Brittany Chibe, the CEO of Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.-based alternative seafood analog firm AQUA Cultured Foods, said she is taking a different approach toward helping the products gain mass appeal.
Instead of mass producing its fish-free seafood analog products, as many producers in the space are working to do, AQUA Cultured Foods said it has chosen to target individual restaurants and win over their chefs – and then their customers – one bite at a time.
“Chefs running Michelin-starred restaurants or tastemaker shops care so deeply about sourcing because they want to not only work with the best to give the best experience to the customer, but because they are also telling a story through food,” Chibe said. “Part of that story is where [the food] comes from and being able to trace it back to the origin."
One such restaurant that has partnered with Chibe and AQUA is Michelin Bib Gourmand award-winning Chicago restaurant Mama Delia. AQUA’s fish-free raw tuna analog has now replaced conventional tuna on the menu at Mama Delia, with the establishment’s chef, Marcos Campos, now bringing AQUA products to the menus of his other restaurants.
“I think it’s an incredible achievement to recreate something that looks like just tuna,” Campos said in a release. “As humans, we eat with our eyes. As soon as you see the color, you understand what you’re eating and feel comfortable with it; that’s very important with a product like this.”
Besides the look and taste, chefs have also enjoyed the return on investment AQUA products offer them, Chibe said.
“I think a really interesting anecdote that [Campos] has shared with me is that when he buys tuna for his restaurants, he actually loses between 25 percent and 40 percent of it when they’re trimming it for use,” she said. “Between removing the skin, bones, and fatty muscles, and depending on the experience of the person in the back of the house that's preparing that tuna, you lose a significant portion of it just in that operation. So when it comes to a price per pound, there's that premium on [the conventional fish] that we can completely eliminate.”
Chibe said to meet demand many companies producing a seafood analog aim to produce products that are inexpensive and scalable, often leveraging advanced technology like 3D printing to produce products.
Chibe said that AQUA has taken a different approach ...
