Navigating uncharted waters: mapping the future of cultivated seafood

For this priority area, we’re seeking proposals that are primarily focused on fish or aquatic invertebrates. We’re also accepting proposals in three other priority areas, all of which could help support alternative seafood product development but do not exclusively focus on cultivated seafood:

• Extrusion 2.0: Enhancing traditional extrusion through process innovation and mechanistic evaluations of protein texturization 
• Data collection and curation to inform the development of genome-scale metabolic models for optimization of feedstock formulation and feed conversion
• Improving feedstock availability for food fermentation in biomass and precision fermentation platforms

Interested research teams can apply for funding by September 21, 2023 and the maximum that can be requested is $250,000, with an additional $100k available to research teams that include a new academic collaborator or an industry partner. We’ll also be holding an informational webinar on July 18 at 11 am EDT and at 8 pm EDT and two virtual networking and information sessions on July 24 at 11 am EDT and at 9 pm EDT.

Therefore, increasing the availability of open-access research funding from governments across the globe continues to be a key priority of GFI’s policy teams. In late 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy put out a Request for Information related to the National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative. GFI’s response included recommendations of increased public funding for three specific short-term goals, one of which was for alternative protein products to achieve price and taste parity with conventional animal products across the most popular categories of meat and seafood.

We’re seeing government engagement efforts begin to pay off in the form of support for cultivated meat research by several governments worldwide—including the Netherlands, China, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, and the U.S. Earlier this year, we were excited to see the U.S. government champion the need for alternative proteins in their Bold Goals For U.S. Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing report. In Section 2 of the report, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) specifically called out the need for research into “…the structural design and food architecture of alternative protein (e.g., plant-based, fermentation-derived, and cell-cultured) products, including how plant and microbial materials compare to animal-based products.”

Thankfully, it’s not just words in a report, either—the USDA currently has an RFP open that includes a priority area on Novel Foods and Innovative Manufacturing Technologies (priority 3b; see page 46). The RFP defines novel foods as “…those foods or food ingredients that can be newly developed, produced or preserved using new technologies or processes including cell-cultured meat, seafood and animal proteins, plant protein products, edible insect proteins, single-cell proteins, and other novel sources/varieties.” The maximum award amount is $650,000 for standard grants, and applications are due September 28th.

• We added 1:1 video networking to the seafood-focused webinars we already had on the calendar. GFI APAC’s webinar with Dr. Shigeki Sugii was followed by a networking session where 45 individual 1:1 introductions were made, and GFI US’s webinar with Dr. Frederico Ferreira was followed by a session where 33 introductions were made. We hope those conversations were fun and useful, and we’ll plan to continue including networking sessions with our seafood-related webinars as long as people keep showing up to them!
• We’re also experimenting with new formats for networking, collaboration, and idea-sharing. As a result of feedback we received during and after the workshop, we recently piloted a new virtual event series we’re calling Fish & CHIPS: Collaborative Huddle for Ideation & Problem Solving. Our goal for these events is for the research community to become more interconnected and for participants to come away with new ideas to try out. Our first event brought together 36 cultivated seafood scientists, who were sorted into breakout rooms to discuss a series of cultivated seafood-related discussion prompts in small groups. Based on participant feedback, we will plan on repeating this event with some minor modifications, with one of the discussion topics next time being related to strategies for balancing intellectual property concerns with the benefits of openly sharing information within the industry. If you’re a scientist working on cultivated seafood—whether in academia or industry—and would like to be part of these conversations, please stay tuned for future installments in this event series!
• You may have already seen the announcement that The Good Food Conference is happening in person (with the option to attend virtually) this year! The workshop attendees and survey respondents were very clear in their enthusiasm for in-person events, so we’re making plans for some seafood-focused networking time at the conference. Stay ‘tuna’d’ for more details!

Finally, the idea came up during the workshop of in-person, hands-on workshops (ideally with a hybrid option) on topics like cell isolation. We don’t have any concrete plans here yet, but this is something we’re thinking about for the future. If any companies or labs with the capacity to host such a workshop are interested in collaborating with GFI to make this happen, we’d love to hear from you!

• Our Solutions Database lists key science, industry, and policy needs related to alternative proteins, with an emphasis on concrete actions needed to move the industry forward. We have some exciting new seafood-related additions to the database in the works, including:
  • Cultivated, fermentation-derived, or hybrid surimi
  • Cell line development from food-relevant aquatic species
  • Synergistic climate and biodiversity benefits of alternative proteins
  • Consumer and sensory research as a guide for alternative fish R&D
  • Optimizing fat profiles for nutritional and sensory properties
• We published additions and updates earlier this year to our cultivated meat technical deep dive series, including some related to seafood scaffolding and end products.
• Recently, GFI’s Science & Technology team began recording a “State of the Science” snapshot every four months that captures the latest in alternative protein science, including a segment dedicated to alternative seafood.

We’ll continue publishing scientific explainers in various forms as long as we get the sense that the community finds it ‘kelpful’! We’re always open to feedback and ideas here: Love video content? Prefer text-based content? Want more science explainers geared toward beginners? Toward experts? Is there a particular topic you’re curious about? Let us know!