Next food frontier: Fish made from plants, or in a lab
The chef Tsang Chiu King is preparing a subtle-but-significant change to his menu: He’s replacing the fish in some dishes with a plant-based alternative. “Its flavour is light and bland and the texture, like grouper, is a bit tougher,” Tsang said, referring to the alternative fish varieties he has been testing at Ming Court, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hong Kong. To boost the flavour, he adds ingredients like dates and goji berries. “This may give our customers a new experience or surprise, and that will help our business,” he said.
Plant-based products have been breaking into the foodie mainstream in the United States, after years in which vegan burgers and milk alternatives hovered on the market’s periphery. That is partly because more companies are targeting omnivores who seek to reduce the amount of meat they eat, rather than forswear it altogether. Now, as sophisticated fish alternatives begin to attract investment and land at restaurants in the United States and beyond, people who track the fishless fish sector say that it could be on the cusp of significant growth.
One reason, they say, is that consumers in rich countries are becoming more aware of the seafood industry’s environmental problems, including overfishing and the health risks of some seafood. Another is that today’s plant-based start-ups do a better job of approximating fish flavour and texture than earlier ones did — an important consideration for non-vegetarians. “This isn’t your grandfather’s alternative fish stick,” said Joshua Katz, an analyst at the consulting firm McKinsey who has studied the alt-protein industry. “There are a number of people already looking at alternative hamburgers,” he added. “You might actually say, ‘I should work on something else,’ and seafood is still a massive market with compelling reasons to work on it.” ‘Smarter’ seafood
People who scale back their consumption of animal proteins for environmental reasons often stop eating red meat, which requires enormous amounts of land and water to cultivate and belches a lot of methane as a byproduct.
But alt-fish advocates say that seafood also comes with environmental problems. Unsustainable fishing practices have decimated fisheries in recent decades, a problem both for biodiversity and the millions of people who depend on the sea for income and food.“It’s simply a smarter way to make seafood,” said Mirte Gosker, the acting managing director of the Good Food Institute Asia Pacific, a non-profit advocacy group that promotes alternative proteins.
“Full stop.”
So far plant-based seafood products in the United States account for only 0.1 percent of the country’s seafood sales, less than the 1.4 percent of the U.S. meat market occupied by plant-based meat alternatives, according to the Good Food Institute.
But alt-seafood ventures worldwide received at least $83 million from investors in 2020, compared with $1 million three years earlier, according to the institute’s data. As of this June, 83 companies were producing alt-seafood products around the world, a nearly threefold rise since 2017. All but 18 of those 83 companies focus on plant-based products. Six others, including a French start-up that makes smoked salmon from microalgae, specialize in proteins derived from fermentation. A dozen others are developing lab-grown seafood, which is not yet commercially available in any country. Mike Ives is a reporter with NYT©2021 The New York Times