as they might have inside a fish but also change into muscle and fat. There’s hope at the company that, in the near future, Finless will be able to offer a product fully comprised of cultured cells. For now, the focus is on getting a prototype through the roughly year-long regulatory process and on to plates across the US. Then, the rest of the world.
Last year, Upside Foods, another cultivated meat company, got the first FDA approval for its chicken, an achievement celebrated across the burgeoning industry. Still, key challenges remain. Even with regulators on board, a suspicious public will have to be convinced. Questions remain around the scalability of foods grown in labs and whether they can be both a sustainable and affordable alternative to eating meat the old-fashioned way. There is already some preliminary data that suggests the cultivated meat industry’s promise of a less-environmentally harmful product may fall short. One recent analysis found that the way cultivated beef products are produced could exact an even higher toll on the environment than retail beef if brought to scale.
But for Finless, the point has always been to create a way for consumers to enjoy fish without the fish, and they say they are committed to doing so sustainably. “I have seen a lot of tech being correctly exposed for bad work being done,” Selden told me. “I hope people don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We are doing a real thing, there are real people here who genuinely care, and who are actually doing something that will help if the world lets us.”
The final test, of course, comes down to taste.
I had finally wrangled my cell-cultivated nigiri between two chopsticks, skipped the soy sauce dunk, and went all in. The texture wasn’t an exact match but the flavour was impressive to my admittedly unrefined palate. Most of all, I was distracted by the excitement of being offered a taste of the future and the hope of one-day enjoying foods without a side of guilt.
There are still questions that need answers, but, as Finless CTO Brandon Chen put it: “This is happening sooner than [anyone] anticipated. The future is now.”
