New Plant-Based “Tuna” Coming to Restaurants By 2022
Cultured seafood company, Finless Foods, has announced its expansion into the plant-based seafood sphere, with vegan tuna coming to restaurants as soon as next year.
Credit: Finless Foods
Alternative seafood company, Finless Foods, has announced plans to broaden their portfolio with the release of a new plant-based tuna offering, as part of their commitment to create a future where the ocean thrives.
Co-founded by Michael Selden and Brian Wyrwas, Finless Foods is a pioneer in cell-cultured seafood alternatives. Now, the company has also developed a plant-based tuna product, which they discovered during their development of cell-cultured tuna, according to a blog post on their website: “In our pursuit of cell-cultured tuna, plant ingredients play a key role in the development of the product. During our process, we developed a plant-based tuna product that is so good, we decided to bring it to market first.” Finless Foods aims to make their plant-based tuna widely available to consumers by 2022, via restaurants and food service channels.
Made from nine plant-based ingredients, the product has been specifically designed to act as a substitute for raw tuna in dishes like poke and spicy tuna rolls. Finless Foods also partnered with chefs to ensure that the taste, texture, and mouthfeel is comparable to top-grade sushi.
“We’ve developed a delicious, versatile product that makes an ideal plant-based substitute for raw tuna,” says Selden. “The feedback received from our culinary partners has been phenomenal, likening the flavor and texture to sushi-grade tuna.”
Finless Foods says that ventures into plant-based and cell-cultured tuna “was a clear first step” in their mission to improve the health of the ocean. Global tuna populations have declined by 60% over the last 50 years with one-third of tuna stocks being fished at unsustainable levels. It’s also not possible to farm tuna at scale. “Tuna play an important role in ocean health and has historically been a difficult species for aquaculture,” says Wyrwas. “We felt that developing viable alternatives would yield the greatest net impact for our ocean.”
Fueled by changing consumer interest and more awareness of sustainable food and ocean health, the plant-based seafood industry is predicted to grow 28% annually over the next decade. Finless Foods have called their plant-based venture a “natural broadening of our portfolio and company.”
As for cultivated bluefin tuna, Finless Foods is in the process of obtaining regulatory approval for its product in the U.S. and hopes to see the tuna products on restaurant menus by next year. The company is also exploring the possibility of releasing the product in China, Japan, and Singapore, the latter of which was the first country to approve the sale of lab-grown meat - in this case, chicken nuggets - in December last year.
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