Lab-grown salmon introduced by Bay Area-based seafood company
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- It's lunchtime at the San Francisco headquarters of Wildtype. And company founders Justin Kolbeck and Arye Elfenbein, M.D., believe what's on the menu is nothing short of the future of seafood: thin slices of salmon, not caught in the open ocean, or even farmed in captivity, but instead, grown in their lab.
"You know for me, it was the sort of confluence of, OK, there's this potential technology that could address this really big problem that our society is facing. Very simply, where are we going to get enough meat and seafood for the next three billion people?" Kolbeck said.
The samples are sliced from the cutting edge of an emerging technology known as cell-cultured seafood. For the Wildtype founders, it's part of a larger mission. Kolbeck, traces it back to his former career in the foreign service and stops like war-torn Afghanistan where he remembers speaking to young fathers who snuck miles across the border into Pakistan to bring back food for their families.
"It's hard to grow even the most simple of crops. It's a dry place, obviously. So, it's those kind of stories that really stick with you and, you know. Like, as a dad, of course, I would do the same thing to, like, feed my kids. But that's kind of what it looks and feels like," Kolbeck said.
"Essentially, we have the cells that come out of the bioreactor, and we want to concentrate them," said Elfenbein as he lead us on a tour of the Wildtype lab.
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In its own classic start-up story. It was converted from a microbrewery. Now, expanded from beer tanks to bioreactors, it helps grow the living cells derived from pacific salmon and nurtured first in a seed lab.
"This is kind of where just the very small scale culture begins," Elfenbein said. "It's where we'll take kind of the starter culture, and have the cells grow in the nutrients."
He said the entire process ultimately nurtures the cells into a form of biological salmon tissue that's mixed with plant-based ingredients, which has now secured FDA clearance.
But to appreciate how complex that science is, you might want to journey a few blocks away to Elfenbein's former life as a trained cardiologist and microbiology researcher at San Francisco's Gladstone Institutes. That's where a Nobel Prize-winning team engineered breakthroughs, like turning skin cells into pluripotent stem cells -- and from there into beating heart cells and other types of human organ tissue. President Deepak Srivastava, M.D., remembers the day Elfenbein came into his office to let him know he was leaving, to turn similar techniques into lab-grown salmon.
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"He completely surprised me one day by coming into my office and sitting down and saying, 'Deepak, I'm really grateful for the training I've gotten here, but I've always been passionate about sustainable food for the planet. And I feel like from what I've learned here with making muscle from stem cells, I could make fish muscle from stem cells and solve a problem of food and the planet,'" Srivastava said.
Elfenbein says he's been grateful for the support ever since.
"He said, 'You know, I really feel that this is something that you care about, and these kinds of decisions. Like, I can already feel is something, that you have a lot of conviction around. And this is something that you should do and you'll, you know, always be able to come back here,'" Elfenbein said.
But that career-changing decision also came at a revolutionary time for the earth's food supply. With Bay Area companies, like Savor Foods, introducing butter cultivated from CO2, and Berkeley's UPSIDE Foods pioneering lab-grown meats and chicken. Still, Wildtype admits the next part of the journey could be convincing consumers to try lab-based seafood. To get started, the company has staged dinners, tastings and partnerships with chefs.
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"And what ended up happening is, it wasn't a big deal. The staff introduced it as a third option between wild caught and farm raised, and a lot of people ordered it. In fact, we sold all of the fish that we had that first night," Kolbeck said.
In the end, besides the taste, the long-term mission is sustainability, availability and price, to create seafood that's affordable for everyone, and a global solution that's far easier on our planet.
"I think that's a future that feels like a far happier future. We're able to sustain the new humans who will be residing on this planet in the coming years," Elfenbein said.
"And that's really our vision," Kolbeck said. "To have the most accessible, clean salmon on the planet.
Wildtype salmon will make its Bay Area debut on the Aug. 14 on the menu of the sushi restaurant, Robin, in San Francisco. The team also has restaurant partners in several other cities, including Seattle and Portland, and is working to add more here in the Bay Area. You can find more information here.
