Umami Bioworks

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Lou Kutzler to our team as our new Director of Food Science! With a Ph.D. in Muscle Biology and Meat Science, Dr. Kutzler has a remarkable background, including roles as CTO at Agua Foods and Principal Product Development Scientist at Nestle. His work has spanned culinary applications, pet food development, and nutrition across multiple continents. Dr. Kutzler shares our passion for uniting culinary arts and science to create sustainable and localized cultivated seafood solutions, quoting "I am thrilled to dive into the future of food with Umami Bioworks, where we unite culinary arts and science to create sustainable and localized cultivated seafood solutions. This is a great opportunity, and I am looking forward to continuing my passion for technology and innovation alongside the brilliant team at Umami and partnerships with industry leaders." Join us in welcoming Dr. Kutzler to the UMAMI Bioworks team! We are excited to see the incredible innovations that will come from his expertise.

Thank you @asiatomorrow for an insightful discussion with UMAMI's founder and CEO, Mihir Pershad, about the history and future of UMAMI Bioworks! In the article titled "Navigating Challenges in Deep Tech: UMAMI Bioworks' Journey in Cellular Agriculture," Mihir delves into the origin of our name, our recent merger with Shiok Meats, and our thoughts about the path for cultivated seafood to grow going forward, with writer @Jinnykim. One key point Mihir highlights in this discussion is a key reason UMAMI exists today: "The systems for producing and distributing food have a significant impact on society. However, despite the importance, these systems are generally underrepresented and unsupported by funders and entrepreneurs." Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gadhazsi

Singapore's cultivated meat sector is facing growing pains, as highlighted in the article below. High production costs and building consumer trust are hurdles, but at Umami Bioworks, we see them as challenges to be tackled, not roadblocks. The key, we believe, lies in strategic product selection. Focusing on premium cuts and species facing supply limitations – think endangered fish populations – allows cultivated seafood to establish itself as a desirable and economically viable option. This future is closer than you might think. We envision a world where cultivated seafood production is localized and powered by Umami's innovative solutions, a network of businesses around the globe cultivating delicious, sustainable seafood, benefiting both people and the planet. Umami Bioworks is committed to collaborating with industry partners to overcome the current obstacles. Together, we can transform the promise of cultivated meat into a reality, building a more secure and sustainable food system for the future. Link to the article: https://lnkd.in/gPWugYje #cultivatedmeat #singapore #futureoffood #sustainability #umamibioworks

UMAMI is headed to Chicago for Future Food-Tech next week! Interested in cultivated seafood? Want to understand how we can scale cell-cultivated production globally? Curious how we can make delicious and accessible cultivated seafood products a reality? Reach out to meet with us during the event! Our founder and CEO Mihir will also join Lou Cooperhouse from Blue Nalu on the ‘Transforming Seafood: Overcoming Global Challenges to Mitigate a Fragile Supply Chain Through Tech and Innovation’ panel on June 17th at 2:55PM to discuss how cultivated seafood can help to address growing supply-side challenges in the seafood industry.

We are excited to share that Mihir Pershad, our CEO, will be at Hack Summit in Switzerland next week! He will be part of a panel discussion on the potential and challenges of #machinelearning and #AI in #biotech. In this discussion, Mihir will share more about how Umami is leveraging machine learning to accelerate process development, improve our knowledge of fish cell biology, and make #biomanufacturing more accessible. Tune in to hear Mihir along with the other excellent panelists Russ Tucker (Ivy Farm Technologies), Ed Steele (Hoxton Farms), Hadar Sutovsky (ICL Group), and Jasmin Hume, PhD (Shiru). The session will be moderated by Triplebar CEO, Maria Cho. If you're joining the summit, check out the panel titled "Fast Tracking FoodTech Innovation: AI and Synbio," which will take place at the Insights Stage on June 13th at 2:45pm!

