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Finless Foods is a biotechnology company founded in March 2017 and is located in San Francisco, California. The company produces cultured in-vitro marine animal food products through combining cellular agriculture and manufacturing technologies.
Seafood products produced by Finless Foods are not wild caught or fish farmed; they are grown from living cells extracted from a rice grain-sized biopsy from fish meat. The extracted living cells put into a supportive growth environment that includes a nutrient-rich serum, and grown to resemble a particular shape such as a fish fillet. Only animal byproducts are used in making the serum. On a cellular level, their products are real seafood; the challenge is to create a product that looks, tastes, and feels like real fish.
One important step in the developmental process is creating a cell line that is "immortalized," meaning that it can grow forever and a fish will not need to be sampled again to continue production.
Company-stated benefits of cell-based fish:
- Cuts down on overfishing
- No mercury, unlike fish in the wild that have mercury due to bioaccumulation
- No microplastics, which can be found in ocean-caught seafood
- Lower carbon footprint
- Can be grown far from where wild tuna are found, thereby reducing the need for transportation and the environmental impact of fishing fleets
CEO of Finless Foods Mike Seldon explains why and how Finless Foods exists.
Finless Foods is working on creating cultured bluefin tuna meat. In September 2017, Finless Foods produced their first pound bluefin tuna meat for approximately $19,000. In December 2017, Finless foods claimed to have reduced their production cost of one pound of bluefin tuna meet in half. The company is hoping to produce cultured bluefin tuna for the same price as bluefin tuna is selling for on the market by the end of 2019.
Mike Selden, CEO of Finless Foods, explains his companies plans to make lab grown blue fin tuna
On March 28th 2017, Finless Foods received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Indie Bio, and SOSV.
