‘Smarter’ seafood
People who scale back their consumption of animal proteins for environmental reasons often stop eating red meat, which requires enormous amounts of land and water to cultivate and belches a lot of methane as a byproduct.
But alt-fish advocates say that seafood also comes with environmental problems. Unsustainable fishing practices have decimated fisheries in recent decades, a problem both for biodiversity and the millions of people who depend on the sea for income and food.
“It’s simply a smarter way to make seafood,” said Mirte Gosker, the acting managing director of the Good Food Institute Asia Pacific, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes alternative proteins. “Full stop.”
So far plant-based seafood products in the United States account for only 0.1 percent of the country’s seafood sales, less than the 1.4 percent of the U.S. meat market occupied by plant-based meat alternatives, according to the Good Food Institute.
But alt-seafood ventures worldwide received at least $83 million from investors in 2020, compared with $1 million three years earlier, according to the institute’s data. As of this June, 83 companies were producing alt-seafood products around the world, a nearly threefold rise since 2017.
All but 18 of those 83 companies focus on plant-based products. Six others, including a French start-up that makes smoked salmon from microalgae, specialize in proteins derived from fermentation. A dozen others are developing lab-grown seafood, which is not yet commercially available in any country.
Plant-based moves
Impossible Foods, a dominant force in the alternative protein industry, has been developing a fishless fish project for years. Jessica Appel, a spokeswoman for company, said that it was not yet manufacturing alternative fish products.