Lab-grown fish products could become available in grocery stores soon as the Germany-based Bluu Seafood food tech company unveils their cell-cultured fish products: fish sticks and fish balls.
Bluu Seafood is at the stage of preparing for regulatory approval processes in Asia, the US, the UK, and the European Union. The manufacturing of cell-cultured products is slowly becoming popular. Bluu Seafood claimed that their product is the first market-ready fish product made from cultivated fish cells in a lab. They hope to sell their fish sticks and fish balls by 2025.
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Bluu Seafood was founded in 2020, and since then, they have been perfecting the art of making seafood without killing actual fish. Talking to NPR's Ayesha Rascoe, Blue Seafood's chief operating officer Chris Dammann explained how they cultivated fish cells to develop their lab-grown fish products.
Dammann said that they harvest the cell samples from a fish, wherein the sample looks a bit translucent, and mix it with some plant protein to give it a bit of texture and structure that holds together. The cell-cultured product can be formed into anything they want, such as fish sticks and balls.
When asked if their product could be considered vegetarian since no fish was harmed during the process, Dammann said that the sample cells were alive, although they do not grow in the fish. But it still contains protein from the nutritional content they supplement, so it still has the other benefits from the real fish, like minerals and omega-3.
He pointed out that this does not make it vegetarian because it is an animal protein. So, those who have fish allergies will still have an allergic reaction to their product because it comes from real fish.
Furthermore, Dammann noted that their fish product is an effort o address environmental concerns in fish commercial fishing. He said that there is so much bottom trawling and other fishing methods that take out so much from the ocean and that the ocean has become more and more polluted that microplastics have been found in fish. Dammann emphasized that their product has no environmental impact because its production is in a controlled environment. Therefore, there is no mercury or microplastics in their fish products.
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Making the Bluu Seafood Fish Sticks and Fish Balls
According to Smithsonian Magazine, the company collects tissue from live fish to make its products without harvesting any fish. They use stem cell technology to duplicate the cells by putting nutrients in a bioreactor where the cells grow up scaffolding structures to help them get that texture found in fish meat.
The system is self-sustaining and does not need any more real fish after the initial biomass of cells is developed. Bluu Seafood's co-founder Simon Fabich told TechCrunch that the amazing thing about their fish product is its immortalized cells that can create copies up to 20 times and then stop compared to normal cells. Then, that immortalized cells continue to double and perhaps forever, theoretically.
Per the company's statement, these cultured fish cells are the main ingredient in the products of Bluu Seafood. Aside from fish sticks and fish balls, the company is also working on creating sashimi and fillets.
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