According to founder Mihir Pershad their comparative success can be attributed to a range of factors but is partially due to concentrating on tech development, combined with a willingness to collaborate with conventional seafood players.
“I think our strategy has been pretty good in terms of trying to develop a tech platform as opposed to a fully integrated food company. And we've also managed to bring customers in as co-funders of development, which really helps us make sure we're doing things that customers want,” Pershad explains.
While many of the more ambitious startups in the space planned to build their own branded seafood products from scratch, Umami adopted a more cautious approach. And it looks like it’s paying off.
“We didn't manage to raise a mega round before the market soured on cultivated. So we’ve had to be much more frugal by necessity and think more creatively about how to stretch a smaller budget much further than most competitors. And when the market turned as aggressively as it did against cultivated, having already been used to working with constraints, we were in a better position,” Pershad reflects.
The startup is based in Singapore and its flagship product is a cell-based eel fillet, with an eye on the Japanese unagi market – a concept that’s struck a chord with the country’s largest seafood company.
“We've established an equity and joint development partnership with Maruha Nichiro, proving a key hypothesis that many people were sceptical of: that you can convince traditional seafood businesses that investing in complementary technologies is a growth opportunity rather than a threat to their business, if it's positioned the right way,” points out Pershad.
“Typically what we have seen in land-based meats has been very much the opposite, where you see a lot of pushback from the cattlemen and some of these other associations when it comes to cultivated,” he adds.
Other recent milestones include three tastings of their range of product solutions, while plans to upscale are well underway.
“We're currently building a pilot plant with a customer [Cell AgriTech], which they are actually financing. We bring the process and tech transfer team, they bring the capex and operational experience, and we then are able to deliver a pilot-scale tech readiness assessment,” Pershad explains.
Another recent success was their acquisition of Shiok Meats – a fellow Singapore-based startup which specialises in cultivated crustaceans – reflecting their ambitions to diversify their platform offering.
“The M&A brought in their assets, their IP and expanded our platform from vertebrate fish, which is where we've historically been focused. For invertebrates, we’ve seen that the biology gets substantially more difficult than for vertebrates, so there's still work to be done to make cultivated crustacean production scalable. But it fits really well into our thesis that people really want to eat crustaceans, which have had a few pretty bad years in terms of fisheries, particularly in the Alaska fishery with king crab,” Pershad explains.
Another product solution they’ve started to work on is caviar – inspired in part by the supply chain issues in the sector, which have become more complex following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Meanwhile development of their flagship unagi is looking extremely promising – not least in terms of affordability, which has always been one of the key areas of doubt surrounding the cell-cultivated sector.
“We've actually hit gross margin breakeven on that product [unagi] already at our largest lab scale. So we want to prove next that we're going to be able to achieve positive unit economics for our customer at pilot scale,” Pershad explains.
The next big question is when the unagi will be commercially available. Pershad said it has taken 4.5 years for their initial eel product to get to market but he envisages 18 months of development and a year for regulatory clearance as a goal for Umami’s next species.
“We are really making an effort to spend one on one time with the regulators and with the scientific experts at the government level. And for several regulators, I think now we have a much clearer view of exactly what data they would like to see and what safety questions they have, which is half the battle,” Pershad explains.
“In Singapore and in US, our dossiers are in active reviews with food safety authorities. Our application to the UK is imminent and hopefully we'll have an application submitted to another Asian regulator shortly,” he adds.
Meanwhile Umami is continuing to build momentum with customers, despite the volatile political climate.
“There's been a lot of geopolitical uncertainty that's making companies be a little more cautious than we might hope, but we’ve seen customers get excited when we tell them we can deliver a couple of kilograms of biomass to do trials – it's not a statement they're used to hearing. Because for a long time we, like most of the industry, were constrained [to offering samples of as little as 50 or 100 grams]. And to a big food company, that’s not a useful starting point,” Pershad reflects.
However, Umami’s volumes mean that they can work on a traditional product development pathway with customers. And, when the pilot plant opens this is only going to improve.
“In the next few months we're going to achieve a production rate of tens of kilograms per month, and are targeting a tonne-scale annual run rate from the pilot plant by the end of the year,” Pershad explains.
Looking further into the future Pershad gains inspiration from the rise of one of Silicon Valley’s true trailblazers.
“I would love to see us achieve the position Intel managed to create in the early days of the computing boom. In our first decade we’ll build initial traction with some early customers who see Umami as the best tech partner to help them make the best cultivated product and to achieve that outcome as fast as possible,” he explains.
He then envisages a period of 10 to 20 years in which the cell-cultivated seafood sector really starts to make a contribution to the 100 million tonne seafood industry – a period he hopes will be spearheaded by Umami’s technology.
“If we're talking about 10 or 20 percent of 100 million tonnes a year of fish, that's 20 million tonnes, which realistically equates to at least 10 years of building cultivated food factories at a rapid rate to get to that level of market penetration,” Pershad points out.
“To me the first decade is demonstrate the technology, prove that you can do it at scale, that the fundamental economics work, and that [cultivated] can be a good investment. Then the second decade will be about expanding into new categories but also getting much, much better at delivering factories, improving operational economics, and longevity of the factory, all that stuff for the customers,” he adds.
It’s a pathway he thinks can mirror the rise of Intel.
“Their first several years Intel managed to get their chips into a few computers and made their ‘Intel Inside’ branding stick. And then there were a couple of decades in which most global computer brands built their commercial computers and PCs with Intel chips because they saw it was the best path forward. And we would love to get to that point of industry adoption by our year 10,” he concludes.
