Making cultivated meat a reality: Q&A with Umami Bioworks CEO Mihir Pershad

In 2013, the world’s first lab-grown beef patty was sizzled up and served on live television. Made up of cultivated muscle stem cells, the patty took three months and €250,000 (approximately S$430,000) to grow. 

Since then, cell-based proteins – also known as cultivated meat – have come a long way. Today, more than 100 companies worldwide are in the business of growing meat in the lab, with an extensive focus on beef. But one company is turning the tide on seafood representation in the industry. 

Umami Bioworks, a cultivated fish meat start-up co-founded by Mihir Pershad, aims to ease the burden on depleting fish stocks while giving more people access to fresh, high-quality seafood. With their patented machine learning algorithm, they team can speed up, lower the cost of and scale cultivated cell lines of endangered fish. 

With the rising culinary aspirations of a burgeoning middle-class in regions like South and Central America, the shift towards cultivated meat could potentially be a durable one, said Mihir, who is also the start-up’s Chief Executive Officer. 

Co-founder and CEO of Umami Bioworks, Mihir Preshad (left) at SGInnovate’s Firestarter event moderated by Jerry Lui.

There is also a strong environmental impetus. Since the late 1980s, the amount of wild-caught fish has stagnated, while a third of commercial fish species, such as anchovies and sardines, are overfished.

Since its beginning in 2020, Umami Bioworks has grown from strength to strength. Their most recent achievement? A partnership with Maruha Nichiro. Japan’s largest seafood company will help take Umami Biowork’s operations to the next level by growing its research and development and accelerating commercialisation. 

In the latest instalment of SGInnovate’s CEO Firestarter Series, Mihir spoke about these meaty issues and more. Here are the main takeaways:

Right now, the challenge is that everyone wants to tell their own story. Each company thinks that the way they’re doing it, the reason they got into it, is special. But to a random person on the street, you’re just one of 50 people doing the same thing.

The cultivated fish category needs a voice. What’s the story we can tell that makes this tech valuable? Everyone can put their spin on it, but there still has to be some narrative. For example, everything we make using this technology is plastic and mercury-free, or we’re not killing fish.

One of the areas the plant-based meat industry failed was in not defining a category vision for itself. You can’t have five messages that resonate – whether it’s veganism or climate change. Have one message that resonates and tell it a thousand times.

At Umami Bioworks, for example, we work on cultivating cells from endangered, threatened and protected fish species to preserve them in the wild. We have to figure out how we can create cohesive industry stories around a single narrative. Otherwise, we risk drowning ourselves out with messages.

Related: How She Married Her Love For Food With Technology

What we try to do at Umami Bioworks is build the business case in such a way that if you want to work with us, you don’t get to make the solution cheaper by compromising on the environmental impact.

For example, our standard solution is to build wastewater recycling into our production systems. Wastewater laws are very strict in countries like Singapore and the Netherlands. If we build our system in a strict country and deploy it elsewhere, we can avoid customising the system for different countries. We can also avoid building a massive team to support different versions of the system.

This way, we ensure that sustainability is built into the solution. These kinds of business decisions can actually be the most impactful way to do things because you don’t have to sacrifice profits to be sustainable.

I think regulation is the best competitive advantage you can have in this space. Once your product is approved, it buys you time because everyone else has that journey ahead of them. Do it well and do it right, and you can buy yourself a year to 18 months on everyone.

One of the best experiences I’ve had working with regulators so far has been in the cultivated meat sector. Most regulators won’t really speak to you along the way, but we’ve been on calls with the United States Food and Drug Administration for years to do consultative discussions, which is very rare. This is happening in Singapore and Japan too. It’s a positive change to talk to regulators to understand what they’re thinking instead of reading 60 pages of regulation and hope we can interpret it correctly in light of new technology and new approaches.

As for investors, we lean heavily on strategic investors who want to be our customers first, investors second. Some investors may push you to triple revenue year-over-year without realising that it takes 18 months to get a physical plant running on the ground.

We take a longevity approach. We set up a system where you can apply not to a role, but just to know when we post job openings. We ask applicants to tell us a bit about themselves so we can screen for the right personality and right skill-set. When a role opens, we email them.

Especially for tech talent, the best people will never be unemployed. They will get pulled from role to role at every part of their career because you will never find an abundance of people who are really, really excellent. So we have to do scouting. We also attend events so that people know who we are.

Realise that you’re never going to pick the best path to get anywhere, and sitting around trying to plan it out in your head will also get you nowhere. My view is that you need to pick problems that are big enough to cause industry shifts, instead of trying to strike gold in the next six months.

If you pick a growing problem that’s significant enough for a large group of people, the question then is how to build a solution that is compelling and makes sense in the market.  

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