Wildtype Foods

Wildtype Foods, or Wildtype for short (sometimes erroneously called 'Wild Type' in the media), is an American biotechnology company which produces cultured seafood from fish cells. Its primary production facility is located in a 7,700-square-foot former microbrewery space in the Dogpatch neighbourhood of San Francisco, California.[1] The focus of Wildtype is on producing cultivated Pacific salmon that will be cheaper than conventionally-harvested fish.[2]

Wildtype Foods
TypePrivately held company
IndustryFood technology
Founded2016
FoundersAryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck
Headquarters
Dogpatch, San Francisco
,
California, United States
Websitewildtypefoods.com

History

Origins

Aryé Elfenbein (a PhD cardiologist[3]) and Justin Kolbeck co-founded Wildtype Foods[4][5] in 2016.[6] They started exploring funding possibilities in 2015, but after their applications for several government science grants yielded no results, they opted for venture capital instead.[3] After raising a $3.5 million seed round in 2018, Wildtype expanded its research and development.[6]

Proof of concept

In June 2019, the company held a tasting at a restaurant in Portland, Oregon, where guests were served an array of Wildtype-cultured salmon dishes.[5] At the time, it took them 3.5 weeks to create the pound of salmon that was consumed at the tasting;[5] the cost of producing just the spicy salmon roll was about 200 dollars.[6] The company sought to bring down costs to sell cultured salmon at 7 to 8 dollars per pound and thus be competitive with real farmed Atlantic salmon.[6]

Pilot plant

On 24 June 2021, Wildtype's pilot plant opened in Dogpatch.[1] At the time the startup had raised $16 million in funding.[1] As of October 2021, it was capable of producing 50,000 pounds (or 22,680 kilograms) of salmon per year, which it claimed was scalable to 200,000 pouds (or 90,718 kilograms) a year.[4]

References
  1. Alex Barreira (25 June 2021). "Sushi grown in a lab? A S.F. startup just unveiled the world's first cell-cultured seafood production facility". San Francisco Business Times. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  2. David Silverberg (24 March 2020). "Could synthetic fish be a better catch of the day?". BBC News. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  3. Kate Aronoff (29 September 2021). "Lab to Table". New Republic. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  4. Alex Barreira (14 October 2021). "The cell-cultivated meat revolution is starting, and these Bay Area startups are ready". San Francisco Business Times. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  5. David Yaffe-Bellany (10 July 2019). "The Fish Is Boneless. (Fishless, Too.)". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  6. Catherine Lamb (14 June 2019). "Wild Type Debuts New Cultured Salmon in Largest Tasting of Lab-Grown Meat". The Spoon. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
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