Ever After Foods (EAF), a company producing cell-cultured, or -cultivated, meat protein, has purchased cultivated seafood producer Fishway following a successful collaboration.
Ever After Foods develops cultivated chicken and beef products and is working to create a scalable production system for the products at an industrial scale. Fishway, another food-tech company, has been undergoing similar development but for fish products.
Alongside the acquisition, EAF said it secured an additional USD 2 million (EUR 1.7 million) strategic investment to help it support the continued commercialization of its platform.
“The future of protein will be determined not by who develops the next breakthrough but by who can bring breakthrough technologies together into scalable industrial production,” EAF CEO Eyal Rosenthal said in a release. “Fishway is an important addition to our broader strategy of building the industrial infrastructure required for resilient, scalable, and secure protein production. We are committed to selectively integrating complementary biology, media, and manufacturing technologies while remaining an open manufacturing platform serving companies across the cultivated protein ecosystem.”
As part of the acquisition, the Fishway team will become a part of the EAF organization, with Belgium – where Fishway’s headquarters is located – remaining “an important center of excellence for the company’s aquatic biology and media development.”
The two companies said they engaged in a technological collaboration between them, which EAF said proved the two platforms the companies use to develop their proteins are compatible. The acquisition means EAF now has access to Fishway’s aquatic cell lines, expertise in “animal-component-free” media, and its scientific team.
EAF said the collaboration showed it can use the knowledge accumulated by Fishway in its own processes and that combining Fishway’s aquatic biology and animal-component-free media with EAF’s manufacturing “creates a faster, more integrated pathway from biological innovation through media development and industrial-scale production.”
Animal-component-free media has been an important part of the development of cell-based protein production, as previously, many cell-based products relied on fetal bovine serum, which caused a bottleneck in production due to its low availability and high cost. Multiple companies working to make cell-based seafood products, such as E-fishient Protein, IntegriCulture, and BlueNalu, have all since managed to eliminate the use of the product from their manufacturing processes.
EAF said one of the integrated platform's first commercial programs will focus on protein ingredients for premium pet food due to the combination of high industry demand, product value, and favorable regulatory dynamics.
“The cultivated protein space has faced an assortment of challenges over the last few years, but the promise of quality protein production at scale has not dimmed. The industry is entering a new phase, moving from isolated technology development to industrial integration and commercialization,” Fishway CEO Annelies Bogaerts said in a release. “After an initial technology collaboration demonstrating the power of our complementary solutions, it was clear that the acquisition would help us drive a new era of safe, sustainable protein manufacturing. We look forward to supporting EAF’s industrial platform.”
