Shiok Meats Ltd., a Singapore-based company developing lab-cultured shrimp cells as a substitute for natural or farmed shrimp meat, announced in a 20 July press release that it will collaborate with Tokyo, Japan-based IntegriCulture Inc. to scale up production.
Shiok Meats is the first company specializing in culturing crustacean cells for food, and the first company in the “cell-based meat” industry to be based in Southeast Asia. It has already succeeded in culturing enough shrimp cells to make a small serving of shrimp dumplings – displayed and eaten at a press event last year. However, the cost of production is very high because of the pharmaceutical grade serum that is used as a growth medium.
Cell-culture media consists of a liquid nutrient mix comprising of proteins, carbohydrates/sugars, fats, vitamins, minerals, and growth factors to enable stem cells and cells to grow. Developing cheaper food-grade serum is a key to bringing down costs.
Integriculture Inc. is a cellular food company whose first product, a cell-based foie gras, is to be released next year. Its automated “CulNet System” imitates the inter-cellular interactions occurring in an animal body. They add growth factors, produced by recombination, to a plant-based serum in a proliferation bioreactor. The laboratory-scale system can culture multiple types of cells under controlled conditions to produce serum components – one of the largest costs in producing cultured animal cells.
In-house serum production is expected to significantly reduce the production cost of cell-culture food products. IntegriCulture will provide its food-grade culture medium and its scalable inexpensive cell culture protocols to scale up production of Shiok’s shrimp product.
“Together, the teams will adapt Integriculture’s existing technology for shrimp cell cultures to develop an inexpensive cultured serum for shrimp, which will omit the necessity of expensive growth factors or serum and provide Shiok Meats with higher capability to develop unique cell-based seafoods and further meet its mission to deliver delicious, clean, and healthy seafood through the harvesting of cells instead of animals,” IntegriCulture stated in a press release.
Shiok recently raised USD 3 million (EUR 2.5 million) in bridge funding from Agronomics, U.S.-based VegInvest, UK-based Impact Venture, and UAE-headquartered Mindshift Capital Fund. The company has secured a total of USD 7.6 million (EUR 6.4 million) in funding to date.
Photo courtesy of IntegriCulture Inc.