UMAMI Bioworks is heading to the HackSummit! Catch our CEO, Mihir Pershad on stage with industry frontrunners on 13th-14th June 2024 as they discuss scalable solutions and strategies to radically move the needle on ClimateTech. Our food system is one of the biggest contributors to climate emissions, but has historically received a mere fraction of the investment and attention of other sectors like energy production and transportation. UMAMI will share some of the approaches we are taking to enable rapid implementation and adoption of cultivated seafood production solutions as part of our efforts to make our seafood system more resilient and sustainable for future generations. Interested in adding your voice to these critical discussions? Join 1,500 bold founders, active funders, and savvy operators ready to make the deals that redefine our future. 📍 June 13-14th 󰎤 Lausanne, Switzerland Meet us there: https://www.hacksummit.co/

Our Founder and CEO, Mihir Pershad, recently spoke with Food Navigator Asia about the state of the cultivated food sector, UMAMI's recent progress, and our priorities to ensure we can deliver on the promise of sustainable, ethically produced seafood in the coming year. In the interview, Mihir shed light on the recent merger between UMAMI and Shiok Meats, outlining our ambition “to position UMAMI as the clear choice for established seafood players seeking a cutting-edge technology partner for cultivated production.” Our journey to commercial scale will be about more than just UMAMI's success – it's about shaping the future of the cultivated food category. As Mihir highlighted, “the journey towards a truly mass-market cultivated protein product is still a multi-year one, mirroring the paths electric vehicles and solar power have taken.” We firmly believe that partnerships with incumbents will be a critical aspect of bringing cultivated from luxury to mass affordability for consumers around the world. Ready to dive deeper? Click the link below to read the full article and listen to the insightful podcast discussion between Mihir Pershad and Pearly Neo from Food Navigator Asia! https://lnkd.in/eSrSeymG

UMAMI Bioworks is pleased to share significant advancements in our collaboration with Nanyang Polytechnic and Dr. Mark Richards over the past year! We have now deepened our collaborative R&D into sustainable plant-based substitutes for use in cell culture media with grants from both the Good Food Institute and the Singapore government. This pioneering work follows our core philosophy of using plant and algae-derived inputs to replace animal-based components, driving sustainability and cost-effectiveness in cultivated seafood production. Our teams are currently working to explore novel sources and extraction methods that produce low-cost, scalable alternatives to animal-derived components in culture media and then screening these isolates for performance in fish cell culture. Developments in this project not only further validate our approach but also have the potential to significantly advance the entire cultivated food industry. We look forward to sharing more updates in the coming few months as we generate further results!

UMAMI Bioworks is pleased to share that our R&D team has now successfully validated the use of plant and algal bioactive extracts throughout the full fish cell cultivation process, from stem cell growth to muscle and fat maturation! In addition to replacing animal-derived components, this approach is helping to substantially reduce overall cell culture media costs by replacing precision-fermented molecules with bio-derived substitutes. Even better, our fish cells seem to like these extracts more than traditional media, showing significant improvements in overall growth! Replacing expensive, highly purified components with biological equivalents within bioactive plant and algal extracts through #bioprospecting has been a core tenet of our development philosophy from the very beginning of UMAMI. We’ve now been able to establish a full cultivation cycle based on these extracts, substantially reducing costs and making our feedstocks significantly more sustainable. Rethinking traditional assumptions - like the sources of critical feedstocks and signalling molecules - is at the heart of our strategy to make #biomanufacturing a more sustainable way to make the foods and products we love cultivated, #notcaught.

At UMAMI Bioworks, we're tackling the hard challenge of transforming our seafood supply to ensure long-term sustainably. In a recent interview with e27, our CEO elaborated on the crucial factors to success in our groundbreaking field, which shape the core philosophy underlying UMAMI's approach: "Producing a few kilograms of cultivated fish is one thing. Producing it at scale, reliably, with rigorous quality and production standards is another. We call this industrialisation, and at Umami, we believe it is one of the most critical aspects to the success of cultivated seafood." Mihir also goes more in depth on the rationale behind the merger of UMAMI Bioworks and Shiok Meats: "This merger allows two companies with complementary strategic priorities in cultivated seafood to combine their resources, commercial relationships, and species pipelines to establish a leading platform that can be the one-stop-shop for seafood incumbents wanting to adopt cultivated production." Dive deeper into the article to uncover the insights driving our mission at UMAMI Bioworks. #UMAMIBioworks #CultivatedSeafood https://lnkd.in/eEAvKpD5